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    Transformative Motherhood: On Giving and Getting in A Consumer Culture

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    Paloma Castro
    The Truth about Working Mothers,” for instance, the author re- veals how she once left her toddler unattended in a car for over an hour while she worked. She acknowledges that her actions were irresponsible and dangerous. While this extreme example is disturbing, it underscores the pres- sures working mothers face and the difficult choices they sometimes make. Other pieces offer more positive perspectives. In “The Gift of Time,” Heather Havrilesky celebrates slowing down to appreciate the small moments with her children. Similarly, in “The Gift of Motherhood,” Elizabeth Lesser finds meaning and purpose in raising her family, despite career setbacks. Overall, Torn provides a nuanced look at

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    Transformative Motherhood: On Giving and Getting in A Consumer Culture

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    Paloma Castro
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    The Truth about Working Mothers,” for instance, the author re- veals how she once left her toddler unattended in a car for over an hour while she worked. She acknowledges that her actions were irresponsible and dangerous. While this extreme example is disturbing, it underscores the pres- sures working mothers face and the difficult choices they sometimes make. Other pieces offer more positive perspectives. In “The Gift of Time,” Heather Havrilesky celebrates slowing down to appreciate the small moments with her children. Similarly, in “The Gift of Motherhood,” Elizabeth Lesser finds meaning and purpose in raising her family, despite career setbacks. Overall, Torn provides a nuanced look at

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    The Truth about Working Mothers,” for instance, the author re- veals how she once left her toddler unattended in a car for over an hour while she worked. She acknowledges that her actions were irresponsible and dangerous. While this extreme example is disturbing, it underscores the pres- sures working mothers face and the difficult choices they sometimes make. Other pieces offer more positive perspectives. In “The Gift of Time,” Heather Havrilesky celebrates slowing down to appreciate the small moments with her children. Similarly, in “The Gift of Motherhood,” Elizabeth Lesser finds meaning and purpose in raising her family, despite career setbacks. Overall, Torn provides a nuanced look at

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    22 views3 pages

    Transformative Motherhood: On Giving and Getting in A Consumer Culture

    Uploaded by

    Paloma Castro
    The Truth about Working Mothers,” for instance, the author re- veals how she once left her toddler unattended in a car for over an hour while she worked. She acknowledges that her actions were irresponsible and dangerous. While this extreme example is disturbing, it underscores the pres- sures working mothers face and the difficult choices they sometimes make. Other pieces offer more positive perspectives. In “The Gift of Time,” Heather Havrilesky celebrates slowing down to appreciate the small moments with her children. Similarly, in “The Gift of Motherhood,” Elizabeth Lesser finds meaning and purpose in raising her family, despite career setbacks. Overall, Torn provides a nuanced look at

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    of 3

    book reviews

    Transformative Motherhood:
    On Giving and Getting in a Consumer Culture

    Linda L. Layne, ed.


    New York University Press, 1999.

    Reviewed by Tatjana Takševa

    The five essays collected in Transformative Motherhood: On Giving and Get-


    ting in a Consumer Culture straddle the disciplines of anthropology and wom-
    en’s studies. Implied in the subtitle is the book’s focus on the rhetoric of the
    gift, gift giving and receiving in the context of non-normative mothering in
    the United States. The essayists explore the experiences of women whose re-
    productive lives do not conform to dominant and consumer-oriented cultural
    standards when it comes to birth, motherhood, and mothering. These experi-
    ences include adoption, surrogacy, foster parenting, giving birth to children
    with disabilities, and pregnancy loss. In each instance, drawing on extensive
    field-work and ethnographic analysis, the authors emphasize the various ways
    in which women adopt the rhetoric of the gift not only to creatively meet
    the challenges of their experiences, but also to critique consumer culture and
    redefine the conventional institution of motherhood, the mother/child re-
    lationship, and the notion of children as products of biologically or legally
    determined kinship. The theoretical framework provided by the concept of
    “the gift” suits the subject matter of some essays better than others.
    The collection opens with Judith Modell’s polemical essay “Freely Given:
    Open Adoption and the Rhetoric of the Gift,” in which she argues for open
    adoption over closed adoption. Modell seeks to restore the gift to its classi-
    cal meaning of “social exchange,” and posits a “gift model” of adoption that
    removes it from the ideology of blood-based kinship. At the time she was
    writing, the forms of open adoption available in the United States were not
    contracted and legal. However, according to the Child Welfare Information
    Gateway of the United States Department of Health and Human Services,
    as of February 2009, 24 states have legal provisions for enforceable open
    adoption contact agreements. Given this significant change in legislation, the
    value of Modell’s essay lies primarily in its exploration of the rhetoric of the
    gift in relation to open adoption practices in general. Rather than “giving up”
    the child for adoption, which implies surrender, loss, and victimization, the
    rhetoric of the gift re-conceptualizes the act of the birthmother as a gift to
    the appreciative and known adoptive parents, and highlights the aspects of
    generosity and self-sacrifice involved in open adoption. It also implies that re-
    cipients remain beholden to the gift giver, which in some cases of open adop-

