Introduction: Mothers wanted / Lisa Rowe Fraustino and Karen Coats
PART I. Historical legacies: maternal instruction and delight. Chapter 1. Barbauld and the body-part game: maternal pedagogy in the long Eighteenth century / Donelle Ruwe
Chapter 2. Juliana Ewing's Six to Sixteen: realizing and rewriting maternal legacy / Koeun Kim
Chapter 3. The romance of othermothering in Nineteenth-century Backfisch books / Julie Pfeiffer
PART II. Mothering in modernity: shifting culture sand subjectivities. Chapter 4. The women who sent their children away: mothers in Kindertransport fiction / Adrienne Kertzer
Chapter 5. Minority mama: rejecting the mainstream mothering model / Dorina K. Lazo Gilmore
Chapter 6. Cultural-historical activity theory and the expansive cycle of mothering while Black / Lauren Causey and Karen Coats
Chapter 7. "The hills were in her bones": living in the blend of mothers and environments / Anna Katrina Gutierrez
PART III. The Mother-child bond: fantasy and desire for the real. Chapter 8. Animal mothers and animal babies in picture books / Robin Calland
Chapter 9. A daughter's sacrifice: saving the 'Good-enough mother; from the Good Mother fantasy / Alexandra Kotanko
Chapter 10. "The mother was the mother, even when she wasn't": maternal care ethics and children's fantasy / Mary Jeanette Moran
PART IV. Performing postfeminist motherhood. Chapter 11. "I would never be strong enough" Sarah Dessen's postfeminist mothers / Sara K. Day
Chapter 12. Abandoning Mothers / Lisa Rowe Fraustino
Chapter 13. "A mom shaped hole": psychoanalysis and the dystopian maternal / Jennifer Mitchell.