Motherhood Museum

I love Phyllis Chesler, feminist, professor, writer, psychologist, scholar, and poet-on-birth extraordinaire (just dip into With Child: A Diary of Motherhood if in doubt on that last point). On her website two months ago–but sadly I’m just seeing it now–she published an amazing review of the brand-new Museum of Motherhood that opened in September in Manhattan. She discusses her own journey to motherhood, her books on the subject, her interview with the museum’s founder, and her fervent hope that this museum manages to get the funding it needs and stay open.

–Christina

Book Review: Viral Mothers

Bernice L. Hausman. Viral Mothers: Breastfeeding in the Age of HIV/AIDS (U Michigan, 2011).

What a great book! It’s academic, for sure, and not for the casual reader, but it’s a great, perceptive look at so many issues surrounding breastfeeding in our culture. Hausman considers the famous pro-breastfeeding ad campaign of a few years ago, which focused on the risks of not breasftfeeding rather than the advantages of breastfeeding, and which garnered such a critical response; she addresses the way that breastfeeding features in media reports about AIDS and West Nile virus; and she offers perceptive, feminist-based criticism of how our society in general marginalizes breastfeeding because it is actually threatening to what she identifies as our underlying cultural values. Really just a smart, thoughtful, and interesting read!

–Christina