A Potent Spell: Mother Love and the Power of FearEvery parent has felt that certain dread: your toddler gets lost in the mall; your teenager isn't home by curfew; your third-grader walks to school alone. The psychotherapist Janna Malamud Smith rigorously argues that fear of child loss has the keenest effect on mothers and has proven to be a powerfuly underrated motivation for them throughout history. Bearing the brunt of responsibility for keeping children safe and healthy, mothers constantly accommodate to the need to be vigilant. Their fears make them vulnerable in many ways, affecting their daily lives in the workplace, at home, and within the social hierarchy. Smith takes the long view of this phenomenon, uncovering a buried message to mothers in advice books from the days of the Puritans to the present, in medicine and psychology, in art and literature. It is a history brimming with mothers' stories from ancient times to today. Like Arlie Hochschild's The Second Shift and Ann Crittenden's The Price of Motherhood, A Potent Spell confirms women's real experience of motherhood in America. |
Contents
THE POTENT SPELL | 11 |
My Son Who Died | 35 |
Semele Remembered | 57 |
Copyright | |
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abandoned Adrienne Rich adults Advice to Mothers Agave American Anne Anne Bradstreet Anne Hutchinson attachment baby Bacchae become behavior birth Boston Buchan century chil child death child loss child-rearing claim Clytemnestra contemporary create culture D. W. Winnicott daughter David Grene daycare Demeter described devalued Dionysus doctor dren economic Ellen Key emotional England Euripides experience fantasy father fear felt female Flavel grief harm human husband Ibid ideas Increase Mather infant Interview Jerome Kagan John Flavel kids kill labor lives Mary maternal moth mother love motherhood notions nurse offers pain parents Pentheus perhaps person protect psychoanalytic psychological Puritan putting children responsibility Richmond Lattimore safe safety sense sexual shame simply social society sometimes stay story suffering suggests threat tion toddler Token for Mourners unconscious vulnerability Winnicott wish woman women worry writes York young Zeus