Recreating Motherhood

Recipient of the Jesse Bernard Award of the American Sociological Association. "Rereading Recreating Motherhood should be high up on the agenda of everyone interested in women's health."-Women & Health "Written with force, grace and great humanity. Barbara Katz Rothman's disciplined, informed, passi [...]
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Recipient of the Jesse Bernard Award of the American Sociological Association. "Rereading Recreating Motherhood should be high up on the agenda of everyone interested in women's health."-Women & Health "Written with force, grace and great humanity. Barbara Katz Rothman's disciplined, informed, passionately careful thinking on gender and genetics makes Recreating Motherhood a sound, wise guide both to the politics of motherhood and to private moral decision-making. This is an invaluable book."-Ursula K. Le Guin "This wonderful and classic feminist text has been beautifully revised for the new millennium. Rothman's incisive analysis of the culture of motherhood is a must read for scholars, activists, policy makers, students, parents, parents-to-be-for anyone interested in procreative and family issues. I rarely say so about sociological writing: you won't be able to put it down!" -Wendy Simonds, author of Abortion at Work: Ideology and Practice in a Feminist Clinic "A lively, sensible work, connecting different aspects of women's reproductive freedom, exploring the various assaults against those freedoms, and positing feminist alternatives in a hopeful and practical manner."-Robin Morgan, author of Word of a Woman: Feminist Dispatches Selling "genetically gifted" human eggs on the free market for a hefty price. Birth mothers reclaiming their children. Fetal rights. Surrogacy. Nannygate. All are instances of news stories with which we have become familiar in recent years. Yet these issues are often regarded as distinct problems. Barbara Katz Rothman demonstrates how they form a complex whole that demands of us in response a coherent vision-a woman-centered, class-sensitive way of understanding motherhood and the family. Her book shows clearly that the real needs of mother, father, and children have been swept aside in an attempt to reduce the complex process of human reproduction to a clinical event that can be controlled by medical technology. Rothman suggests ways to accomplish social and legal changes that would allow technological advances and evolving gender roles to affirm the mother-child relationship without cost to women's identities. In this new edition of a classic work, Rothman shows how this material is key in understanding the family, not just motherhood.A new chapter, "Reflections on a Decade," explores how new reproductive technologies combine with new marketing and new genetics to pose troubling social questions. Barbara Katz Rothman is a professor of sociology at the City University of New York. She is the author of many books, including Genetic Maps and Human Imaginations: The Limits of Science in Understanding Who We Are.