Morning Plenary

Guest Speaker

Andrea O’Reilly, PhD, Professor, School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, York University, founder and director of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement

TOPIC: “When my kids were young…” The Changing Role of Motherhood in the 20th and 21st Centuries

Andrea O’Reilly will explore how and why the image and role of ‘good’ motherhood has changed over the last eighty years in North America. Beginning with a discussion of the celebration of the working mother during WW II, to the glorification of the full time stay home mother in the 1950s and 60s and finally to the idealization of intensive mothering and helicopter parenting in the 1990s to contemporary times, Andrea will discuss how meanings and practices of good mothering are culturally reproduced as a result of, and in response to social and economic change.

Read more… and register