Myths of Motherhood: How Culture Reinvents the Good Mother

This groundbreaking and irreverent history of motherhood is worth a hundred advice books for any mother who’s ever been made to feel guilty or frazzled by society’s impossible expectations. Analyzing data from the psychoanalyst’s couch to the hidden history of wet nursing, psychologist Shari L. Thurer wends her way from the Stone Age to the age of Hillary Rodham Clinton, painting a vivid, often frightening picture of life for mothers and children in a time when their roles were constructed ...