Course | Columbia Law School

This course will explore the shifting and contested meanings of motherhood as individual experience and in its institutional context at different historical moments and in contemporary United States. The materials focus on the complex relationships between motherhood and such topics as work, citizenship, sexuality, poverty, reproductive technologies and the fetus itself. We will also look at categories of mothers (birth mothers, grandmothers, immigrant mothers, unwed mothers, welfare mothers, slave mothers, to name a few). Materials will be drawn from historical sources, legal texts and selected fictional works.