bahareads's Reviews (1.09k)

Birthing Black Mothers looks at Black mothers in the US and how they have become (spectacularly and dangerously) visible through the frame of crisis. Black women and mothers are seen as symbols. They have become a political category mobilized by the US left. Nash probes a moment where the conditions of the ordinary have been framed as a crisis and where Black motherhood has become a site of cultural interest, empathy, fascination, support and benign regulation by the political state and Black feminists. One of the things she does is advances the term "Black maternal politics" by looking at how Black Women have used motherhood as a platform for activism.

My favorite quote is "Crisis - the primary frame through which Black mothers and Black motherhood become visible - has affective, temporal, and aesthetic dimensions that collectively conjure up an image of black mothers occupying a nontime and non-place, one that is thought to be qualitatively different from the here and now of the contemporary United States."

Nash invests in naming, describing, and analyzing what she calls the feminist birth industry. > spotlighting the newfound place of Black motherhood in the construction of that industry and the centrality of Black feminists to that industry. Treating Black feminism and Black women as the vanguard of the institutional efforts, Nash unfolds to center the transformative and life-affirming work of doulas.

Nash does a few things in this book. She (1) explores a particular iteration of the crisis facing Black mothers and grapples with efforts to support, encourage and bolster Black breastfeeding by claiming that Black breast milk is Black gold; (2) Turns to the labour of women of colour doulas in Chicago tracing how they are increasingly positioned as on the front lines of the way to preserve Black life; (3) Turns to a trio of Black female celebrities who rewrite Black mother's relationships to crisis; (4) Turns to an archive of Black maternal memoirs, examining how contemporary Black maternal life writing both sits with and against crisis reframing the figure of the Black mother and her psychic and political capacities; and (5) Considers the place of Black mothers in the 3rd pandemic terms used by activist to describe the intersection of COVID 19, Black people by the police, and Black maternal morality.

Nash is very theoretical and this work has a LOT of theory in it. I enjoyed that, but it also takes to read, digest, and understand this book. It does make me think a lot of Black motherhood and everything that encompasses and draws from it.

review to come - I'm going to review this when I get back to Miami so I can talk about each of the stories more in-depth. Some of the stories were so GOOD and others did not resonate with me.

Milanich examines the linkage of two categories of social relations (usually considered separately) those of class and and family. This book is a history of children and family but it is also a history of social inequality and class. She's concerned with the evolution of legal regimes, state formation, and class relations. It is also a historical ethnography of children and filiation in Latin American society. She reconstructs a social world in which children are ubiquitous; Arguing that familial patterns emerge in, are sustained by and help reproduce the profound social hierarchies that have characterized Latin American societies historically.

I enjoyed the premise of this book. I didn't get to dive as deeply into it as I would have liked. Children and childhood are such under-read topics (for me) that this book really did pique my interest in the class. 

Francis-Sharma is too too much, I cried and screamed multiple times. Til the Well Runs Dry is like multiple books in one. All the TRAUMA in here is enough to trigger just about anyone. I was talking with my friend, and they told me they had to put the book down for TWO years. The narrative is woven together well though. Things that happened years earlier at tied together at the right now wayy in the future. There's a lot of love and heartbreak in this book.

Most of the characters were unlikable. I adored Marcia and Farouk in the beginning but by the end of the book, I couldn't stand them. The only one whose POV I constantly enjoyed was the middle daughter. Seeing from all the characters' POV did flesh out the whole story, and allow the age-old adage that not everyone views their parents/home life in the same way. Francis-Sharma has lighthearted points throughout the novel to help readers through the heavy issues.

The narrator for the audiobook was amazing. The accents and voice changes were phenomenal. I can still hear all the voices in my head when I think about 'Til the Well Runs Dry. I adored the historical setting. Francis-Sharma did a great job of setting it in a time when Trinidad and Tobago is still a British Colony. She showed the undercurrents of what politics is really like, and how much work goes into making a colony a country.

ALL of Lauren Francis-Sharma's books so far have been IT for me. She brings the right blend of beautiful writing, history, deep characters, and a great plot. So so immersive into each world she brings her readers too.

Jenny Luke focuses on the demise of midwifery as a Black and White issue. She believes that the inherent racism of the South created a unique environment that allowed a very particular style of maternity care to emerge. This book charts the shift from micro-level care to micro/macro blend to macro care. Luke believes the value of community-centred, culturally appropriate, holistic care would solve the needs of the modern day.

Honestly, this wasn't my favourite book. I feel like Luke could have done a lot more. She lacks Black midwifery primary sources in their voice and relies heavily on medical and nursing journals. She has so many chapters that are only a few pages long, I believe she is spreading herself too thin. If she had focused on only a few things she could have fleshed them out more. Luke does a great job of acknowledging that African-American midwives contributed to American society. I don't know if Luke adds much to the field with this work though. Other books have done the same.

I enjoyed this - it was a lighter read for me. Yet Kwan still deals with heavy topics. I enjoyed all the drama and romance issues. China Rich Girlfriend fulfilled me. It does not suffer from second-book syndrome.

Tiffany Sippial writes a gender history of Cuba's transition from a colony to a republic. While this book is promoted as Cuban history on the whole the focus is almost solely on Havana. The presence of 'public' women within 'honourable' neighbourhoods prompted varying levels of anxiety among public officials and local residents concerned with the potential impact of prostitution on the health and morality of the city and island as a whole. Colonial officials were forced to reimagine Havana's socio-spatial landscape by reformulating existing legislation to geographically segregate prostitutes within a designated zone. 

