Showing results for "A Mother" in Anthropology

Somewhere in Africa, more than a million years ago, a line of apes began to rear their young differently than their Great Ape ancestors. From this new form of care came new ways of engaging and understanding each other. How such singular human capacities evolved, and how they have kept us alive for thousands of generations, is the mystery revealed in this bold and wide-ranging new vision of human emotional evolution. Mothers and Others finds the key in the primatologically unique length of human childhood.

Before temples and official rituals, there were places people avoided after sunset. In the hills of ancient Anatolia, long before Rome ruled the Mediterranean, villagers gathered around stones they believed were alive. They were not there to recite prayers. They came because something unsettled them, and gathering together made it bearable. Drums carried across the valleys. Some people swayed, some watched, some stayed at the edge. A presence was felt before anyone gave it a name. Later it would be called Cybele. This book follows the Great Mother through the lives of ordinary people.

C. J. Schneider found herself in the middle of a perfect storm after giving birth to her third child and moving to a new neighborhood. Conditions for misery and postpartum depression were ideal: She was isolated, lonely, and exhausted with three young children at home. As she started talking with other mothers, she realized that she was not alone in her experience of feeling alone. In her unique voice, Schneider intelligently and compassionately offers practical advice on how to create the essential community that mothers need.

With the increasing demand for midwives among U.S. women, reproductive rights activists are lobbying to loosen restrictions that deny legal access to homebirth options. In Pushing for Midwives, Christa Craven presents a nuanced history of women's reproductive rights activism in the U.S. She also provides an examination of contemporary organizing strategies for reproductive rights in an era increasingly driven by "consumer rights".