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CONFESSIONS OF LOSS:

Maternal Grief in True Story, 1920- 1985

Graduate Center, City University of New York

This article analyzes articles appearing in True Story from 1920 to 1985 that concern women's grief after pregnancy and child loss. They are discussed as a historical link between nineteenth-century consolation literature and current psychological and academic discussions of grief. True Story is a confession magazine marketed for working-class women, whose reproductive losses have generally been minimized or ignored by previous literary and current professional and journalistic treatments of maternal grief. Articles are examined within the constructs of confession literature and within the larger context of women's popular literature. Like working-class women's experiences of reproductive loss, these areas have been largely overlooked, dismissed, or denigrated by literary scholars and sociologists. The moral tone of True Story gives women's first-person narratives about infant death and pregnancy an ambiguous prescriptive quality, in that both self-empowerment and self-blame are recommended. True Story reinforces traditional notions of motherhood and femininity, but subtly challenges patriarchal class relations in American society.

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