The sixties were a time when anti-disciplinary politics blurred the boundaries between the political and the aesthetic, and, according to some critics, the time when the possibility for revolution died. In this book, first published in 1998, Stephens questions the frameworks which inform commonplace understandings of this period, arguing that the most distinctive forms of sixties protest are often marginalized or excluded from view. She looks at the problematic ways in which sixties radicalism has been narrativised, and critically evaluates the modernist and postmodern impulses that can be discerned in the anti-disciplinary protest of the time. Stephens develops a new theoretical framework for conceptualizing the relationship between the sixties and later political and theoretical developments. Drawing on broad-ranging, lively and often rare sources, this is a provocative contribution to contemporary social theory and cultural studies.

The sixties were a time when anti-disciplinary politics blurred the boundaries between the political and the aesthetic, and, according to some critics, the time when the possibility for revolution died. In this book, first published in 1998, Stephens questions the frameworks which inform commonplace understandings of this period, arguing that the most distinctive forms of sixties protest are often marginalized or excluded from view. She looks at the problematic ways in which sixties radicalism has been narrativised, and critically evaluates the modernist and postmodern impulses that can be discerned in the anti-disciplinary protest of the time. Stephens develops a new theoretical framework for conceptualizing the relationship between the sixties and later political and theoretical developments. Drawing on broad-ranging, lively and often rare sources, this is a provocative contribution to contemporary social theory and cultural studies.

There is a deep cultural anxiety around public expressions of maternalism and the application of maternal values to society as a whole. Julie Stephens examines why postmaternal thinking has become so influential in recent decades and why there has been a growing unease with maternal forms of subjectivity and maternalist perspectives. In moving beyond policy definitions, which emphasize the priority given to women's claims as employees over their political claims as mothers, Stephens details an elaborate process of cultural forgetting that has accompanied this repudiation of the maternal.

Reclaiming an alternative feminist position through an investigation of oral history, life narratives, Web blogs, and other rich and varied sources, Stephens confronts the core claims of postmaternal thought and challenges dominant representations of feminism as having forgotten motherhood. Deploying the interpretive framework of memory studies, she examines the political structures of forgetting surrounding the maternal and the weakening of nurture and care in the public domain. She views the promotion of an illusory, self-sufficient individualism as a form of social unmothering that is profoundly connected to this ethos. In rejecting both traditional maternalism and the new postmaternalism, Stephens challenges prevailing paradigms and makes way for an alternative feminist maternalism centering on a politics of care.