All's Fair in Love and Poetry - Taylor Swift's 'The Tortured Poets Department'
Kami Steffenauer provides an in-depth analysis of motherhood in the Grammy-nominated album.
Dec 10, 20245 min read
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ABOUT READING MOTHERHOOD
Reading Motherhood was founded by two Georgetown University professors based on a course they co-teach of the same name. It seeks to spark conversations about motherhood, feminism, and reproductive rights, as well as provide a community for educators looking to bring these themes to their classrooms.
We offer a space between the ubiquitous lifestyle “Mommy Influencers” and websites focused strictly on mothers in academia. But we do aspire to be influencers of another sort: using our teaching and research skills to bridge the generational divide between all types of women by interrogating conventional models and myths about motherhood. Our approach is introducing--rather than dictating--ideas about representations of diverse mothers in literature, media, and popular culture.
QUOTES TO CONSIDER
People know the basic facts about me, how I was married when I wasn't quite fourteen and had four babies by the time I was eighteen ... So when I sing those country songs about women struggling to keep things going, you could say I've been there. It's like that hit record I had in 1975, "The Pill,"...Well, they didn't have none of them pills when I was younger, or I'd have been swallowing 'em like popcorn. See, the men who run some of the radio stations, they banned the record because they didn't like what I was saying. But the women knew. Like I say, I know what it's like to be pregnant and nervous and poor.
--Loretta Lynn, Coal Miner' s Daughter
Who decided that "women should be responsible for daily life?"
-- Dorothy Smith
"Unless carefree, motherhood was a killer."
-- Toni Morrison, Beloved
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SPOTLIGHT
Our newest book recommendation is for Honorée Fanonne Jeffers' The Love Songs of W.E.B. DuBois. The book is both an intimate character study and a sweeping epic, tracing Ailey Garfield's maternal family line over the course of more than 200 years.
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SPOTLIGHT
In 2020, TED published an excerpt from Glennon Doyle's book Untamed, in which she laments the "terrible memo" that new parents receive in the 21st century. Doyle proposes a "new memo" for parents, one that recognizes the importance of struggle and failure for children.
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