MeterAreice Kaiser has published a book that has received a lot of attention, including “The Discomfort of Modern Mothers”. The author analyzes the young 21st century’s motherhood concerns in a mixture of personal experience reports and historical side-views. Mothers are a stepping stone, but Caesar’s vision goes further: the text is a contribution to the debate on structural disadvantages (such as “wage losses due to childbirth”), and aims to increase people’s awareness of caring for children, the elderly, and the disabled. Here comes it.
Many things sound familiar. For example, some people criticize that women in partnerships are usually responsible for the little things in daily life, and mothers are usually classified online as super-working moms, asexual Marias, or delicious moms. Of course, Orna Donath’s 2015 study “Regretting Motherhood” (Regretting Motherhood) should not be missed, which interviewed women who regretted having children.
Poor reference material or no reference material at all
Kaiser’s suggestion for more family-friendliness is so common and can reach a consensus, almost no one would object: more time for family, friends, culture, fun work that does not take up too much space-and unconditional basic income. Nevertheless, there are still contradictions. Why does the ideal of millennials read like a part-time wife a week, with the state playing the role of provider? How does the vague anti-capitalist stance combine with the described intensive use of capitalist flagship products, namely the dating app and its permanently optimized erasure technology?
However, the reason why this book is not convincing is not just because of the content. If you follow the endnotes, you will find that in some places, the foreign text without quotation marks is copied verbatim or almost verbatim, and this citation is insufficient, sometimes even without citation. Some examples: Kaiser cited Johanna Haarer’s 1934 book “The German Mother and Her First Child”, which was published until 1987 under the title “Mother and Her First Child.”
Many inaccuracies
Your source is not the book itself, but Zeit-Magazin on 39/2019, which published an interview with Haarer’s daughter Gertrud Haarer. Kaiser not only copied the passages from the Haarer book cited by Zeit-Magazin, but also copied the transitions of the Zeit author. Kaiser said: “In it, Haarer advocated strict and relentless child-rearing from the beginning: mother and child should be separated immediately after delivery, and the child should be handed over to the mother in the delivery bed,’just for breastfeeding’.” Zeit-Magazin You can read: “And she has advocated strict education of children from the beginning. Mother and child should be separated immediately after delivery, and the child’only breastfeeds the mother’ during the puerperium.”
Later, Caesar briefly described the situation of the East German mother, which is almost identical in text to the two unmentioned texts. The first part is similar to Hedda Nier’s “East German mothers are more often employed” published by Statista on October 2, 2019 as an interpretation of the statistics of the Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs and Energy.The following part is almost identical to the report “East and West Germany’s Family Policy and Its Long-term Impact” by Anke Domscheid-Berg The date is November 9, 2016 and can be found on the website of the Heinrich Böll Foundation.
