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By Allison Berg. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002. 186 pp. $35.00.
As Elaine Tuttle Hansen notes in Mother Without Child (1997), "the story of feminists thinking about motherhood since the early 1960s is told as a drama in three acts: repudiation, recuperation, and, in the latest and most difficult stage to conceptualize, an emerging critique of recuperation that coexists with ongoing efforts to deploy recuperative strategies" (5). Following "second act" works like Adrienne Rich's Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976) and Alice Walker's In Search of Our Mother's Gardens (1983), literary critics began applying psychoanalytic, semiotic, and cultural-historicist approaches to maternal representations in an effort to reconceptualize both the power and paralysis of motherhood.
Building in particular on works by Hazel Carby, Eva Cherniavsky, Laura Doyle, and Stephanie Smith, Allison Berg offers a historically and geographically specific, "third act" analysis of the intertwining narratives of race and maternity in Mothering the Race: Women's Narratives of Reproduction, 1890-1930. Eschewing a formalist or psychoanalytic approach, Berg focuses on the American social and political contexts for constructions of maternity in native white women's and African American women's fiction of the so-called Progressive Era. In doing so, she provides a valuable exploration of how and...