Motherhood in Ireland, Creation and Context

In this book I bring together creative and critical writing on motherhood in Ireland in an attempt to understand its complexity. I am conscious that motherhood has been used as a symbol in Ireland in political, cultural and social life. In the course of editing this book I met many men and women who told me that they did not feel qualified to write about motherhood, and some expressed a fear of speaking on the subject. This they all agreed was because they had not experienced physiological motherhood. I found this very disturbing, as it seemed to imply that a whole section of the population had been silenced.