Excerpt: My best efforts at parenting weren’t enough to make him stay. My son no longer wanted to call me “Mom.”

Book Summary: This volume offers an overview of the latest research on perinatal adaptation among women who have faced trauma, loss and/or adversity, both in childhood and/or as an adult, and describes the varied trajectories of adaptive and maladaptive coping that follow. The range of outcomes considered span from health-limiting (e.g. mental illness, substance use, unhealthy life style behaviours) to health-promoting (e.g. resilience and posttraumatic growth). These outcomes are examined both in relation to mothers’ experience of motherhood and parenting, and with regard to their children’s lives. Interpersonal trauma, experienced in childhood and/or or adulthood, can have a profound effect on how women experience the transition into motherhood – from pregnancy, to childbirth, and postpartum caregiving. Women across the globe are exposed to high rates of interpersonal violence, and face the physical and emotional consequences of such events. The shift into motherhood is an emotionally evocative period in a woman’s life, entailing not only challenges, but also the potential for healing and growth. Individual chapters will present state-of-the-art research, and will also highlight the voices of women who have personally experienced trauma, illustrating the effects on their experiences as mothers. Throughout the book, the consistent emphasis is on clinical implications and on ways that providers can create a context for healing and growth with the help of current evidence-based and promising treatment methods.

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Objetivo: O cinema é um produto cultural constituído por discursos e significações e contribui para a formação de subjetividades. Esta pesquisa busca identificar em três longas-metragens nacionais contemporâneos o sistema de valores e ideias que orienta, situa e delimita as práticas maternas na sociedade brasileira e de que maneira os efeitos de sentido que constroem reforçam, transformam ou degradam a representação social materna. Métodos: Enquadramento teórico-metodológico interdisciplinar, que tem como base a Análise do Discurso oriunda da Escola Francesa, em diálogo com conceitos-chave da teoria da representação social, os estudos culturais e os estudos de gênero. Resultados: Com base nas análises, concluímos que a representação social da mãe brasileira contemporânea está ligada à ideologia da maternidade intensiva. Nos três filmes do corpus identificamos também contradiscursos que se contrapõem ao modelo vigente, o que aponta possível desgaste da representação social materna atual e o surgimento de mudanças e transformações relacionadas a ela no futuro. / Objective: Cinema is a cultural product that carries discourses and meanings and contributes to the formation of subjectivities. This research seeks to identify in three domestic contemporary feature films the range of values and ideas that guide, situate and delimit the maternal practices in Brazilian society and in what ways the meanings that they produce reinforce, transform or degrade maternal social representation. Methods: Interdisciplinary theoretical-methodological framework, based on French discourse analysis, in dialogue with key concepts of social representation theory, cultural studies and gender studies. Results: Based on the analysis, we concluded that the social representation of the contemporary Brazilian mother is linked to the ideology of intensive motherhood. In the three films of the corpus we also identified discourses that are contrary to the current model, which indicates a possible erosion of the current maternal social representation and an emergence of changes and transformations related to it in the future.

This dissertation consists of three chapters. The first chapter addresses the roles of changes in assisted reproductive technologies, returns to female experience and abortion rates in explaining the historical trend of child adoption. The second chapter assesses the effects of increased income inequality and decreased income mobility on timing of births and marriages and on the single motherhood rates. The third chapter establishes the importance of accounting for marital state in the models of indirect income uncertainty inference. Chapter 1 aims to explain the μ-shaped historical trend of child adoption in the US by emphasizing the role of the changes in the demand side of the market for child adoption. I argue that changes on the demand side such as increasing returns to female human capital and innovations in Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) have played a major role in shaping the historical adoption trend along with the changes in the supply side, namely, increase in the abortion rates. I present a life-cycle model, in which an agent makes a fertility-timing decision based on the returns to her human capital and age-specific probability of conception. Under the assumption that adoption is an alternative to childbearing, i.e. an agent chooses to adopt after she fails to conceive, the presented model uses historical trends of returns to human capital and success rate of ART to explain changes in adoption trends. According to the model, increasing returns to female human capital were responsible for the delay in childbearing and therefore the increase in the demand for adoption until the 1970s. After 1970, the legalization of abortion decreased the supply of orphans, while innovations in ART decreased the demand by allowing women to have biological children at later ages. Around 1980, the effect of increasing returns to human capital overturned the one of advances in ART, which resulted in a slow recovery of the adoption trend. Chapter 2 studies the dramatic transformation that the typical American family has undergone since the 1950s. Marriage and fertility have been delayed, while single-motherhood rates have increased. The link between these facts emanates from the greater delay in marriage than that in first births. As “the Gap” between the age at first birth and the age at first marriage becomes negative for some women, out-of-wedlock first births increase. In my analyses, I focus on the increase in income inequality and the decrease in income mobility --- observed across two National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) cohorts of women --- to account for the above facts using an equilibrium two-sided search framework in which agents make marriage and fertility choices over the life-cycle. Marriage is a commitment device for consumption-sharing, providing spouses with partial insurance against idiosyncratic earnings risk. Agents derive utility from children, but children also involve a risky commitment to future monetary and time costs. According to my model, two observed trends in the income process produce these changes in the respective timings of marriage and fertility. First, the increase in income inequality produces incentives to delay marriage. Since single women tend to face higher income risk than do married women, all else being equal, a decline in marriages when young implies delayed births, which are perceived to be risky. Second, the decrease in income mobility also delays marriage as the insurance value of marriage decreases but accelerates fertility because it becomes less risky to have a child. The model qualitatively matches the observed changes in family formation and quantitatively accounts for a significant portion of the observed changes in marriage and fertility timing between the two NLSY cohorts. In Chapter 3 I aim to add to the indirect income uncertainty inference literature. The currently existing models used to infer earnings uncertainty from consumption decisions of individuals either use married couples as a unit of analysis or treat married individuals as singles. Income pooling and less than perfect correlation of earnings in marital unions provide spouses with marital income insurance. Not accounting for the marital insurance biases the uncertainty estimation results. In this chapter, I demonstrate some properties of the marital insurance bias in a stylized analytical model. In order to access the potential magnitude of the marital bias, I build a structural model which accounts for marital insurance. I then compare the estimation results of the model which accounts for marriage with the results of one that does not after using them on the simulated data set. In addition, I introduce a non-parametric income process in the structural model used for the indirect uncertainty inference. The main advantage of the resulting model is that, unlike the typical models in this area, it can be used on short-term panel data.