Sippial is recasting the "oldest profession" to show true differences; and accepts that the definition of prostitution is a permeable set of international and regional female labour, not a fixed occupation. She reads along the gram to seek to understand how state agendas of control and patterns of prostitute resistance and or compliance were mutually constituted and dialogic. She connects prostitution as a system of control and lived experience to four areas: space and sexual geographies; bodies and disease, agency and resistance; and national identity and state formation.

Sippial says "both urban geography and lives of urban inhabitants are shaped by the constant tension between state efforts to define, contain, and control urban areas and people's determination to move unfettered across those imposed boundaries."Negotiations over the form and function of Cuba's regulatory mechanism shaped and were shaped by broader discourses about citizenship, state power, and Cuba as a nation. Prostitutes resisted state fixity to avoid limits and exactions.

I enjoyed this book a lot. It reminded me of another book I've read about Cuba that talks about prostitution and sexuality. Using prostitution to look at state formation is a fascinating technique. Some people in my class weren't convinced fully by the argument. Prostitution policy was produced and reproduced, reinforced and revised, debated and defended according to complex interactions between international, national, and local actors and their agendas.

Darlene Clark Hine is looking at the rise of Black professional Nursing and the development of institutional infrastructure of Black nursing. The central unifying focus of this book is the efforts of Afro-American healthcare professionals to assemble an institutional and organisational arsenal with which to combat racism inside the healthcare establishment. Clark Hine writes about the history of Black women nurses to probe questions of the relationship between class and race. She seeks to explain precisely how they acquired agency, and the power and resources to bring down the wall of racial exclusion, segregation, and discrimination.

Clark Hine's book is a study of the successes and failures of Black nurses from the 1890s-1950. She says that the history of Black nursing is a microcosm of the history of Afro-Americans. It is a "complex, and often contradictory, history of conflict and cooperation." Clark Hine says nurses were supposed to deal with the patient as part of the broader social system. It was to embrace the entire community. The dependence was mutual.

This book is very very old. Clark Hine's narrative is very dry. In tracing institutions there were just so many organizations, names, and dates that it made it a tad boring. This book is so important to the foundation of this type of history, but I longed for something more readable. I did really enjoy seeing how Black nurses did not let institutional obstacles stop them. They made their own organizations when White orgs like the AMA excluded them.

The development of black nursing training in the North was inseparable from the fortunes of hospitals and the development of political disputes between doctors and admin overseers. Nursing training in the South was offered at only FEW black hospitals. This should be unsurprising but the most vexing medical problem in the Black community is the high Black infant and maternal mortality rate (and it's still so so stink now).

Nurses had to home a dual consciousness of themselves as Black professionals. Within Black orgs Black nurses got agency and became forces of social change Read this book if you want to see the plight of what Black nurses had to go through, and how they helped pave the way.

Charissa Threat chronicles the experiences of African American female and white male nurses revealing a different type of civil rights story. Their respective campaigns suggest that the civil rights struggles of the 20th century did not always follow a smooth arc towards social justice. By looking at both groups, Threat is highlighting them in a profession that regulated them to the margins. Gender is used to refer to the social construction ideals that define roles/behaviours and obligations of individuals based on biological sex differences. This includes the normative understanding of womanhood and manhood in the United States at that time.

This book arises from the premise that nursing, an occupation traditionally sex- and race-typed white and female, provides a place to examine how gender identities and racial ideologies are contested in mid-twentieth century American society. It links the story of the Army Nurse Corps to critical events in the United States between WW2 and the Vietnam War. Threat reveals how agents of change became defenders of exclusionary practices when the opportunities were extended to men.

I truly enjoyed this book. It was so interesting (and a bit weird) to see White men framed as a struggling minority. Seeing how gender norms really really played a role in nursing does make me wonder about Black male nurses. Threat says that the history of Black male nursing is difficult to trace and there are little to no references of Black male nurses. By looking at nursing in a military role, Threat shifts the focal point to allow readers to see male nurse suffrage. It is fascinating to be in the modern day now looking back. In my mind, we still portray nursing as a more feminine job.

Threat offers insight into how integration campaigns and the history of the ANC over a 30 period help scholars understand a more inclusive civil rights story and the evolution of nursing into a modern profession. "The Civilian nursing profession mirrored attempts to redefine race and gender roles during and after wartime."

Diana Paton uses an analysis of imperial-level decisions and Jamaica-specificities within a framework that emphasizes comparisons and connections between and among development in Jamaica and elsewhere. Paton uses Jamaica as a case study. She says Jamaica is unique because of its influence in and out of the British empire. The time period for the book focuses on the late 18th century beginning with the amelioration period of slavery which coincides with the first wave of major prison building ending with the second post-emancipation reconstruction of the Jamaican state.

Paton’s central point is to show the evolving shape of the penal practice in Jamaica, and how it was a circulation of trans-Atlantic intellectual ideas, the political world, and the intricate societal, economic, and political struggles that took place among the enslaved, freed people, planters, and representatives of the imperial state. Gender is one of the central categories of analysis. Paton’s work is a cultural, social, and political history with legal material as the base for her primary sources.

She shows that the relationship between wages, prisons, and whips was complex. By focusing on punishment in the transition from slavery to emancipation, Paton says she forces scholars to distinguish between the ruling classes' attempts of domination and those that actually worked. She moves away from the sharp dichotomy between slavery and post-slave societies to show that there was a long and intimate relationship between state formation and private punishment.

Previously historians have examined slavery or emancipation but not both. Her method of examining pre and post-emancipation society allows readers to see the continuation of whipping being carried out by the state authority, slavery depending on prisons and slaveholders' direct use of imprisonment. Many of her examples throughout the book use female voices, which is a part of her main contribution, showing gender differences. No Bond but Law is a bit dense but a very enjoyable read. It provides a lot for readers to think about and meditate on. I highly recommend it.