Lifting the Taboo

by Cline, Sally

• ISBN13: 9780814714065
• ISBN10: 0814714064
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1997-03-01
• Publisher: New York Univ Pr

Summary

lluminated by a profound yet humorous vision, Lifting the Taboo explores the specific relationship women of many colors, cultures, ages, and sexual orientations have to their own deaths, their attitudes towards loss, and their disposition to their role as primary care-givers to the dying.Specifically, the book weighs the implications of breast cancer and examines in detail Alzheimer's Disease which, contrary to popular myth, can in several significant ways be perceived as a women's disease. Investigating mothers' responses to children's deaths, Sally Cline establishes that women's relationships to death are intricately connected to the experience of giving birth. They are, she argues, therefore psychologically and emotionally different from those of men. Cline goes on to examine women's roles and responses to AIDS and suicide, women's sexual relationships while dying, how society views widows as leftover lives, and women's radical work in hospices and death therapy, as well as their roles as female funeral directors.

Author Biography

Sally Cline was many years Co-Course organizer for Women's Studies at Cambridge University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Introduction: Background to the Book	p. 1
Breaking the Silence	p. 13
Earlier Times, Other Cultures and Religions	p. 42
Mortal Messages	p. 65
Dutiful Daughters: Private Caring	p. 87
Female Funeral Directors	p. 116
Widows and Other Leftover Lives	p. 140
Deaths That Haunt: Mothers Lose Children	p. 162
Image, Sex and the Language of Cancer	p. 196
Sons? Do I Have Sons?	p. 219
Suicide: Shock and Stigma	p. 245
AIDS: The Social Death Kept Under Wraps	p. 278
Unacknowledged Losses	p. 304
Positive Gains	p. 320
Notes	p. 347
Bibliography and Further Reading	p. 362
Index	p. 370
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