Professor Examines Motherhood in Italy
February 7, 2008
In her new book, The Tigress in the Snow: Motherhood and Literature in Twentieth-Century Italy, Georgetown University professor Laura Benedetti explores how literature was influenced by and helped to shape notions of motherhood in twentieth-century Italy.
“From the turn-of-the-century rhetorical celebration of the mother as Madonna (a celebration that often ignored the very real lives of mothers working in factories and rice fields) to the Fascist regime’s demographic campaign and the feminist revisions of the maternal role, the institution of motherhood has been the site of constant negotiation,” writes Benedetti.
