Bonnie Fox

From culture to power : the sociology of English Canada

There have been many dramatic changes in English Canadian sociology since the 1960s. 25 years ago the cultural values of Canadians were believed to be largely responsible for patterns of economic development, politics, and inequality. In the late 1980s these same features of social life are typically explained in terms of the way power is distributed in Canada. Brym and Fox attribute this change to the growing influence of various currents of Marxism and feminism in Canadian sociology. In this book they analyze the Marxist critique of conventional sociology in the 1970s and the feminist critique of Marxist sociology in the 1980s. In addition they document the findings of more than two decades of increasingly careful and sophisticated social resarch in Canada.

Embodied Motherhood Women’s Feelings about Their Postpartum Bodies

Based on in-depth interviews, this article examines a sample of 48 Canadian women’s feelings about their changed postpartum bodies, their sense of self, and the factors that affect both. Our findings suggest that understanding women’s postpartum feelings requires contextualizing them in the work of infant care and women’s life circumstances, as well as ideologies about mothering and feminine appearance. Motherhood afforded the women in this study a new appreciation of their bodies, and a positive embodied sense of themselves, but only if they felt their bodies performed maternal functions well. Concerns about appearance persisted and became especially salient when women faced the return to paid work. Moreover, varied life circumstances influenced women’s overall feelings about their changed bodies as insecurities were displaced onto women’s body images.

Family Shifts: Families, Policies, and Gender Equality

1: From the Patriarchial Model to the Individual Responsibility Model of the Family. 2: Social, Economic, and Legal Trends Affecting Families. 3: The Blurring of Spousal Roles. 4: Uncertain Parental Roles. 5: Internal Contradictions - Why the Individual Responsibility Model Cannot Work. 6: From Refurbishing the Past to Abolishing the Family - Three Proposed Solutions. 7: The Social Responsibility Model of the Family. 8: Practical Applications of the Social Responsibility Model

Book Review: Delivering Motherhood: Maternal Ideologies and Practices in the 19th and 20th Centuries, edited by Katherine Arnup, Andree Levesque and Ruth Roach Pierson. New York: Routledge, 1990

early twentieth centuries, aspects of mothering were medicalized, creating a pattern many women now experience as problematic. Specifically, childbirth came under medical control, and successful contraception and purportedly even successful mothering came to depend on medical expertise. The dominant feminist interpretation of this transformation formulated most fully by Ann Oakley is that it meant control shifted

Book Review: The Politics of Motherhood: The Politics of Motherhood, by Jane Lewis. London: Croom Helm, 1980

The data suggest that we may need to talk about the mutual economic interdependence of two parent families rather than the economic dependence of the housewife. Although married women may find it difficult to live without the wage of their spouses since wage differentials between male and female workers show few signs of disappearing, the evidence reveals that women are playing more of an economic role outside the home and that it is increas-

Book Review: Never Done: A History of American Housework, by Susan Strasser. New York: Pantheon Books, 1982

Our grandmothers’ (and greatgrandmothers’) nostalgia about family life in the &dquo;the Good Old Days&dquo; was both silly and sensible, according to Susan Strasser’s excellent history of housework. It was silly for forgetting the back-breaking drudgery that tasks such as doing laundry involved, but sensible in its memory of an era when family members sat down together every night for dinner and when Dad and the kids were at least