This thesis analyses the experiences, memories, and events of the World War II mass incarceration of Japanese Americans to determine what changes this traumatic event engendered in the gender roles of Issei and Nisei women. The events of incarceration separated families and broke down traditional societal norms leaving a deeply emotional and psychological scar upon the Japanese American community. Ironically, new opportunities arose for Issei and Nisei women as both a result of the effects of the mass incarceration upon the Japanese American community and because of governmental pressures such as labor shortages and the cost of housing over one hundred thousand prisoners. Issei women stepped into authority roles after the arrests of Japanese American community leaders and, in some cases, asserted their authority as mothers to stay in the United States against their husbands wishes. Nisei women were offered more opportunities in higher education and careers which allowed them to choose if they wanted to pursue an education or a career. These opportunities also allowed women more choices for marriage. While the decision of when to marry during the war years seems split between immediately before, during, and then in the years following the war, there is also a consistent pattern of women waiting to marry until after they had finished their education or worked for a few years. These patterns differ from both Issei and older Nisei women who often married early. World War II and mass incarceration is an extremely painful event that left deep wounds upon the Japanese American community, however it also gave Issei and Nisei women opportunities to choose what roles to fill and when.

In these six intertwining fictional short stories, one fateful decision ripples through the lives of multiple generations. Annie is an unmarried young mother during World War II when she leaves her young daughter in the care of a childless couple. When Annie fails to return for the child after days and then years, a new and fragile family is formed only to be tested by Annie's eventual return. The other stories in this collection follow the daughters and granddaughters who have to navigate their own lives in the shadow of this abandonment. Spanning multiple decades, Annie's decision remains a pivotal psychological scar imprinted in her descendants and those left to care for the child that she could not.

The ideology of motherhood in the United States makes it seem as though motherhood is a natural role for women. The ideology holds mothers solely responsible for the well being of their children. Combined with the ideology of blaming the victim, the ideology of motherhood causes a great deal of guilt in women as mothers cannot possibly live up to the unrealistic expectations set up in the culture. In this study, I have used two case studies to illustrate the impact of the ideology of motherhood on the lives of these particular women. Utilizing the theories of Michel Foucault and Antonio Gramsci, I will show how the ideology is constructed, internalized, and enforced in the United States.

Working mothers who are school leaders face challenges as they attempt to manage competing time demands and personal and professional responsibilities. A need exists for existing school leaders, as well as women aspiring to school leadership, to understand the coping strategies used by mothers who are also school principals. To that end, the purpose of this phenomenological study was to examine the experiences of mothers who are school principals. Strategies used to navigate multiple roles were examined through a role conflict lens. Three overarching research questions guided this study to focus on how female principals with children accommodate their dual roles as principal and mother, what feelings are generated by the experience of managing dual roles as principal and mother, and how female principals with children respond to the demands of their roles. A purposive sample of 6 principals who are working mothers participated in in-depth interviews. Each interview was recorded, transcribed verbatim, and coded to identify major themes and subthemes. The findings revealed that these mothers were impacted by the conflicting demands of motherhood and school leadership. Overwhelming responsibilities led to emotional pressures and lack of self-care for these women. This research makes an important contribution to the field of educational leadership by strengthening school leadership, facilitating a more sustainable female workforce, and increasing support for and dialogue among other women experiencing these phenomena. Current female school leaders may be compelled to serve as mentors, as the findings suggest that networking and support activities may help to combat feelings of isolation in the workplace and increase self-fulfillment.

I had dreamed of being a mother for some time. These dreams were complete with expectations of how and when I would give birth, and what motherhood would look and feel like. Now that I am a mother, I realize that my projected expectations in light of my true experience provide a conflicting story. While adjusting to reality has not always been easy, the experiences in unknown territory have brought beauty, joy, sadness, pride, and love in ways I never imagined. I believe that the only way to fully grasp the intensity of the experience of motherhood is to actually live through it. In this sense, the significance of documenting the motherhood experience is to capture the emotions and the reality of being a mother. I hope to put images to the continual conversation, conflict, and emotional battle that wages inside of me. I feel driven to document this experience not only to preserve these feelings for my own sake, but also to shed light on what I see as a misperception of motherhood. My experience with motherhood as subject matter for my artwork has led me to feel a sense of judgment; that to talk about motherhood in a fine art context is almost by nature taboo. I find this strange, as certainly we all have, or have had mothers. I hope to question this perceived negativity in the discussion of this relationship. I also desire to give those who share my feelings regarding motherhood a voice; to be confident in their experience, their love for their children, and to celebrate the common, yet extraordinary role of being a mother.