Description
‘A book of striking honesty. Naomi Wolf writes vividly about the deception and betrayal to which women are exposed in pregnancy and childbirth, and the abuse that comes from a society that is hostile to mothers and babies.’ Sheila Kitzinger
In this powerfully honest book Naomi Wolf puts ‘the birth myth’ under the same scrutiny as she once famously put ‘the beauty myth’. Here she uses the personal to explore with ferocity and passion the culture and practices of pregnancy and childbirth in the modern age.
Wolf also takes a critical look at the powerful vested interests in the pregnancy ‘business’ and at the social message coming at women: an amalgam of sentimentality, psychologically dangerous half-truths and conflicting ideologies. She discusses with devastating honesty the details of her own two pregnancies and those of other women, from the physical and emotional effects of having your body taken over, through the elation and the fear, to the choice of delivery method – where mother-friendly childbirth is often in conflict with hospital-friendly practice – and the shock of the postnatal experience.
Part memoir, part contemporary analysis, Misconceptions is a moving, provocative and unusually candid account of pregnancy and childbirth which for the first time tells the truth about women’s conflicting emotions and society’s ambivalent attitudes to women’s experience.
Softcover. 282 pages.
In very good preloved condition, minor marks.