It is for her contribution – more than three decades of promoting the advancement of women in Canada’s universities and colleges – that O’Reilly has received the 2010 from the Canadian Association of University Teachers ().

Left: Andrea O'Reilly

O'Reilly is founder and director of the newly launched feminist scholarly and activist organization, the (MIRCI), developed from the former Association for Research on Mothering. She is also the founder and editor-in-chief of the , formerly the Journal of the Association for Research on Motherhood, now housed in the MIRCI along with , the , the and the forum. The MIRCI is also partnered with , which has two new titles out –  and .

In the newest CAUT bulletin, CAUT executive director James Turk called O’Reilly an illustrious scholar, a prolific writer and a devoted mentor and activist who “is a most deserving recipient of the Sarah Shorten Award.”

The Sarah Shorten Award was established in 1990 in honour of Sarah Shorten, who served as CAUT vice-president from 1982 to1983, and two terms as president (1983-1984 and 1984-1985), to recognize outstanding achievements in the promotion of the advancement of women in Canadian universities and colleges.

O'Reilly is also the editor and author of several books, including and .

Her other honours have included 1998 and 2009 91��ɫ Teacher of the Year awards and a 2007 Atkinson Dean’s Award for Outstanding Research.

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin

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“Over the last 25 years, the topic of motherhood has emerged as a central and significant topic of scholarly inquiry across a wide range of academic disciplines. A cursory review of motherhood research reveals that hundreds of scholarly articles have been published on almost every motherhood theme imaginable,” says O’Reilly, who coined the term "motherhood studies" to acknowledge and demarcate motherhood scholarship as a legitimate and distinctive discipline.

"Indeed, similar to the development of women studies as an academic field in the 1970s, motherhood studies, while explicitly interdisciplinary, has emerged an autonomous and independent scholarly discipline in the last decade," she says. "This intellectual tradition of maternal scholarship both made possible and created the need for an encylopedia on motherhood."

Founder and director of the newly formed (developed from the former Association for Research on Mothering at 91��ɫ), O'Reilly approached contributors and compiled articles by some 300 women scholars throughout the United States, Canada and beyond for the book.

The , the first scholarly reference devoted to the subject, covers a vast array of topics, including how the study of motherhood is almost completely ignored in archeology, mothers in popular culture, hip mamas, influential maternal theorists, the economics of motherhood, psychoanalysis, fertility, guilt, ecofeminism, refugees and the future of mothering. The encyclopedia touches on mothers, and what it means to be a mother in almost every country. It also looks at mothers in film, books, art and poetry, as well as in the Bible.

“The publication is for me a significant moment in motherhood scholarships as it confirms that motherhood has indeed arrived as a legitimate and distinct academic discipline and scholarly field." says O'Reilly. "As well, the encyclopedia, in bringing together for the first time over 700 motherhood topics from A to Z, from aboriginal mothering to zines, and in providing a detailed summary and a bibliography for each topic, is an invaluable resource for anyone – students, journalists, writers, researchers, community agencies – in need of an overview of a particular motherhood topic and/or interested in doing further research on the subject matter.”

Left: Andrea O'Reilly

The book delves into the anthropology of mothering, a discussion on advice literature for mothers, a chronology of motherhood and mother activists. It explores the concept of bad mothering, absentee mothers, alcoholism, ethics, HIV/AIDS, race, slavery, lesbian and bisexual mothers, breastfeeding and more. In addition, it examines terms, concepts, themes, debates, theories and texts of motherhood within history, geography and academia.

To O’Reilly (BA Hons. '85, MA '87, PhD '96), the publication of the encyclopedia is like the coming of age of mothering research. The scholarship of motherhood has been legitimized and recognized, she says.

She introduces the Encyclopedia of Motherhood with a quote from author Adrienne Rich: “We know more about the air we breathe, the seas we travel, than about the nature and meaning of motherhood.” And that is exactly what O’Reilly hopes the encyclopedia will change, that it will provide a glimpse into all things associated with and to mothering. The publication of the encyclopedia demarcates motherhood as an academic discipline and points to the future.

O’Reilly is the author of and . She is also the editor of 14 collections.

For more information, visit the Web site.

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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Despite decades of feminism and co-parenting and men grappling with diaper changes and night feedings, moms are often by default or tradition the ones who end up having the sex talk, wrote the . Often it’s because they are the parent who spends the most time with the children.

“Often if there is a woman in the household, she takes over that part of the parenting,” says Andrea O’Reilly, a professor in 91��ɫ’s School of Women’s Studies in the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies and founder & director of the Association for Research on Mothering.

Women are typically the family CEO, in charge of remembering who got which shots and setting up play dates. Having “the talk” falls into that realm. “The talk is part of a larger paradigm of gender. Until we dislodge that, women will probably be the ones to have ‘the talk’. I try to de-gender caregiving, but it’s a hard sell,” O’Reilly says.

