While the image or construct of the “good mother” has been the focus of many research projects, the “bad mother,” as a discursive construct, and also mothers who do “bad” things as complicated, agentic social actors, have been quite neglected, despite the prevalence of the image of the bad mother across late modern societies. The few researchers who address this powerful social image point out that bad mothers are culturally identified by what they do, yet they are also socially recognized by who they are. Mothers become potentially bad when they behave or express opinions that diverge from, or challenge, social or gender norms, or when they deviate from mainstream, white, middle class, heterosexual, nondisabled normativity.

When suspected of being bad mothers, women are surveilled, and may be disciplined, punished or otherwise excluded, by various official agents (i.e. legal, medical and welfare institutions), as well as by their relatives, friends and communities. Too often, women are judged and punished without clear evidence that they are neglecting or abusing their children. Frequently they are blamed for the marginal sociocultural context in which they are mothering. This anthology presents empirical, theoretical and creative works that address the construct of the bad mother and the lived realities of mothers labeled as bad. Throughout the volume, the editors consider voices and acts of resistance to bad mother constructions, demonstrating that mothers, across time and across domains, have individually and collectively taken a stand against this destructive label.

Dr. Michelle Hughes Miller is an Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of South Florida. She earned her M.A. and PhD in Sociology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln while raising two wonderful children with her husband, Rob Benford. As a feminist criminologist she researches motherhood within legal and policy constraints. In addition to publishing on criminalized and allegedly “bad” mothers, she is co-editor of Addressing and Preventing Violence Against Women on College Campuses (Temple University Press, forthcoming) and Alliances for Advancing Academic Women: Guidelines for Collaborating in STEM (Sense Publishers, 2014). She is currently analyzing discourses of mothering in global economic and social campaigns, along with very much enjoying being a new grandma.

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Dr. Tamar Hager is a Senior Lecturer in the Departments of Education and Gender Studies at Tel Hai College, Israel. Motherhood, critical feminist methodology, art sociology and fictional and academic writing, multiculturalism and critical pedagogy are core issues of her academic research, writing, teaching and social activism. She is the founder and the former co-director of the college’s center for Peace and Democracy, whose mandate is to academically and administratively develop and implement the multicultural vision of the college. She published in 2000 a book of short stories A perfectly Ordinary Life (in Hebrew) and in 2012 Malice Aforethought (in Hebrew), in which she attempts to reconstruct the elusive biographies of two English working class mothers who killed their babies at the end of the 19th century.

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Rebecca Jaremko Bromwich has a B.A. (Hon.) in social/ cultural anthropology from the University of Calgary, an LL.B. and an LL.M. from Queen’s and a Graduate Certificate in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies from the University of Cincinnati. This book is adapted from her Ph.D. dissertation, which she completed at Carleton University, in the Department of Legal Studies. In her Ph.D. research, Rebecca is working towards an understanding of what insights from the field of critical studies and cultural theory of girls studies can bring to law and legal studies.Called to the Bar of Ontario in 2003, Rebecca works as a lawyer, and has previously researched and published in a variety of areas, including youth criminal justice law, law practice management and equality issues relating to women and members of other historically marginalized groups in the legal profession as well as contributing as author and co-editor to several Demeter Press anthologies. She is a Contract Instructor at Carleton’s Department of Law and Legal Studies, a PartTime Professor at the University of Ottawa Faculty of Law, and a staff lawyer, legislation and law reform with the Canadian Bar Association. All views expressed in this book are hers alone and do not reflect the views of any organization with which she is or has ever been affiliated.

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