Introduction: Popular Culture’s Maternal Embrace

[para. 1]: "Mothers are indeed everywhere, as Julie Tharp and Susan MacCallum-Whitcomb affirm in This Giving Birth: Pregnancy and Childbirth in American Women’s Writings. In a related spirit, Chatelaine editor Sara Angel explains the rationale for the magazine’s “first-ever Motherhood Issue” in May 2013: “At no point in history has being a mother, a daughter – or both – been as complicated as it is now. We are working to maintain relationships, careers, homes and aging parents. Playgrounds have become political forums for battles in competitive parenting. Bookstore shelves overflow with manuals on how to do right by your child, and the mommy memoir is its own literary genre. Meanwhile, as the age of first-time mothers climbs higher than ever before, the topic of getting pregnant is a media obsession.” The topic of motherhood in general is “a media obsession,” as Judith Timson explains in the Globe and Mail on 10 April 2005: “We have guided tours of every nook and cranny of modern motherhood and every possible blogging subset of moms: political moms, eco moms, lazy moms, shopping moms, sexually frustrated moms, angry moms, moms who confess that their kids bore them, moms who say it’s necessary to stay home, moms who argue we should all be working.” Timson concludes that “we’ve become, as one blog has it, ‘mothered up beyond all recognition.’”"