Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Barone-Chapman, Maryann

Titel

Epilogue

Ist Teil von

• Personal and Cultural Shadows of Late Motherhood, 2020, p.115-118

Auflage

1

Ort / Verlag

Routledge

Erscheinungsjahr

2020

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Cross-culturally, a woman’s status as child bearer has been the test of her womanhood. Through motherhood, every woman has been defined from outside herself: mother, matriarch, matron, spinster, barren, old maid–listen to the history of emotional timbre that hangs about each of these words. A woman without a child is often asked questions about her fecundity and procreative identity not required of women who became mothers at an earlier age. Such interrogations reflect the pressure within culture to ‘complex’ the childless woman. The rise of late desire for motherhood began to appear as an Anima Mundi problem requesting revisioning. Women who have delayed motherhood in the biotechnological age report feeling the shift to procreative identity as both subtle and seismic, conscious and unconscious. Re-embodying the feminine through late motherhood emerges as a new union of epistemology and ethos, requiring both deconstruction and reconstruction.