I was asked to share the cover blurb with you all about "The Myth of the
Good Mother"  Sincerely, Pat in SNJ

The Myths of Motherhood: How Culture Reinvents the Good Mother.  Shari
Thurer, 1994.  Houghton Mifflin Company.  Boston/NY.

Shari L. Thurer is a professor at Boston University and a
psychoanalytically trained psychologist with a private practice.  She has
published widely in scholarly journals on the concept of the good mother.
She lives with her husband and daughter in Boston.

"Given a voice, what would the Great Goddess, the Virgin Mary, Snow White's
evil stepmother or Portnoy's mom have said about child care, contraception,
bonding and breast-feeding?  Would their feelings have mattered? After all,
maternity has been constructed by men over the millennia.  Aristotle
thought mother's womb merely cooked father's seed.  The Church preferred
virgins to mothers, and Frued was father-fixated.  Even a brief survey of
history reveals a diversity of maternal practices and ideals at odds with
each other as well as with the views of contemporary  child-care experts
and psychologists.

'I cannot recall ever treating a mother who did not harbor shameful secrets
about how her behavior or feelings damaged  her children' writes Thurer.
Today our sentimentalized conception of the good mother casts a long,
guilt-inducing shadow over real mothers' lives.  Never has there been so
much advice and so little agreement.  Never have the ideals of motherhood
been as ambiguous, pyschologically demanding, and unforgiving.  One
conclusion is certain: the 'good mother' is a cultural invention.

In this brilliant synthesis of history, psychology, the arts, and religion,
Thurer shows how our current concept of the ideal  mother, like all
ideology, is culture-bound,  historically specific, and hopelessly tied to
fashion.  Thurer exposes our current myths of motherhood as a backlash
against recent gains in women's rights and control   over their bodies.

'For thousands of years,  because of her awesome ability to spew forth a
child, mother has been feared and revered.  She has been the subject of
taboos, witch  hunts, mandatory pregnancy, and confinement in a separate
sphere.  She has endured appalling insults and perpetual marginalization.
She has also been the subject of glorious painting, chivalry,  and
idealization.  Through it all she has been rarely consulted'.  The Myths of
Motherhood, finally is her story."

The book has a long bib and is well referenced.