ABSTRACT
This chapter examines English-language life narrative written by those who are positioned in the social location of “mother” and whose writing reflects their engagement with the work of mothering. Because the history of both motherhood memoirs and those who would write about their experience as mothers is marked by exclusion and oppression, many scholars define maternal autobiography broadly. Motherhood memoirs in their current form began to be published in the twentieth century, and the subgenre expanded significantly in the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Feminist scholarship on the form has frequently explored topics related to the workings of narrative and the formation of maternal subjectivity. Debates center on whether the form remains complicit with, or critical of, heteronormative gender formation; why the majority of its authors reflect privileged identities, and to what extent this is changing; and how maternal autobiographical subjects are produced through the act of writing about mothering. Motherhood memoirs continue to change, providing a valuable window onto the shifting landscapes of contemporary parenting and family life and inviting us to imagine new possibilities and ways of forming family and raising the next generation.