She believes "the talk" is declining in importance in any case. “We live in such a sex-saturated culture. Kids know about sex long before children 10, 20, 30 years ago did,” she says.

Children want information about sex, according to a study of 1,200 Toronto teens released last summer. The found 28 per cent of teens weren getting information about sex from their parents and 53 per cent were getting it from their friends.

Parents might feel they lack the skills or even the stomach for a discussion about sex with their children, says Sarah Flicker, a professor in 91��ɫ’s Faculty of Environmental Studies and principal researcher on the Toronto Teen Survey. “Not all parents feel comfortable telling children where a clitoris is, but you could talk about what makes a healthy relationship.”

Coverage also appeared in .

Reposted by Elizabeth Monier-Williams, with files courtesy of YFile – 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin, and .

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Mothers think. That was a revolutionary concept at one time, and may still be in some quarters – myth shattering and at the same time obvious. For 91��ɫ women’s studies Professor Andrea O’Reilly, it was life changing and groundbreaking, and was delivered by Sara Ruddick through her 1989 book Maternal Thinking: Towards a Politics of Peace. It was a book O’Reilly couldn’t put down. She still has it and, although it’s a bit battered and stained with sand and water, she has read it over a dozen times.

It is this “aha” moment that O’Reilly talks about in her introduction to Maternal Thinking: Philosophy, Politics, Practice (Demeter Press, 2009), along with the impact the concepts in Ruddick's book had on her life and the discipline of women’s studies as a whole.

“For me, and I suspect for most mothers and scholars of motherhood, this is what made Maternal Thinking [Towards a Politics of Peace] so life-changing and groundbreaking,” writes O’Reilly in Maternal Thinking: Philosophy, Politics, Practice, which she edited. Ruddick “theorized the obvious: mothers think.” O’Reilly calls it a “monumental text” and one of the most significant works in maternal scholarship and the new field of motherhood studies.

She can remember being excited and absorbed by passages from Ruddick’s book, such as: “The work of mothering demands that mothers think; out of this need for thoughtfulness, a distinctive discipline emerges.” Those were words that would stay with her. She circled the page number on which she read them twice and underlined the words. O’Reilly had three children under the age of six at the time and was working on her PhD. Ruddick’s words were affirming and validating.

“Ruddick’s concept of maternal practice and thinking, divested of biological nature, instinct and sentiment, is fore-grounded in what all mothers know: motherwork is inherently and profoundly an intellectual activity,” writes O’Reilly. “When mothers set out to fulfill the demands of mother-work, what Ruddick defines as protection, nurturance and training, they are engaged in maternal practice; this engagement, in turn, gives rise to a specific discipline of thought, a cluster of attitudes, beliefs, and values which Ruddick calls maternal thinking.”

Two decades later, O’Reilly continues to revere Ruddick and her work. Maternal Thinking: Philosophy, Politics, Practice, a collection of 17 essays from diverse disciplines, everything from anthropology, sociology, literature and philosophy to education, women’s studies and psychology, is a celebration of the 20th anniversary of Ruddick’s Maternal Thinking: Towards a Politics of Peace.

Right: Andrea O'Reilly

O’Reilly sat down with Ruddick in her apartment for an almost two-hour-long conversation that continued long after the interview was over. They discussed what Ruddick’s head space was at the time of writing her book, what things have changed and what they agree and disagree on. Ruddick is very present in the new book through the conversation as well as its epilogue, which she wrote. The essays in the book revisit Ruddick’s work and examine the “pivotal insights” of the text.

The essays range from University of Michigan-Dearborn Professor Maureen Linker’s “Explaining the World: Philosophical Reflections on Feminism and Mothering” and California State University San Marcos Professor Linda Pershing’s “Cindy Sheehan: A Call to Maternal Activism in the Contemporary Peace Movement” to Assumption College, Worcester, Professor Regina Edmonds’ “Maternal Thinking Expanded: A Psychologist’s View” and O’Reilly’s “Feminist Mothering as Maternal Practice: Maternal Authority and Social Acceptability of Children”.

O’Reilly is founder and director of 91��ɫ’s Association for Research on Mothering and an associate professor in the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies' School of Women's Studies. She is the author of Toni Morrison and Motherhood: A Politics of the Heart (SUNY Press, 2004) and Rocking the Cradle: Thoughts on Motherhood, Feminism and the Possibility of Empowered Mothering (Demeter Press, 2006). She is the editor of 14 collections, including with Elizabeth Podnieks Textual Mothers Maternal Texts: Motherhood in Contemporary Women’s Literatures (Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2009) and is the editor of the forthcoming, first-ever encyclopedia on motherhood.

For more information, visit the Demeter Press Web site.

By Sandra McLean, YFile writer

Republished courtesy of YFile – 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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