Physical activity and the pressures of ‘good’ motherhood: navigating changing bodies, other mothers and role modelling for the active family

Leisure Studies · 2024 · 3 citations

• Sociology
• Developmental psychology
• Psychology

In a context of complex and contradictory discourses of 'good' motherhood, women are often expected to quickly resume or take up a physically active lifestyle postpartum for both their own health and that of their children. Guided by post-structuralist feminism and drawing upon interviews with 12 mothers with young children living in Aotearoa New Zealand, we reveal the various ways mothers navigate social pressures and expectations surrounding 'good' motherhood. A reflexive thematic analysis revealed the various pressures on mothers in relation to their physical activity practices. A key element was achieving 'good mother' status by taking control of their bodies through exercise and role-modelling proactive physical activity practices for their children and families. While some mothers worked to achieve this unrealistic ideal, others problematised and resisted such pressures. Concerns about body image, pressures from 'other mothers', limited time and energy, and feelings of guilt were all key contributing factors influencing mothers' physical activity practices. Mothers also considered themselves integral in their children's lives, expressing a desire to increase physical activity time and role modelling for an active family. Focusing on New Zealand mothers' lived experiences of negotiating the various pressures and expectations of motherhood, including the pursuit of a physically active lifestyle, this paper makes an original contribution to a growing body of literature on the complex relationship between motherhood, sport, and physical activity.

Roundtable: Defining the Black 1980s

The Journal of African American History · 2023-06-01

To begin this special issue on the Black 1980s, we asked some of the leading thinkers in the area of post–Civil Rights era Black politics, culture, and society to help us to wrestle with issues of chronology, historiography, and the complicated connections between African Americans and the Black world in this crucial decade. In particular, we wanted to begin a conversation about how we define the Black 1980s and what impact focusing on the period will have on larger discussions of Black life in the post–Civil Rights period as well as of US politics and culture.

INTRODUCTION

Northwestern University Press eBooks · 2022-04-15

Redlining in Boston

Harvard Dataverse · 2022-03-09

Between 1935 and 1940 the federal government’s Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) classified the neighborhoods of 239 cities according to their perceived investment risk. This practice has since been referred to as “redlining,” as the neighborhoods classified as being the highest risk for investment were often colored red on the resultant maps. The Mapping Inequality project, a collaboration of faculty at the University of Richmond’s Digital Scholarship Lab, the University of Maryland’s Digital Curation Innovation Center, Virginia Tech, and Johns Hopkins University has digitized and georectified all 239 HOLC maps and made them publicly available, including the HOLC map of Boston from 1938. The Boston Area Research Initiative has coordinated (i.e., spatial joined) the districts from the 1938 HOLC map of Boston with census tracts from the 2010 U.S. Census. This dataset contains the original shapefile and the spatially joined tract-level data.

The Southern Side of Chicago: Arnold R. Hirsch and the Renewal of Southern Urban History

Journal of Urban History · 2020-01-06 · 2 citations

This essay maintains that Arnold R. Hirsch’s Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago must be viewed as critical to the evolution of Southern history. The author shows how Hirsch’s handling of white anxiety, racial terrorism, and state actions in the preservation of racial segregation helped move Southern historians to adopt a comparative and structural approach to racial politics and metropolitan life. It also encouraged them to abandon interpretive frameworks that treated the South as exceptional, thus proving critical to the development of “Sunbelt” urban history. The fact of Hirsch’s own residing in the South and his collaborations with Southern historians during the publication of Making the Second Ghetto offers additional context to explain the book’s resonance in Southern historiography.

Speculating in History

Anthurium A Caribbean Studies Journal · 2020 · 7 citations

• History

I love that Donette brought this group together. But I'm sad, too. Today feels too much like a special occasion. For a long time, I've worried that Miami's black intellectual diaspora remains mostly a scattered group. It feels cast about. A little here, a little there.

32. My Social Media Philosophy in (Roughly) One Thousand Words

2020-09-21

Making the Second Ghetto

2020 · 14 citations

• Sociology
• Psychology
• Sociology

The Enduring, Gilded Periphery: Colonialism and Grand Cayman in Capital's Atlantic World

The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era · 2020-03-11

The man they called “Smiley” died in February 1938 on an operating table in Kingston, Jamaica. His stomach cancer, only recently discovered, was quickly deemed inoperable by a doctor in the Cayman Islands, where he lived with his pregnant wife and four children. In Cayman, there had been no public hospital. Instead, a British heiress paid to build a four-bed emergency ward and dispensary meant to serve the island's 6,500 residents. Four beds for more than six thousand. Such insufficiency represented the extent of institutionalized health care at the edge of the British Empire.

My Social Media philosophy in (Roughly) One Thousand Words

2020-01-01