Becoming a mother is filled with the extremes of emotion --the highest highs and the lowest lows. But women are often reluctant to talk honestly about the experience for fear they'll be seen as bad mothers. With wit and candor, The Mask of Motherhood takes on the myths and the misinformation, helping women to prepare and deal with the depth of feeling that comes with the experience and perhaps most important, it lets them know that many, if not most, new mothers are feeling the same way.Susan Maushart, sociologist and mother of three, explores how motherhood affects our marriages and friendships, our relationships with parents, our sex lives, and our self-esteem. In The Mask of Motherhood, mothers will find the comfort and reassurance they are looking for, and confirmation that, indeed, motherhood is the toughest job in the world, but can also be the most rewarding.

The Mask of Motherhood: How Becoming a Mother Changes Our Lives and Why We Never Talk About It

Politics & Social Sciences

Maushart, Susan

Sociology

Penguin Publishing Group

'Men get one thing from marriage that women never do. They get wives.' Husbands and wives may say they are committed to equality. Yet, whether employed or not, wives still perform an astounding share of the physical, emotional and organisational labour in marriage - everything from housework to 'sex work'. 'Wifework' is shorthand for this relentless routine of husband maintenance. Women today initiate three-quarters of all divorces. Wifework, Maushart argues, lies at the core of their disillusionment. If family life is worth saving, wifework will have to go. And that means rewriting the job description to make marriage more equitable, less exhausting and more fun for women. In this compulsively readable book, Susan Maushart documents the wifework dilemma and explores its consequences for all the stakeholders: men, women and children alike. "Wifework" is funny, lucid, provocative and inspirational.

Wifework

Social Sciences

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

THE MASK OF MOTHERHOOD How Becoming a Mother Changes Everything and why We Pretend it Doesn't

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Psychology & Counseling

The New Press

Erma Bombeck meets Naomi Wolf -- a funny, articulate, right-on-the-money look at being a new mother in the '90s.

The Mask of Motherhood: How Becoming a Mother Changes Everything and Why We Pretend It Doesn't

Parenting & Relationships

Family Relationships

New Press, The

Men get one thing from marriage that women never do: they get wives.
Husbands and wives may say they are committed to equality, and indeed, many believe that they live that way. Yet, whether they are employed or not, wives still perform an astounding share of the physical, emotional, and organizational labor in marriage-everything from housework to 'sex work'. 'Wifework' is shorthand for this relentless routine of husband maintenance, and it's the reason that a married man is so much better off than a bachelor. He does fewer chores, is happier, healthier and generally more satisfied. A married woman, by contrast, will perform two to three times more unpaid physical, emotional, and organizational labor than her husband-and for a fraction of the rewards. Women today initiate three-quarters of all divorces, and wifework, Maushart argues, is at the core of their disillusionment. If family life is worth saving, the job description for wives will have to be rewritten.
Bolstering her own personal experience as a twice-married mother of three with substantial research and broad statistical evidence, Maushart delves into history to explore the theoretical and evolutionary reasons behind marital inequity. Her arguments are passionate, but she keeps her sense of humor intact throughout, producing a work that is lucid, provocative, and resonant.

Wifework: What Marriage Really Means for Women

Self-Help

Relationships

Bloomsbury USA

Wifework is a fiercely argued, in-depth look at the inequitable division of labor between husbands and wives. Bolstering her own personal experience as a twice-married mother of three with substantial research and broad statistical evidence, Susan Maushart explores the theoretical and evolutionary reasons behind marriage inequality. She forces us to consider why 50 per cent of marriages end in divorce, and why women are responsible for initiating three-quarters of them. If family life is worth saving, and Maushart passionately believes it is, the job description for wives will have to be rewritten. 
Susan Maushart was born in New York and has lived in Australia since 1985. Her first book, Sort of a Place Like Home, won a Festival Award for Literature at the Adelaide Festival in 1994, and her second, The Mask of Motherhood, was published to international acclaim. She is a senior research associate at Curtin University, a columnist for the Australian Magazine and lives in Perth with her three children. 'An often funny dissection of modern marriage...100 percent honest. [A] smart and witty book.' -Publishers Weekly 'With good-humored aplomb, Maushart makes clear she doesn't think marriage or men are "rotten", but that "the way we typically divide up the business-and the pleasure, too-of our adult relationships is inefficient, maladaptive, and unfair.'-Bookpage 'Maushart assembles an overwhelming amount of data documenting how marriage has perpetuated inequities between husband and wife.'-Christian Science Monitor Daily 'Susan Maushart's heartfelt and incendiary Wifework is a brief against traditional marriage that took me back to the galvanizing effect of reading Friedan.' -Salon.com 'A wake-up call for women feeling trapped by marriage.'-Booklist

The wise and hilarious story of a family who discovered that having fewer tools to communicate with led them to actually communicate more. When Susan Maushart first announced her intention to pull the plug on her family's entire armory of electronic weaponry for six months-from the itsy-bitsiest iPod Shuffle to her son's seriously souped-up gaming PC-her three kids didn't blink an eye. Says Maushart: "Looking back, I can understand why. They didn't hear me." For any parent who's ever IM-ed their child to the dinner table, this account of one family's self-imposed exile from the Information Age will leave you LOLing with recognition. But it will also make you think. The Winter of Our Disconnect challenges readers to examine the toll that technology is taking on their own family connections, and to create a media ecology that instead encourages kids-and parents-to thrive. Indeed, as a self-confessed single mom who "slept with her iPhone," Maushart knew her family's exile from Cyburbia wasn't going to be any easier for her than for her three teenagers, ages fourteen, fifteen, and eighteen. Yet they all soon discovered that the rewards of becoming "unplugged" were more rich and varied than any cyber reality could ever be.

The Winter of Our Disconnect: How Three Totally Wired Teenagers (and a Mother Who Slept with Her iPhone)Pulled the Plug on Their Technology and Lived to Tell the Tale

Motivational

TarcherPerigee

In my twenties, I thought sex and career would solve everything. At thirty, I thought marriage would. Later I tried motherhood, therapy, and then divorce. At forty, I decided to renovate.
With all the choices available to today's women, why don't they more feel fulfilled? What Women Want Next is Susan Maushart's meditation―by turns profound and laugh-out-loud funny―on that central dilemma of postfeminist life. At one point she had it all, so why wasn't she happy? With What Women Want Next, Maushart combines research with personal history in a dynamic attempt to answer this question. 
Feminism may have led women to life's banquet table, but the meal they make of it is up to them. How to balance life and work, sex and sleep, child care and self-care? And why has women's guilt―that glass ceiling of the soul―become the biggest barrier they face? What Women Want Next is the first book to look at the spectrum of a woman's life and attempt to demonstrate how she can shape her own destiny throughout all its stages.

What Women Want Next

Women's Studies

Winter of Our Disconnect : How One Family Pulled the Plug and Lived to Tell/Text/Tweet the Tale

Bantam]

Packed with childhood adventures that are sometimes hilarious, sometimes terrible, this nostagic memoir begins with ABC broadcaster and former Federal MP Eoin Cameron's birth on the slopes of the volcanic crater of Mount Gambier. From riding on the lino polisher to homemade rocket launches, this hilarious and engaging account documents the author's experiences growing up in a constantly expanding Catholic family during the 1950s and 1960s in Australia.

Sort of a place like home: Remembering the Moore River Native Settlement

History

Australia & Oceania

Fremantle Arts Centre Press

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Books by Maushart, Susan