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We live in outrageous times when intellectuals are called upon to speak truth to power. Jacqueline Rose has consistently stepped forward to speak and write as a brilliant reader of psychoanalysis and a concerned citizen of the world. She has written more than a dozen books, and spoken in public and academic forums about feminism, gender and sexuality, refugees, the question of Israel and Palestine, children's literature, and has been published in the London Review of Books, the Guardian, among others. Psychoanalysis gives to her writing a kind of plumb line that reaches from the quotidian to the individual psyche, advancing a psychoanalytic tradition that began with Freud's cultural writings, one that she picks up and rescues from the dustbin of second wave feminism where psychoanalysis languished, fairly or unfairly, as an artifact of patriarchal misogyny. In this intelligent and readable volume Rose enriches both psychoanalytic thinking and the argument for political and social action on behalf of mothers.
Rose considers motherhood as a special circumstance of womanhood, one that, in the Western world at least, has a history of drawing to itself the most contradictory and ambivalent of attitudes and projections. Beginning her argument by drawing on our present moment, Now, and the Then of Greek drama, Rose examines the ways in which mothers have been the particular targets of social punishment, expected to bear and nurture children only to give them over to the state to fight wars and die; to be written out of the social contract of patriarchal societies, while bearing full responsibility for perpetuating it. In our own world, refugee mothers and their children are denied asylum and protection, are separated violently from each other; at the same time, motherhood is policed by the state and placed under continual cultural surveillance, taken out of the control of mothers in punitive restrictions against abortion, but also in the disappearing social supports for mot