Analysis of Postpartum Depression in Rock-a-by Baby: by Verta Taylor
Verta Taylor in her book Rock-a-by Baby: Feminism, Self-Help, and Postpartum Depression analyzes issue related to motherhood and its aftermath, meaning post-partum depression and related psychological and physical manifestations of depression or sadness suffered by many women after childbirth. She does so in the context of her view that feminism has created a system for self-help for women suffering form this malady and that this is an effective way to address this particular problem. In her book, she indicates the nature of the issue, the severity of the problem, the way it has been viewed by women themselves, the means undertaken to aid women who face this problem, and the outcome of applying these methods. The study is not empirical but instead involves interviewing women and taking note of their problems and how they have or have not been helped. Her data is qualitative rather than quantitative, which makes the information useful for other researchers, for students, and for caregivers who need to know more about this problem. The study is not necessarily transferable to all situations and does not provide the sort of data that would satisfy those trying to generalize the results. Postpartum depression is a problem faced
Taylor admits that when this focus attracted her attention, "the data gathering shifted to activists involved in the self-help campaign" (11). As a result, she conducted semistructured tape-recorded interviews with 29 participants in the movement, gaining a broader picture of the movement. This was not the primary focus of her research, however, and shows a change in direction that again makes this a different book than it would have been as a report on postpartum depression as an issue. This led Taylor to consider the feminist perspective and the way a feminist approach could explain her findings and shape them into a useful vision of women's behavior and how society influences it, which in turn leads to a concept of how to alter the way social forces shape women's behavior in order to let women be free to develop their own views of motherhood in particular and to decide for themselves how hey fit into that construct. Current attempts to theorize gender change, which harken back to the sex roles tradition of the field, have shown a preference for mapping the way that individuals rebel against and reconstitute the meaning of masculinity and femininity (15). The research design used by Taylor is a simple interview technique, with the interviews recorded by her so the information can be reported and analyzed. She approaches the original study of postpartum depression with this technique in mind and directed toward women suffering form postpartum depression, though how much this was altered by advice from women working with mothers suffering from postpartum depression is not clear. Certainly, the research affected her from the first, and it was the discovery that there were self-help groups dedicated to assisting women in overcoming the effects of postpartum depression that first altered her direction and suggested a different topic for the research. More than this, though, her investigation of these groups and the way they approached the problem produced another change in direction for Taylor. One of the aspects of her original research that raised an issue of concern to feminists was that more than half of the women suffering form postpartum depression reported to her that they felt anger and resentment toward their husbands or partners because the latter failed to share child-care and household responsibilities. Many of these women also expressed anxiety because they believed they did not fit with the societal image of motherhood and did not therefore feel the sorts of satisfactions with motherhood that they had been told they would feel, usually had been told for their entire lives. This suggested to Taylor that researchers who believed that postpartum depression and other postpartum illness had both biological and social causes, with the social cause found in the paradigm of motherhood that many women found impossible to fill. Those seeking answers only in hormonal changes or other biological factors were therefore failing to include the important social aspect, while the self-help movement did not fail to account for this and indeed often emphasized it over other factors. Taylor provides an outline of her book to guide the reader. She states that her goal first is to "portray the dimensions of postpartum illness and the significance of the self-help campaign" (20), and after this she wishes to show "the connections among gender, self-help, and feminism" (20). Her final goal is to analyze "the significance of gendered political participation for understanding the shape and direction of modern social movements" (21). After stating her intentions, she first reports on her interviews with depressed women and uses these to lead to a discussion of the competing definitions of motherhood. After this, Taylor discusses the lives of the feminists who founded the first postpartum support groups and tells of the history of the
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Approximate Word count = 2609
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page double spaced)
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