Editors' Note: New Mother

This special issue, titled Mother, aims to present a complex picture of the categories of mothering, motherhood, and mothers. Through our own personal experiences of negotiating academic career paths as mothers, we have become acutely aware of the intensely controversial issues affecting the politics of motherhood. The term "mother" is steeped in cultural and historical meaning, but it is also semantically unstable. Today women find themselves affected by powerful, contradictory expectations that mothers will be stay-at-home caregivers and also, paradoxically, that they will be well educated and have meaningful careers. They face intensive judgments of their parenting from friends and strangers alike and participate in passionate debates about everything from childbirth to feeding to discipline. Policy issues related to child care, familial leave, and maternal and children's health remain unresolved. In light of challenges to traditional notions of family raised by reproductive technologies, transnational adoption, and queer parenting, there are also new ideological debates regarding what it means to mother and parent. Despite three waves of feminist activism in the United States and elsewhere, it may be that mothering is as fraught as ever. At least one point seems certain to us: in the "intensive mothering" paradigm that dominates American culture today, social norms about mothers and mothering are shaped by assumptions of white, middle-class, heterosexual marital privilege. One of the aspects of Mother of which we are most proud is the way its contributors insist on alternatives, including single breadwinning mothers, father activists, immigrant parents, mothers on welfare, and women who do not wish to parent.

Motherhood writing has exploded in recent years, with mothers' memoirs, collections of essays, publications by political groups, and alternative parenting magazines. This issue of WSQ, guest edited by poet and novelist Nicole Cooley and sociologist Pamela Stone, was designed to showcase what has become one of the hottest areas of feminist thought and writing. A great deal of mothering writing takes the form of the personal memoir, and we are pleased to offer the works of Carolyn Kraus and Lesléa Newman as wonderfully complex examples of that genre. Poetry on motherhood is also flourishing, and in this issue we offer the poems of Mary Jo Bang, Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei, Martha Rhodes, Jessica Fisher, Meena Alexander, Stephanie Cleveland, Heidi Lynn Staples, Miranda Field, Jeanne Marie Beaumont, and Ericka Eckart, all of whom provoke readers to imagine motherhood as an imaginative space, not necessarily a dutifully autobiographical one. In moving beyond the celebratory language of popular culture, these texts offer poignant representations of suffering, loss, and ambivalence associated with the question of whether to bear children, as well as insights into the nuances and complexities of women's positive experiences with mothering.

While we felt WSQ needed to represent contemporary motherhood writing, we also wanted WSQ to challenge and reshape it. We wanted to give those readers steeped in popular discourse on motherhood access to different voices, including deeply researched, historically and sociologically informed writing on mothering, mothers, and motherhood. In so doing, we attack the popular conception of motherhood as the epitome of natural femininity. Equally, we fight academia's infamous tendency to ignore the bodily requirements and familial responsibilities of its participants.

Instead, Mother reads these realms together. The articles here use the tools of academic theory to dissect essentializing assumptions, while simultaneously using the experiential daily work of child care to rethink academic protocols. Tamara Mose Brown and Erynn Masi de Casanova demonstrate how motherhood shapes our academic work, while Caryn E. Medved and Cynthia Edmonds-Cady reveal how academic work helps us understand constructions of motherhood. These authors insist that mothering cannot be (and should not be) separated from the life of the mind. They demonstrate that motherhood is a social construct built of fragments of unexamined political, biological, and social assumptions, and that motherhood can be critically explored. Leah Souffrant's discussion of innovative poetic forms and Michelle Pridmore-Brown's exploration of Annie Leibovitz...