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About Reading Motherhood

Reading Motherhood was founded by two Georgetown University professors who were inspired by a class they co-teach of the same name. After hearing countless teachers and students remark that they wished they could have taken a class that focused on motherhood and its social/political contexts in literature, we decided to create a website that would make the course's concepts accessible to all those who were interested. 

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Reading Motherhood aims to spark and contribute to discussions about motherhood, reproductive rights, and feminism and their intersections with gender expression, sexuality, race, and class. Its founders are two White women of different generations who have raised children of color--one via childbirth, one via transnational adoption. This site offers 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 and reproductive justice more broadly.  Our approach is introducing--rather than dictating--ideas about representations of diverse mothers in literature, media, and popular culture. Here, you will find critiques of movies and books, compilations of notable news stories, and opinion pieces commenting on these topics. Along with commentary by site contributors, interviews with authors, students, educators, and parents will highlight the social disparities within and contradictions inherent to mothering and attempts to teach or write about it. Keeping true to Reading Motherhood's classroom origins, the site also looks to provide community and resources for teachers hoping to emphasize mothering and feminist themes in their own classrooms.

 

Reading Motherhood seeks to be a collaborative platform, hoping to integrate forum discussions into the broader mission of the site, making the blog part of a larger 'conversation' rather than a one-sided posting.

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Have a comment or suggestion? Reach out! Send an email to: readingmotherhood@gmail.com

Contributors

Professor Pam Fox

PAMELA FOX

Founder

Welcome! I am a feminist scholar of literary/cultural studies at Georgetown University whose research and teaching encompass the fields of Feminist Studies, Working-Class Studies, Critical Race Studies, Motherhood Studies, Adoption Studies, and Popular Music Studies. I grew up amidst the steel mills and oil refineries of Upper Northwest Indiana and was a first generation college student.  That history informs much of the work that I do.

 

My ‘mother’ identity:  I didn’t want to have children until my later thirties, and after a brief and demoralizing whirl with low-level reproductive therapy, I and my husband decided, after considerable research, to adopt a baby from China during the heyday of transnational adoptions (late 1990s).  That daughter is now 22, and the three of us over the years have explored the complexities of adoption as a family-making opportunity as well as an exploitative practice. She is now making her own contribution by organizing adoptee support groups and events.   I’m fortunate to have this chosen family who provide daily love, laughter, and community.  Our twelve-year-old dog Jackie is still as neurotic as ever in her advanced years but keeps us highly amused.

 

If you’d like to see some of my writing, here are book titles and links:

 

 

 

Professor Elizabeth Velez

ELIZABETH VELEZ

Founder

I think of myself as a writer, journalist, feminist and occasional poet—but primarily   I describe myself as a teacher.  I have been at Georgetown for more than thirty years, serving as the academic director of the Community Scholars Program

(an academic program focused on critical writing and reading for first-generation

students).  As the head instructor in that program for many years, teaching writing

was my primary academic interest.  I also teach (and am passionate about)

motherhood studies, feminist theory, sixties cultural history, and poetry.

I have co-written and edited four volumes of poetry as “literary therapy.”

  

When my publisher asked me for a bio for my first book, it seemed important to

include only my work and professional life.  As a woman, I did not want to talk about being a mother—only very recently have male authors begun to include the fact that they have x number of children, whom they adore, in their bios. I am so relieved and delighted to talk briefly about my life as a mother on this site.  I have two sons, 37 and 49. (The age gap is explained by the epiphany I had when my oldest was born—I could not have another child until I understood and began my work in the world.)

 

Raising feminist sons was my goal in addition to all of the other work that goes into mothering.  My husband is Chicano (self-described), so that meant raising feminist boys of color.  I also have two grandsons (Jewish, Mexican, Russian, Polish, British, Irish, German, and Swedish).  They have relatives who died in the Holocaust and they study pre-Columbian history.  All of us want them to learn that survival itself can be a privilege and that gender is never destiny.

 

We are delighted to welcome you to this site and offer both past and present cultural and literary standpoints on motherhood. We hope that you will share your

own experiences and points of view as well.

 

If you’d like to take a look at my latest book, you can see it here.

 

https://www.amazon.com/How-Did-This-Happen-Anymore/dp/1455567000

 

And a brief description:


"This is the book I didn't even know I needed-until I found myself crying within the first few pages. 'Growing up' and 'growing older' can feel lonely-thinking no one else feels the same way or experiences the same losses and hopes and fears. In these poems, and in the hilarious, touching commentary accompanying them, I found solace and joy. How Did This Happen is not your mother's anthology. It is a fierce, funny, guided meditation, set in poetry, through the insult, grit and grace of aging; a thinking woman's guide to growing older. This is a book to love, now and for the months and years to come."―Andrea Seabrook, NPR

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Kathleen Felli

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Hello! I am a junior at Georgetown majoring in Government and English with a minor in Spanish. Taking Prof. Fox and Prof. Velez’s course in Spring of 2022 opened my eyes to the many ways in which motherhood is a societal institution as much as it is a personal undertaking. In my studies, I have always been interested in intersectionality and how an individual's competing identities can affect their day-to-day life. With that in mind, Reading Motherhood was the perfect course to examine how factors such as race, class, and sexual orientation interact with each other to profoundly impact the lives of mothers all around the world. 

 

I am excited to continue exploring the intricacies of motherhood as current webmaster and contributor on the site!

Reading Motherhood at Georgetown

Georgetown University seal

Course Description: 

Motherhood is deemed one of the most ‘natural’ experiences binding women together across time and space.  But as feminist poet and essayist Adrienne Rich famously argued in her landmark work Of Woman Born, it is also a social institution with its own history and ideology.

 

Our course examines this institution as a shifting, historically and culturally specific phenomenon given particularly potent life in cultural representations: that is, the literature, film, television, advertising, video, comics, etc. that surround us in everyday life.  We explore how differing notions of motherhood are constructed, contested, negotiated. 

 

A central premise of the course is that motherhood cannot be universalized as an experience or as a right (not all women are urged or even permitted to mother); it is not innate or necessarily a biological relation. 

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