For many years mothers have been viewed in terms of their impact on children rather than as people with needs, feelings, and interests--subjects in their own right. This book explores the maternal experience from the mother's point of view. It questions a society that has devalued and sentimentalized motherhood, presents images of generative and creative women who are also mothers, discusses the complex psychological experience of having and being a mother, and examines how representations of mothers in art, film, literature, the social and behavioral sciences, and historical writing have affected women. Contents Introduction Donna Bassin, Margaret Honey, and Meryle Mahrer Kaplan Part I: The Acknowledgment and Appropriation of Maternal Work Thinking Mothers/Conceiving Birth Sara Ruddick Fictions of Home Jane Lazarre Shifting the Center: Race, Class, and Feminist Theorizing about Motherhood Patricia Hill Collins The Mothers of the Disappeared: Passion and Protest in Maternal Action Jean Bethke Elshtain Maternity and Rememory in Toni Morrison's Beloved Marianne Hirsch Part II: The Paradoxical Nature of the Maternal Position Being a Mother and Being a Psychoanalyst: Two Impossible Professions Janine Chasseguet-SmirgelThe Omnipotent Mother: A Psychoanalytic Study of Fantasy and Reality Jessica BenjaminMothering, Hate, and Winnicott Elsa First Maternal Subjectivity in the Culture of Nostalgia: Mourning and Memory Donna BassinRosalind: A Family Romance Myra Goldberg Part III: The Cultural Construction and Reconstruction of the Maternal Image Images of the Maternal: An Interview with Barbara Kruger Therese Lichtenstein The Power of "Positive" Diagnosis: Medical and Maternal Discourses on Amniocentesis Rayna RappThe Maternal Voice in the Technological Universe Margaret Honey Taking the Nature Out of Mother Adria Schwartz Sex, Work, and Motherhood: Maternal Subjectivity in Recent Visual Culture E. Ann KaplanPlaying and Motherhood; or, How to Get the Most Out of the Avant-Garde Susan Rubin Suleiman