Bikini-Ready Moms: Celebrity Profiles, Motherhood, and the Body

Argues that expectations for mothering include a new core principle of "body work."

Winner of the 2016 Outstanding Book Award presented by the Organization for the Study of Communication, Language, and Gender (OSCLG)

The requirements of "good" motherhood used to primarily involve the care of children, but now contemporary mothers are also pressured to become bikini-ready immediately postpartum. Lynn O'Brien Hallstein analyzes celebrity mom profiles to determine the various ways that they encourage all mothers to engage in body work as the energizing solution to solve any work-life balance struggles they might experience. Bikini-Ready Moms also considers the ways that maternal body work erases any evidence of mothers' contributions both at home and in professional contexts. O'Brien Hallstein theorizes possible ways to fuel a necessary mothers' revolution, while also pointing to initial strategies of resistance.