Missing Voices

Motherhood is often portrayed as one of the most fulfilling experiences in a woman's life. Books on pregnancy, birth and motherhood not only tell women what they should do, they also encourage them to have high expectations of what is inevitably a `journey into the unknown'. Missing Voices is different: its authors offer no prescriptions. Instead they relate the stories they heard during two rounds of interviews with 800 recent mothers. We hear about what happened to them during pregnancy and childbirth, what they thought of the care they received, and how they coped back at home. The result is a moving and powerful account of what it is like to be a mother in Australia in the 1990s.