Mother, madonna, whore : the idealization and denigration of motherhood

Orig. pub.: London, Free Association Books, c1988.. Foreword and preface c1992 by Estela V. Welldon.

1 Female sexual perversion. 2 Sexuality and the female body. 3 The power of the womb. 4 Motherhood as a perversion. 5 Mothers who commit incest: the surrogacy of the child. 6 The symboliic mother as a whore: whose control is it anyway?. 7 Substitute motherhood: the whore as an incest survivor: whose responsibiliity is it anyway?

'Motherhood confers immense powers, which some women misuse because of their own emotional problems and the social expectations placed upon them. In these unfortunate cases, mothers may batter, commit incent, or prevent their children from understanding or accepting their core gender-identity....mothers often see their children as extensions of themselves, and this type of mistreatment is a form of self-inflicted wound....[The book] poses new questions about the nature and origins of female perversion....challenges the tradition of seeing women's sexual development as parallel to men's....'

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