‘Which June?’ What Baby?: The Continued Invisibility of Maternity in Academia

• Author(s) / Creator(s)

  • Beard, Laura J.

• Introduction: I can trade an interest in mothers and daughters throughout my academic career, from my undergraduate thesis as an English major on the development of the maternal role in the novels of Jane Austen to a later dissertation proposal on mothers and daughters in the novels of contemporary Latin American, African American, and Native American women writers. (Immediately after the proposal defense, I jettisoned that dissertation as too broad and wrote on another, more focused topic). As a professor, I presented papers on female sexuality from adolescence to maternity, citing such texts as Marianne Hirsch's The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism, E. Ann Kaplan's Motherhood and Representation: The Mother in Popular Culture and Melodrama, Nancy Chodorov's The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender, or The (M)other Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation, edited by Shirley Nelson Garner, Claire Kahane, and Madelon Sprengnether. I wrote on all of these topics as a feminist scholar and as a daughter, but not as a mother. Then, after tenure, I got pregnant.

• Date created

  2012-01-01

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Maternity
  • Motherhood
  • Academia
  • Feminism

• Type of Item

  Chapter

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/R3DN40B04

• License

  © 2012 L. J. Beard. This version of this article is open access and can be downloaded and shared. The original author(s) and source must be cited.