A Potent Spell: Mother Love and the Power of Fear [Audiobook] [Hardcover]

Janna Malamud Smith (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 16, 2003

Every parent has felt that certain dread: your toddler gets lost in the mall; your teenager isn’t home by curfew; your third-grader walks to school alone. The psychotherapist Janna Malamud Smith rigorously argues that fear of child loss has the keenest effect on mothers and has proven to be a powerfuly underrated motivation for them throughout history. Bearing the brunt of responsibility for keeping children safe and healthy, mothers constantly accommodate to the need to be vigilant. Their fears make them vulnerable in many ways, affecting their daily lives in the workplace, at home, and within the social hierarchy.
Smith takes the long view of this phenomenon, uncovering a buried message to mothers in advice books from the days of the Puritans to the present, in medicine and psychology, in art and literature. It is a history brimming with mothers’ stories from ancient times to today. Like Arlie Hochschild’s The Second Shift and Ann Crittenden’s The Price of Motherhood, A Potent Spell confirms women’s real experience of motherhood in America.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The "mother's fear of child loss" is universal, omnipotent and inescapable, Smith (Private Matters: In Defense of the Personal Life) argues; women's urge to protect their young is their bottom line, their most fundamental drive. This "maternal vulnerability" explains much about "women's unequal status" in society, as it makes it difficult for women-the majority of whom become mothers-to commit to the job world as men do. (Why men are not similarly afflicted goes largely unexplained.) Furthermore, Smith argues, throughout human history, "mother blaming" has been a key method of maintaining high levels of "maternal sacrifice." To support her argument, Smith calls on anecdotes from her own mothering experiences, as well as examples from various Greek classics, Puritan meditations on child loss and child-rearing advice manuals. While her choice of evidence is hardly systematic, it's the conclusions she draws from her hypothesis that are most problematic. She suggests more social support for "free mothers," such as flexible career paths and better day care, yet these measures might not make much difference if mother-love obsession is, as she believes, instinctive. The author means well, but pads her book with repeated assertions and doesn't fully explore the existential implications of mother-love obsession. Her pleas to stop guilt-tripping employed moms and her endorsement of more social responsibility for child-rearing will find favor with many feminist readers, but her overall argument is so muddled it will be hard to appeal to anyone.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Mothers' fear of losing their children through death, illness, degeneracy, delinquency, or denial of custody has heightened women's vulnerability and made them easier to constrain socially since time immemorial, according to Smith, a clinical psychotherapist. In this fascinating book, she eloquently explores how religion, psychology, literature, and advice books have admonished women to curb their aspirations in favor of protecting their children, and women have acquiesced out of fear. Smith investigates this theme in literature, history, art, and science, homing in on the iconographic image of Mary's suffering at her loss of her son, Jesus; Demeter's loss of her daughter, Persephone; Puritan tracts that suggested that a child's death was due to God's jealousy at the mother's devotion; and Czarina Alexandra's reliance on Rasputin to cure her hemophiliac son, Alexander, setting off events that led to the Russian Revolution. She also explores how advice-giving authority has moved from ministers to doctors and later to child psychologists with attendant changes in perspective on how children's welfare is tied to constraints on women. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1ST edition (January 16, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0618063498
• ISBN-13: 978-0618063499
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.8 x 5.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,076,807 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars If you are a mom, read this book. If you are not, do it too, January 16, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: A Potent Spell: Mother Love and the Power of Fear (Hardcover)

This book brings justice to an overseen truth about mothers: we are vulnerable. Since the moment we conceive, we are suddenly carrying this unbelievable responsibility that everyone else seems to find normal, although we know it is sometimes unbearable. The survival of a human being depends on us. Loosing a baby, seen our child die, the ultimate devastation. Janna Malamud Smith brings light into this topic, writes wonderfully well, and tells anectodes like the best storyteller. She is smart, intelligent, profoundly educated. It is a joy to read such a complete and profound book.

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent, December 29, 2011

By 

Gretchen Robinson "gentlewoman" (Attleboro, MA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Potent Spell (Paperback)

Why has it taken this long for this info. to get out?? Every mother knows these feelings. And most, I would say, have had to 'sell out' in order
to get their child/children raised. I commend the author on a brave, insightful, and powerful text. Read it and heed what it says. This is in the news
every day and as close as your children's and grandchildren's lives: the obsessive fears and often obsessive caregiving mothers are forced into.