Women as Mothers

Front Cover
Random House, 1978 - Family & Relationships - 239 pages
A leading social anthropologist examines what being a mother means to a woman as a person , using examples from societies all over the world, and concludes that a great deal of what we call “maternal instinct” is culturally imposed and that there is no “right” or “wrong” way of mothering. -- Publisher description.

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Contents

Mothercraft or Motherhood?
3
The Motherhood Trap
16
Mothers in the Social System
36
Copyright

10 other sections not shown

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About the author (1978)

Sheila Kitzinger was born Sheila Helena Elizabeth Webster in Taunton, Somerset, England on March 29, 1929. She studied social anthropology at Ruskin and St Hugh's Colleges at Oxford. As an anthropologist, she encouraged women around the world to reclaim from doctors their natural prerogative over pregnancy and childbirth. Her first book, The Experience of Childbirth, was published in 1962. Her other works included Birth over Thirty, Woman's Experience of Sex, Breastfeeding Your Baby, Ourselves as Mothers, Becoming a Grandmother, Birth Crisis, Birth and Sex: The Power and the Passion, and A Passion for Birth. She created a Birth Crisis Network in Britain, which offers reflective listening for women traumatized after delivery. She died after a short illness on April 11, 2015 at the age of 86.

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