The Concept of Motherhood in Tradition-oriented, Modern/Feminist and Islamic Approaches

This article examines the concept of motherhood in three approaches; tradition-oriented, modern/feminist and Islamic. Although the concept of motherhood leads to females giving birth to a child at the first glance, more careful scrutiny of social texts reveals the broadness and complexity of this phenomenon. From a tradition oriented point of view, motherhood is the characteristic of female identity. However, the modern/feminist approach views woman and the maternal instinct separately. Terminologies such as genetic mother, biological mother and social mother have been mentioned in this literature. In this article, we review the existing literature based on these two approaches and demonstrate how the feminist approach encounters the traditional point of view towards motherhood. However, as the third wave of feminism has addressed return to motherhood and raised some confusions and uncertainties, we suggest a re-reading of the Islamic approach toward motherhood based on Quranic literature.