Paradox Of Natural Mothering
Publication Year: 2002
Author Chris Bobel profiles some thirty natural mothers, probing into their choices and asking whether they are reforming or conforming to women's traditional role. Bobel's subjects say that they have chosen to follow their nature rather than social imperatives. Embracing such lifestyle alternatives as voluntary simplicity and attachment parenting, they place family above status and personal achievement. Bobel illuminates the paradoxes of natural mothering, the ways in which these women resist the trappings of upward mobility but acquiesce to a kind of biological determinism and conventional gender scripts.
Published by: Temple University Press
Contents
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p. v-v
Acknowledgments
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pp. vii-ix
Ironically, as I was writing my dissertation-turned-book about families and some women’s efforts to strengthen theirs, my family fell apart. It was hard writing about intact, nuclear families while mine was splitting. Nonetheless, contrasting my experience with others’ gave me a perspective on how we all do the best we can with the resources we...
1. Introduction: Five Women, Five Stories
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pp. 1-34
In the aisles of the local food co-op, the waiting room of the town’s only homeopath, or the children’s area of the public library, you might meet her. Some are inclined to label her “earth mother” or “retro hippie,” but she defies categorization. One thing is certain: this woman is different. She gives birth to her babies at home; she homeschools her children; she grows much of her family’s produce and sews...
2. Female Moral Reform and the Maternal Politics of Accommodation
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pp. 35-47
The thread of female moral reform runs through American history from the late eighteenth century up to the present. It has manifested itself in a variety of forms, including the antiabortion movement (see Ginsberg, 1989) and, I argue, natural mothering.1...
3. A Closer Look: The Ideological Components of Natural Mothering
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pp. 48-72
Natural mothering merges two lifestyle practices—Voluntary Simplicity and Attachment Parenting—while taking inspiration from Cultural Feminism (Figure 1). All three elements are closely intertwined, but I will attempt to disentangle these sometimes uneasy partners to demonstrate the most significant constitutive elements of natural mothering...
4. Interrogating the Ideology of Natural Mothering: Choice, Nature, and Inevitability
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pp. 73-103
Because many of the natural mothers identified themselves as feminists or at the very least identified with feminist ideas, I wondered how they reconciled their feminist politics with a traditionally gendered lifestyle in which the father works outside the home, providing financial resources, and the mother works in...
5. Resisting Culture, Embracing Nature: Natural Mothering and Control
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pp. 104-140
Contradictions are embedded in both the ideology and the practice of natural mothering. Scrutiny of what natural mothers do and say about what they do and say reveals one reality, but a different reality emerges upon deeper examination. One reality does not necessarily negate the other, however. Rather, the two realities seem to rub and chafe...
6. Natural Mothering: Social Change or Narcissistic Retreat?
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pp. 141-164
We have explored what natural mothers do and why, but an important question remains: Can natural mothering effect social change? In Recreating Motherhood: Ideology and Technology in a Patriarchal Society (1989), Barbara Katz Rothman conceptualizes American motherhood as “rest[ing] on three deeply rooted ideologies—capitalism, technology and...
7. Conclusion
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pp. 165-173
This book has explored a style of parenting that reclaims nature and the home—a “way back home.” The “way” refers to the path along which natural mothers travel toward their destination: the home-based, nuclear family nurtured by Mother and Mother Nature. As the natural mothers enact a...
Appendix: On Being a (Quasi) Natural Mother Studying Natural Mothers
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pp. 175-198
Notes
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pp. 199-206
References
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pp. 207-216
Index
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pp. 217-226
E-ISBN-13: 9781439905265
Publication Year: 2002
