While the existence of maternal ambivalence has been evident for centuries, it has only recently been recognized as central to the lived experience of mothering. This accessible, yet intellectually rigorous, interdisciplinary collection demonstrates its presence and meaning in relation to numerous topics such as pregnancy, birth, Caesarean sections, sleep, self-estrangement, helicopter parenting, poverty, environmental degradation, depression, anxiety, queer mothering, disability, neglect, filicide and war rape. Its authors deny the assumption that mothers who experience ambivalence are bad, evil, unnatural, or insane. Moreover, historical records and cross-cultural narratives indicate that maternal ambivalence appears in a wide range of circumstances; but that it becomes unmanageable in circumstances of inequity, deprivation and violence. From this premise, the authors in this collection raise imperative ethical, social, and political questions, suggesting possibilities for vital cultural transformations. These candid explorations demand we rethink our basic assumptions about how mothering is experienced in everyday life.

Sarah LaChance Adams is associate professor of philosophy at University of Wisconsin Superior. She is author of Mad Mothers, Bad Mothers, and What a “Good” Mother Would Do: The Ethics of Ambivalence. She is co-editor of Coming to Life: Philosophies of Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Mothering; and New Philosophies of Sex and Love: Thinking through Desire. She lives with her family in Duluth, Minnesota.

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Tanya Cassidy is a Fulbright-HRB (Irish Health Research Board) Health Impact scholar, an EU Horizon 2020 Marie Skłodowska Curie Award (MSCA) fellow, a Cochrane Fellow and a Visiting Fellow at the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan). Recently she took up a lectureship in the School of Nursing and Health Sciences at Dublin City University (DCU).

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Susan Hogan is Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Derby and a Professorial Fellow of the Institute of Mental Health of the University of Nottingham. She has written extensively on women’s transition to motherhood and experience of psychiatry. Her most recent funded research is The Birth Project (AHRC grant ref. AH/K003364/1).

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