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
Twice Vulnerable | 13 |
Night Walks | 22 |
My Son Who Died | 35 |
Giottos Tears | 44 |
Semele Remembered | 57 |
John Flavels Token for Mourners | 79 |
William Buchans Advice to Mothers | 99 |
From Medicine to Psychology | 120 |
The Free Mother | 167 |
Worrying Mothers | 190 |
Putting Children First | 216 |
Solomons Wisdom | 239 |
Notes | 249 |
| 263 | |
| 277 | |
The Psychoanalytic Searchlight | 141 |
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Common terms and phrases
abandoned Adrienne Rich adults Advice to Mothers Agave American Anne Bradstreet attachment attachment parenting baby Bacchae become behavior birth Buchan century chil child death child loss child-rearing Clytemnestra contemporary create culture D. W. Winnicott danger daugh daughter daycare Demeter described devalued Dionysus doctor dren economic Ellen Key emotional England Euripides experience fantasy father fear felt female Flavel Furthermore grief harm human husband Ibid ideas Increase Mather infant Interview Jean-Jacques Rousseau Jerome Kagan John Flavel kids kill labor lives Mary maternal moth mother love motherhood notions nurse offers pain parents Pentheus perhaps Persephone person protect psychoanalytic psychological Puritan putting children responsibility safe safety seems Semele sense sexual shame simply social society sometimes stay story suffering suggests threat tion toddler Token for Mourners unconscious violence vulnerability Winnicott wish woman women worry writes young Zeus
Popular passages
Page 269 - A Token for Children. Being an Exact Account of the Conversion, Holy and Exemplary Lives and Joyful Deaths of Several Young Children.
Page 8 - When the Greek women married, they disappeared from public life; within the four walls of their home they devoted themselves to the care of their household and family. This is the mode of life prescribed for women alike by nature and reason.