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Rock-a-by Baby: Feminism, Self-help, and Postpartum Depression, by Verta Taylor. New York: Routledge, 1996. 240 pp. $65.00 cloth. ISBN: 0-415-91291-1. $18.95 paper. ISBN:0415-91292-X.
Many women do not experience the promised "joys of motherhood." Instead they feel anxiety, guilt, depression, or anger following the birth of a child. Rock-a-by Baby is a moving story grounded in women's experience of postpartum depression. It is also an insightful analysis of new social movements and feminism in late-twentieth-century America. Verta Taylor links the personal and the political in rich sociological and feminist tradition. And she does it wonderfully.
Like many feminists, Taylor had suspected that the turn toward self-help in the women's movement in the 1980s was a depoliticizing move. Her sociological skepticism made her doubt that helping individuals with personal troubles could change the social institutions responsible for their suffering. Yet she comes to conclude that as well as helping personal healing, postpartum self-help is a movement of political resistance and social change. This conclusion is grounded in several different kinds of qualitative data and...