In Of Woman Born, Adrienne Rich famously made the distinction between the institution of patriarchal motherhood and the experience of motherhood. I’ve always wondered to what degree this distinction bears out in other countries and cultures. According to a new book, Motherhood in India: Glorification without Empowerment?, published by Routledge India and edited by Maithreyi Krishnaraj, India also suffers from a gap between the cultural glorification of mothers and the actual treatment of mothers. Many thanks to writer and Feminist Review blogger Mandy Van Deven, who just told me about it! Mandy wrote a great piece for The Women’s International Perspective (The WIP) in which she interviews Veena Poonancha, one of the book’s contributors. Read her article, “Parvati’s Burden: Scratching the Surface of Motherhood in India,” over at The WIP.

Speaking of motherhood: I’m heading out to the National Women’s Studies Association conference in Atlanta tomorrow, where I’ll be on a panel entitled “Globalizing Motherhood Studies” (and another one on “Feminist Publishing 2.0″)–and will be conference blogging (along with fellow Girl with Penner Alison Piepmeier) over at She Writes!

On October 27, the World Economic Forum released its 2009 Global Gender Gap report, which ranks countries according to four categories: economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, political empowerment, and health and survival. Who wins? Iceland, with the world’s smallest gender gap. Who loses? Yemen, coming in at 134^th place. But lest we point fingers, the U.S. dropped four places, to 31^st place, owing to minor drops in the participation of women in the economy and improvements in the scores of previously lower-ranking countries. (Though we’re top of the heap for educational attainment, we’re #61 for political empowerment. Ouch!)

The authors, Ricardo Hausmann of Harvard University, Laura D. Tyson of the University of California at Berkeley, and Saadia Zahidi of the World Economic Forum, have put together an accessible and informative report. Among many other issues, their report suggests how motherhood can, in a word, kill. Consider a few of the statistics surrounding maternal health in many parts of the world:

Annually, more than half a million women and girls die in pregnancy and childbirth and 3.7 million newborns die within their first 28 days. (Appendix E, “Maternal Health and Mortality”)

Approximately 80% of maternal deaths could be averted if women had access to essential maternity and basic healthcare services. (Appendix E, “Maternal Health and Mortality”)

The need for paying greater attention to maternal health has been underscored by Nicholas Kristof in his New York Times column and his recent book Half the Sky, co-authored with Sheryl WuDunn. And while plenty of criticism has been levied against Kristof’s book, succinctly and fairly voiced by Katha Pollitt in her review in The Nation (thanks to my colleague Amy Kesselman for bringing her review to my attention!), Kristof deserves kudos for bringing media attention to the health issues that needlessly affect mothers in many developing countries, such as obstetric fistula.

The Global Gender Gap report provides other glimpses into how the experience of motherhood varies from country to country. Consider what Ricardo Hausmann, Ina Ganguli, and Martina Viarengo have to say about the relationship between marriage and motherhood, and their impact on the labor force participation gap between men and women:

…while the education gap has been reversed in quite a few countries, the employment gap has not. This gap is related to the compatibility of marriage and motherhood with a lifestyle where women can work.

(Here, the U.S. has a dubious distinction: of those countries where the employment gap has been rising, it has seen the biggest increase.)

Overall, however, there are some signs of positive change when examining the “motherhood gap” within labor force participation globally:

Motherhood has not been a universal obstacle for female labour force participation. In almost half the countries we studied, women with three children work at least as much as women with no children. However, in other countries, especially in Latin America, the motherhood gap is very large, with Chile exhibiting the largest gap. But there is good news: the motherhood gap has been falling in almost two-thirds of the countries, with the biggest reductions shown again by Brazil and Greece, accompanied by Austria and Bolivia.

There isn’t room in this report to explore all the complexities of paid work and mothering–such as who cares for children when mothers work in countries that don’t support working mothers, the working conditions mothers face, and so on–not to mention the wide spectrum of how women experience motherhood according to identity (class, ethnicity, religion), educational background, and geographical location (whether mothers live in a village or an urban environment). Even so, the report provides some broad brushstrokes that help situate the many different kids of gendered gaps in the world.

This was the reaction of more than a few folks when they heard that I was starting to blog about motherhood. While it put me on the defensive, I also concede that they have a point. My single friend in Manhattan is feeling a bit inundated on Facebook by friends writing about their children; my husband points out that given the amount of blogging about motherhood, a lot has already been said (some of it very eloquently, I might add!) and that I should probably think hard about what, exactly, Global Mama is going to contribute.

So here’s the idea that motivated me to start a column called Global Mama. A lot of the conversation I’ve seen about motherhood and family life is pretty focused on individual experiences in the good ol’ US of A, which is fine and well (and also important–last time I checked, we still don’t have universal health care or paid maternity leave or a host of other national policies that would help a whole bunch of working families). But we also live in an increasingly globalized world (witness the development of all those mom blogs and the virtual communities they have created). I’m not just talking about the fact that so much of what we bring into our homes in the U.S. is made elsewhere (plastic toys made in Chinese factories) but also that the U.S. is attracting huge numbers of immigrant women–many of them mothers–who come here to make money to send home to their families, so their kids can eat food and buy clothes and go to school. Many of them working for professional working moms. All connected by globalization and the changes we’ve witnessed over the past several decades. All global mamas.

This column intends to bring together a diverse community–including researchers, activists, writers, thinkers, scholars, parents, paid caregivers, and kids–about what it means to have families and provide care in a globalized world. What are the effects of globalization, migration, technological change, transnational and transcultural exchange, and the development of globalized media culture on mothering and parenting? on our ideas about what motherhood is and what it looks like? As Arlie Russell Hochschild puts it in the anthology Global Woman, how do we create a “global sense of ethics” in a globalized world? And how can feminist commentary from a range of perspectives help inform our take on the myths and realities of motherhood and on debates within the public sphere?

So here’s my invitation to you, dear Girl with Pen reader, to offer your feminist perspectives on motherhood and family life on Global Mama! Contact me at globalmama@gmail.com.