    294 volume 2, number 2


    book reviews

    tion means a long-lasting relationship between the birthmother, her child,


    and the adoptive parents.
    In Modell’s essay, the rhetoric of the gift paradoxically humanizes and
    socializes open adoption, but it also masks the financial side of adoption.
    Further, it ignores adoptive parents who choose closed adoption and who
    raise psychologically healthy children, or instances where ongoing contact
    and openness among the three parties involved may not, for various reasons,
    be in the best interest of the child.
    Helene Ragone’s essay, “The Gift of Life: Surrogate Motherhood, Gam-
    ete Donation, and Construction of Altruism,” on the other hand, explores
    the paradox between gift giving and monetary compensation, as well as the
    gendered nature of the gift with respect to women involved in traditional
    surrogacy (where the surrogate mother contributes an ovum) and gestational
    surrogacy (where the surrogate mother only “gestates” a couple’s baby). Ra-
    gone’s findings reveal that traditional surrogates are more likely than gesta-
    tional surrogates to apply the metaphor of the gift to the embryos they carry.
    All surrogates, however, claim that the payment they receive is insufficient
    compensation for the service they provide and nine months of pregnancy. For
    Ragone, this claim illustrates the prevailing belief that “children are gifts and
    therefore priceless” (70), a view that gives rise to societal disapproval of finan-
    cially motivated surrogates—a gendered response. In stark contrast, sperm
    donors, who routinely declare financial compensation as a primary motiva-
    tion, do not face societal censure.
    Danielle Wozniak’s essay, “Gifts and Burdens: The Social and Familial
    Context of Foster Mothering,” stands out for its clarity and cogency. Woz-
    niak examines constructions of motherhood, mothering work, and kinship
    articulated by African American and Euro-American women who foster in
    the state of Connecticut. The rhetoric of the gift in women’s foster narratives
    subverts dominant notions of foster mothers and foster children as “nonmoth-
    ers” and “failed children” who do not mirror patriarchal nuclear family life.
    Here, they become inherently valuable individuals with agency and control.
    Women who foster embrace a view of themselves as “gifted” mothers who
    have the talent and strength to foster children; at the same time, they form
    transformative relationships with, and a new conception of, foster children
    not as burdens but as gifts, “blessings,” and “joys” in themselves. Wozniak’s
    poignant, well-crafted essay shows that foster mothers conceptualize foster-
    ing as a true gift-exchange in which mothers and children benefit mutually
    and equally.
    The final two essays, “Does God Give Special Kids to Special Parents: Per-
    sonhood and the Child with Disabilities as Gift and as Giver” by Gail Lands-
    man, and “True Gifts from God: Motherhood, Sacrifice, and Enrichment in

    journal of the motherhood initiative 295


    book reviews

    the Case of Pregnancy Loss” by Linda Layne, deal with children who differ
    from the norm and thus challenge their mothers’ status. Both essays deploy
    the rhetoric of the gift, used here with explicit Christian overtones, to cri-
    tique consumerism and self-blame. For Landsman, the idea that God “gives
    special children to special parents”—embraced by many parents of children
    with disabilities—is eventually displaced by the assertion that the child is the
    true giver of the gift, a notion that returns the value of the child to “normal.”
    In the final essay, Layne shows how bereaved mothers use the conceptual
    and symbolic power of the gift to deal with the moral problem pregnancy
    loss poses for women in a culture that often understands pregnancy in terms
    of capitalist production, and the delivery of a healthy child as the result of
    individual triumph.

    Torn: True Stories of Kids, Career & the Conflict


    of Modern Motherhood

    Samatha Parent Walravens.


    Seattle, wa: Coffeetown Press, 2011.

    Reviewed by Dorsía Smith Silva

    Torn: True Stories of Kids, Career, and the Conflict of Modern Motherhood con-
    siders various paths of motherhood and whether mothers “can have it all” and
    at the same time. In many ways, the forty-seven contributors to this volume
    feel “torn” between caring for their children and the demands of their careers.
    Drawing on their personal experiences, they explore the guilt women face
    when they cannot find a balance between motherhood and work. As a result,
    the narratives emphasize that the “supermommy” complex is dead—the real-
    ity of motherhood is that there may not be equilibrium between the worlds
    of parenting and career.
    Most of the tales address this tension with great candour. Liesl Jurock in
    “Cupcake Crazy,” for example, is conflicted when she must miss her son’s
    birthday party at daycare to attend a business meeting. Likewise, Lindsey
    Mead in “A Foot in Two Worlds” is ambivalent about realigning her profes-
    sional life to raise her children full time. Jurock and Mead note that their
    respective career decisions are multilayered and seek to reconcile personal as-
    pirations, educational and financial investments, professional goals, parental
    responsibilities, and several other factors. Each admits that there is no easy or
    perfect solution for mothers.
    The frankness of some essays is unnerving. In “Confessions of a Crazy

    296 volume 2, number 2

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