
Price: $39.95
Page Count: 300
Publication Date: January 2026
ISBN: 978-1-77258-565-0
This crystalline and powerful chorus of voices demonstrates why we need to explore, expand, and revolutionize our collection of motherlines and mothervines. The book ties together complicated histories of erasure with threads of hope, revising the past by adding stories of silenced voices and creating richness of meaning for those engaged in mothering. From Black motherlines to feminist goddess motherlines, the breadth of perspectives provides intriguing examples of this vital topic. This work upends motherhood under patriarchy and presents alternative ways of life that are matrifocal and centered on kindness and empathy—offering unexplored herstories and pathways toward better futures. It inspires readers to reflect on their own complex motherlines and to imagine what their legacies might accomplish.
- Dr. Carolina Toscano, Saint Louis University - Madrid Campus
This powerfully written volume provides much-needed explorations of contemporary and historical motherlines. Authors expertly query and expand Naomi Ruth Lowinski’s notion of “motherlines” to offer beautifully woven narrative and scholarly threads of maternal liberation, spun from intergenerational suffering, gifts, and love for “revolutionizing motherlines.” This text will ground and nourish mother-roots of further inquiries by scholars, students, and all readers reclaiming our motherlines along our mothervines.
- Nané Jordan, Ph.D., author of Placenta Wit: Mother Stories, Rituals, and Research
This collection offers a vibrant and layered contribution to feminist and matricentric scholarship. Bringing together diverse voices, stories, and perspectives, it balances intellectual depth with emotional resonance, weaving theory and story in a way that is as engaging to read as it is important to the field. Honouring the foundations of 'motherlines' and diversity of perspectives, while also sharing the innovative framing of 'mothervines', it stands as a landmark contribution to maternal scholarship and a text to be returned to for years to come.
- Dr Sophie Brock, Sociologist
Revolutionizing Motherlines
Edited by Fiona Joy Green, Victoria Bailey, and Andrea O’Reilly
Contents
Introduction
Victoria Bailey, Fiona Joy Green, and Andrea O’Reilly
1.
The Motherline
Fiona Joy Green
2.
Must We Know The Devil:
A Family Story of Black Clubwomen, Westward Migration, and The Motherline
Zaje A. T. Harrell
3.
Matrifocal Families: Motherlines Without Misogyny
Blythe Collier
4.
Recovered Threads: Gathering the Pieces of Our Grandmother’s Life
Katherine Wardi-Zonna and Anissa Wardi
5.
‘Are You My Mother(line)?’
Disruption and Destruction of The Mother-Daughter Bond in the Foster Care System
Tina Powell
6.
In Search of The Goddess:
Creating A Feminist Motherline for Mother-Daughter Connection and Empowerment
Andrea O’Reilly and Casey O’Reilly-Conlin
7.
Who Cares If There Are No Women?
An Intergenerational Conversation About Queer Parenting
Susan Rudy and Hannah Silva
8.
Stitches to Sutures: Five Generations of Needlework
Hannah Feiner
9.
‘If I Cannot Become Radha, I Can Become Yasodha’:
Decolonising Hijra Motherlines through Contemporary Indian TV Serial Taali (2023)
Sushree Routray
10.
All of Us ‘A’: Healing the Motherline through Matroreform
Alys Einion
11.
A Singer For The Dead
Kristina Ramskyte-Juszczak
12.
Mothervines: Maternal Lineage In Other Words
Victoria Bailey
13.
‘I Wanted to Be Anyone Other Than the Mother I Came From’:
Enacting a Motherline of Intergenerational Trauma to Expose, Explore, and Explain the
Dark Side of Motherhood in Ashley Audrain’s The Push
Andrea O’Reilly
14.
Transforming Restrictive Motherlines into Flourishing Mothervines
Fiona Joy Green
Contributor Notes
Dr. Fiona Joy Green (she/her) identifies as a White straight cisgender temporarily able-bodied feminist mother who believes in the power of revolutionary feminist parenting. Her 35-year teaching career at the University of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, included the positions of Chair, Department of Women’s and Gender Studies, Associate Dean, Faculty of Arts, and founder and first Director of the Institute for Women’s and Gender Studies. She’s the sole author of Practicing Feminist Mothering (ARP), co-editor of ten Demeter Press collections addressing ever-changing feminist maternal praxis and pedagogies, and author of many encyclopedia entries, peer-reviewed articles and chapters discussing feminist mothering, matricentric feminism, matroreform, motherlines, female genital cutting, gender fluidity, mommy blogging, and family engagement with privacy and boundary setting related to media and technologies.
Dr. Victoria Bailey's writing ranges from creative realms to academic essays, however, her work typically explores and examines mothers, mothering, and motherhood. She has a PhD in Creative Writing and an MA in Women’s Studies. Her writing has been included in a wide variety of publications including other Demeter Press anthologies. She is co-editor, along with Andrea O’Reilly and Fiona Joy Green, of Coming Into Being: Mothers on Finding and Realizing Feminism (Demeter Press). She is a feminist mother of three, and she lives in Alberta where she writes and sometimes teaches writing-related classes too.
Dr. Andrea O’Reilly, full professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at York University, is internationally recognized as the founder of Motherhood Studies and its subfield Maternal Theory, and creator of Matricentric Feminism, a feminism for and about mothers, and Matricritics, a literary theory and practice for a reading of mother-focused texts (2021). She is founder/editor-in-chief of the Journal of the Motherhood Initiative and publisher of Demeter Press, as well as co-editor/editor of thirty plus books on many motherhood topics, most recently in 2024 The Mother Wave: Theorizing, Enacting, and Representing Matricentric Feminism and The Missing Mother and in 2025 Gone Feral: Unruly Women and the Undoing of Normative Femininity. She is co-editor of the Routledge Companion to Motherhood which will be published in a 2nd edition in 2026. She is the author of four monographs, including a collection of essays, In (M)otherwords: Writings on Mothering and Motherhood, 2009-2024 (2024) and Matricentric Feminism: Theory, Activism, Practice (2021). She has published 17 chapters with several more planned on mother-centred novels/memoirs that will be published in the monograph Matricritics as Literary Theory and Criticism: Reading the Maternal in Post-2010 Women’s Narratives. She is twice the recipient of York University’s “Professor of the Year Award” for teaching excellence and is the 2019 recipient of the Status of Women and Equity Award of Distinction from OCUFA (Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations). She has received more than 1.5 million dollars in funding for her research projects.