Thesis (DR. P.H.)--University of Michigan.

Thesis (DR. P.H.)--University of Michigan.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 55-57).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 1999. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 214-218). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 55-57). Also available in print.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago Divinity School, August 1999. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2004. / Supervisors: Laura Lein and David Austin. Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Dissertation (Ph. D.)--University of Akron, Dept. of Sociology, 2005. / "December, 2005." Title from electronic dissertation title page (viewed 10/16/2006) Advisor, Kathryn M. Feltey; Committee members, Nancy B. Miller, Cheryl Elman, Gay C. Kitson, Jan Yoder, Sarah Wilcox; Department Chair, John Zipp; Dean of the College, Charles B. Monroe; Dean of the Graduate School, George R. Newkome. Includes bibliographical references.

No decorrer da história, os diversos grupos sociais sofrem valorizações, desvalorizações e transformações em seu papéis sociais. No jogo político, econômico e social, à mulher também foram designados padrões de comportamento e a maternidade é considerada, para várias culturas e por longos períodos, o principal desígnio feminino. No Brasil, interesses do Estado, da Igreja e da Ciência contribuem, desde a organização Colonial até possivelmente nossos dias, com alguns importantes fundamentos no que se entende por ser mãe. Mais recentemente, a sociedade sofreu mudanças que derivaram em uma nova inserção social para a mulher provocando um jogo de corroborações e transformações na maneira de ser mãe. Este trabalho pretende buscar um entendimento do que se pensa sobre ser mãe, no grupo entrevistado. Uma reflexão sobre o conjunto de idéias trazido com relação à maternidade, dos elementos que o constituem, suas articulações, levando-se em consideração as influências histórico-sociais. O método utilizado situa-se no âmbito da pesquisa qualitativa. Foram entrevistadas 15 jovens mães, em duas etapas de entrevista, a partir de um roteiro de perguntas abertas que buscava incentivar suas vivências enquanto mães, o sentido a isto atribuído. As narrativas indicaram os temas de reflexão deste trabalho, a saber: a eternização de ações e sentimentos, a responsabilidade na educação, as dificuldades advindas das tarefas com o filho e o trabalho, a família, a projeção daquilo que é visto como nocivo à relação mãe/ filho. Enfim, a meada ideológica da maternidade, interpenetrando o ser e o fazer no cotidiano desta mãe. Podemos dizer que, tanto o desejo de ser mãe como a maneira de sê-lo sofre influências muito antigas e ainda muito atuantes, o que, neste momento de transição dos papéis sociais, faz com que se crie um descompasso entre a antiga e a atual condição da mulher também no seu modo de ser mãe. / Different social groups have been increasing and decreasing their value as well as presenting changes in their social roles, through history. In the political, economic and social game, patterns of behaviour were designated to women and the motherhood has been considered, for many cultures and for a long period, the most important feminine attribute. Since the colonial Brazilian period, State, Church and Science’s interests have been providing some important ideas related to being mother. Recently, society suffered changes that for the woman mean new social status what contributes to reassuring and transforming the way of being mother. Qualitative methods were chosen to analyse the data from this study. Fifteen young mothers were interviewed following a opened questionnaire, trying to get the women’s experiences as mothers. The discourses indicate the reflection themes presented in this work: actions and feelings that were presented as eternal, the responsibility in education, the difficulties in conciliating work and child’s care, family, projection of bad aspects related to mother/child relationship. Lastly, the motherhood’s ideological net’s influences in being and building the mother’s every day life, and vice-versa. Therefore, regarding the social roles in this transitional moment, there are old and still active ideas affecting the present woman’s status as a mother in her being mother’s wish and in her way of being it.

Women's fight for the franchise in both America and England in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was accompanied by scrutiny of women's relationship to the State by those with varying perspectives on the suffrage battle. In the industrial, post-agricultural age, motherhood defined a woman's place in western society, as well as her rights under and service to the State; if the normative role of the male citizen was the soldier, the normative role for women was the mother. Yet for all of the ways an embrace of maternalism limited women's access to the public realm, it also laid the groundwork for the women's movement, and motherhood was often seen as a route to citizenship by those on both sides of the suffrage battle. As women began to re-imagine themselves as enfranchised citizens, many social theorists, politicians, and novelists continued to debate the rights and roles of women across the body of the mother; thinkers as varied as Theodore Roosevelt, H. G. Wells, and Emma Goldman all wrote tracts about motherhood and the future of the nation. Rather than entering the old debates on the value or liability of maternalism for feminism, my dissertation will argue that the modernist period introduced a new and still-overlooked figure: the anarchic mother. In their essays and novels, Goldman, Rebecca West, John Galsworthy, and Virginia Woolf turned away from the emblem of the Republican Mother and toward a radical new figure. Rather than sacrificing her individual needs to the Republic, the anarchic mother's individual pursuit of liberty challenged the authority of the State and its cultural institutions. An important group of modernist novels and essays employs the figure of the mother to represent not tradition and unity but rebellion, separatism, abstention, or statelessness. This undertheorized figure in modernist and feminist thought clarifies Virginia Woolf's call, in Three Guineas, for allegiance to no country. If Woolf and many other artists were ambivalent as they linked motherhood and anarchy, contemporary feminists inherited both the possibilities and contradictions of the anarchic mother as they reexamine women's relationship to citizenship in the 21st century.