Maternal Love in Willa Cather’s Shadows on the Rock (1931)

Maternity is the primary obsession that haunts Cecile’s character in Willa Cather’s Shadows on the Rock (1931). Unable to decide what to go for, Cecile finds it impossible to leave without having Jacques, a person whom she has been taking care of and compensating him with the care he really needs. His mother could not provide him with the motherly love that Jacques needs as a little child like any other children of his age. Therefore, Cecile undertakes the maternal responsibility and provides him with the attention that he lacks from his mother. The relationship between Cecile and Jacques is a mother and child relationship. We understand this theme throughout the whole novel and through multiple examples and situations we encounter when reading the novel. It is a huge responsibility that Cecile takes and shoulders as she performs this difficult role into giving the maximum maternal care to a little child.

MOTHERHOOD IS THE IMMENSE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE MODERN ORIENTAL WOMAN

The article presents opinions on education, enlightenment, views on the history of our country, the family, maternal responsibility, as well as the involvement of society and the family in the education and training of girls. At the same time, an analysis of the results of the questionnaire conducted by the author on the topic of the article in the city of Andijan is provided, as well as conclusions and recommendations based on it

Introduction

The Introduction lays out the conceptual and epistemological terrain of the problems at hand: the idea of the moral project of childhood, the definition of moral architecture, and the notion of a pre-capitalist child. The main argument is that fundamental problems stemming from a growing acceptance of children’s moral, spiritual, intellectual, and behavioral pliability drive the assembly of a contemporary “moral architecture” of childhood from extensive maternal responsibility coupled with the increasingly hegemonic presence and existence of child subjecthood. It presents and justifies the methodological approach of examining women’s periodicals and summarizes the coming chapters.

The Moral Project of Childhood

The Moral Project of Childhood argues and demonstrates that fundamental problems stemming from a growing acceptance of children’s moral, spiritual, intellectual, and behavioral pliability drive the assembly of a contemporary “moral architecture” of childhood from extensive maternal responsibility coupled with the increasingly hegemonic presence and existence of child subjecthood. Drawing on materials published in periodicals intended for women and mothers from the 1830s to the 1930s, the book examines how mothers—and, later, commercial actors—found themselves compelled to consider children’s interiorities: their perspectives, needs, wants, pleasures, and pains. In this process, the child’s subjectivity progressively, albeit unevenly, arises as a form of authority in a variety of contexts, including discourses about Christian motherhood, the elements of cultural taste, and the discipline and punishment of children, as well as in machinations about play and toys, questions of children’s property rights, and the uses of money by and for children. The book considers the Protestant origins of the child consumer—a somewhat unlikely pairing—and makes visible and relevant the prefigurative elements and rhetorics from which the child consumer emerges as a contemporary, dominant, and normative ideal.

Interchangeable parents? The roles and identities of primary and equal carer fathers of young children

Against the context of enduring gender inequalities in early years parental care, this article examines the experiences of UK fathers who had taken on primary or equal care responsibility for children aged three or under. Informed by qualitative interviews with 24 such fathers, the article explores a discourse of parental interchangeability that pervaded their accounts before outlining the ways that, in practice, most caregiving tasks did tend to be allocated to them or their partners primarily on the basis of factors other than gender. The men’s comfort in presenting themselves and their partners as interchangeable equivalents, along with the range of caregiving approaches they were taking on, suggests that they had begun to move beyond clearly differentiated motherly or fatherly roles. The study goes on, however, to show that certain emotional, organisational and social aspects of parenting sometimes continued to be centred on mothers. In explaining the endurance of these areas of maternal responsibility within otherwise interchangeable partnerships, mutually reinforcing sets of maternal pressures and paternal barriers are outlined.