'[...] it has also become a place for radical and "gender critical" feminists concerned to centre women and mothers in their work, and who retain a sense of the importance of embodiment, sexual difference and a feminist analysis of gendered power relations. While the university purports to be a place for the free expression of ideas, the post-modern turn and some more recent strands of ideological progressivism have made the free expression of the full range of feminist ideas, including those pertaining to women and mothers, menstruation, breastfeeding and child care, increasingly difficult to name, explore and analyse. [...]even as women have gained access to all domains of social life as civil equals, becoming a mother continues to generate entrenched structural inequalities, including, in particular, a pronounced wage, wealth and leisure gap. [...]we have creative writing-poetry and prose-by a range of Australian women writers dealing with the topic of motherhood and mothering and, again, we can find quite frequently a theme of loss-a loss of ideals, the loss of fantasies of perfection, the loss of security, the loss of identity, the loss of income, the loss of a child, the loss of life and more.' (Publication abstract)
