Examines ways in which the representation of motherhood as national allegory has constricted women's social, economic, and political roles in different geographic and historical contexts. This title also shows how this cultural use of the mother-figure can provide alternative models of women's lives as mothers and non-mothers.

Section Two, Transforming Mothers, focuses on texts that both challenge national stereotypes and contest the roles of women in society. The essays in this chapter address problems raised in the first part of the book by questioning notions of chaste, authentic mothers and by attempting to create new, inclusive and multi-cultural versions of the national imaginary. The third section, Transgressing Mothers, presents concepts of "anti-mothering," embodied by "deviant" or "unnatural" mothers, to question the representation of mother as national allegory on the eve of and into the twenty-first century. In showing the relationship of particular women's situations to ongoing discourses of mother-as-nation, this collection is significant to contemporary women's lives, and thus to society as a whole.