For May, DiverseBooks.net puts the spotlight on books for and about mothers. If your mom is a scholar, professor or student, or just interested in issues related to motherhood, consider some selections from our publishers.
Through its partnerships with leading publishers – representing university and independent presses large and small – DiverseBooks.net brings you scholarly and academic titles that you will not find elsewhere about diversity, education, history and many other topics. Visit www.DiverseBooks.net offers books at significant discounts for classroom use, research or pleasure reading.
Academic Mothers, by Venitha Pillay, $26.35 (List Price: $31), Trentham Books, September 2007, ISBN 9781858564173, pp. 206.
Dr Venitha Pillay, a senior lecturer at the University of Pretoria, explores the lives of three white South African women in their struggle to combine motherhood with their academic careers. She challenges notions that relegate women to the realm of emotion and nurturance, while reserving the life of the intellect for men, and examines how women in academia straddle both worlds. See Review from Diverseeducation.com http://diverseeducation.com/article/10855/
Robbing the Mother: Women in Faulkner, by Deborah Clarke, $17 (List price: $20) University of Mississippi Press, January 2006, ISBN 9781578068807, pp. 224.
William Faulkner once said, “If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is worth any number of old ladies.” While his words reflect candor, they do not convey a wellspring of love and affection for women. Clarke examines Faulkner’s work for clues about his attitudes toward women and argues that he “almost certainly feared and mistrusted” them and yet saw them as a powerful force that could be useful in his writing.
Shaping Our Mothers’ World: American Women’s Magazines, by Nancy A. Walker $18.70, (List Price: $22) University of Mississippi Press, September 2000, ISBN 9781578062959, pp. 280.
The mass media of the mid-20th century helped to define and reshape the images of American womanhood in ways that have not been fully appreciated. Walker, a professor of English at Vanderbilt University, puts such mainstream women’s magazines as Good Housekeeping, Vogue, Mademoiselle and Redbook under a microscope to probe their roles in perpetuating stereotypes of the middle-class homemaker of the era and in the undoing of those same stereotypes. She argues that these periodicals presented a far more complicated, nuanced view of life, domestic and external, at a crucial juncture in history, than they are a sometimes given credit for.
