Reproducing Women
Family and Health Work across Three Generations
How do women experience reproductive health? How is knowledge about health issues transmitted from one generation to the next? Utilizing sociological and feminist lenses, Reproducing Women argues that women experience reproductive health as a part of their entire life story, rather than as discrete medical “problems.” Drawing together stories and interviews with three generations of women across twenty-four families, this book examines women’s experience of their “reproductive lives” in order to uncover how women’s experience is rooted in the family and among generational relationships: between mother, daughter, grandmother and granddaughter. By placing women’s biological and embodied experiences, including issues such as menarche, contraception, sexual intercourse, childbirth and menopause, in a social and cultural context, women’s broader roles in ‘social reproduction’ are revealed.
About the book
How do women experience reproductive health? How is knowledge about health issues transmitted from one generation to the next? Utilizing sociological and feminist lenses, Reproducing Women argues that women experience reproductive health as a part of their entire life story, rather than as discrete medical “problems.” Drawing together stories and interviews with three generations of women across twenty-four families, this book examines women’s experience of their “reproductive lives” in order to uncover how women’s experience is rooted in the family and among generational relationships: between mother, daughter, grandmother and granddaughter. By placing women’s biological and embodied experiences, including issues such as menarche, contraception, sexual intercourse, childbirth and menopause, in a social and cultural context, women’s broader roles in ‘social reproduction’ are revealed.
Contents
- Women’s Reproductive Lives
- Relationships: Mothers, Daughters and Granddaughters in Two Families
- Becoming a Woman: Learning about Menarche and Sex
- Becoming a Mother: Conception, Pregnancy and Birthing
- Being a Mother: Motherwork, Identity Work and Reproducing the Family
- The Moment of Menopause: Change and Transition in Women’s Reproductive Lives
- Grandmothering and the Long Moment of Aging
- Experience and the Reproductive Lives of Women
- References
