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Mothering the Mother: African American Postpartum Traditions, Recipes and Healing
Renowned midwife, doula trainer, and Master of Public Health Shafia Monroe reintroduces and celebrates the lost art of African American postpartum healing traditions in this practical, essential guide to maternal health.
As a mother, grandmother, and traditional midwife, Shafia M. Monroe intimately knows about childbirth and the fourth trimester. Over forty years, she’s helped thousands give birth, and has taught thousands more how to support birthing parents, all integrating the deep wisdom of African American healing traditions. Long suppressed by the white medical establishment, these practices--such as belly binding, heat, herbs, the lying-in period, and the “taking-out-of-bed ritual”--are powerful healing tools. Using them, we mother the mother through a healthy postpartum period.
While this framework will be powerful healing for all mothers, the information in this book can save Black mother's lives; with African American women disproportionately suffering from maternal mortality and morbidity, there is an urgent need for an embrace of African American postpartum care that surrounds the new mother and her baby with community, love, and protection. Reconnecting Black women to their postpartum traditions can help reduce common discomforts of birth and empower families to be proactive about their medical care. Mothering the Mother is a resource for Black women and communities to reclaim their cultural traditions for a healthy postpartum recuperation.
As a mother, grandmother, and traditional midwife, Shafia M. Monroe intimately knows about childbirth and the fourth trimester. Over forty years, she’s helped thousands give birth, and has taught thousands more how to support birthing parents, all integrating the deep wisdom of African American healing traditions. Long suppressed by the white medical establishment, these practices--such as belly binding, heat, herbs, the lying-in period, and the “taking-out-of-bed ritual”--are powerful healing tools. Using them, we mother the mother through a healthy postpartum period.
While this framework will be powerful healing for all mothers, the information in this book can save Black mother's lives; with African American women disproportionately suffering from maternal mortality and morbidity, there is an urgent need for an embrace of African American postpartum care that surrounds the new mother and her baby with community, love, and protection. Reconnecting Black women to their postpartum traditions can help reduce common discomforts of birth and empower families to be proactive about their medical care. Mothering the Mother is a resource for Black women and communities to reclaim their cultural traditions for a healthy postpartum recuperation.
336 pages, Paperback
Published January 27, 2026
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
March 21, 2026
There are books that fill a gap in the literature, and then there are books that fill a wound. Shafia Monroe's Mothering the Mother feels firmly like the latter. A midwife, doula trainer, and public health professional with over four decades of experience, Monroe has spent her career not only attending births but studying and preserving the traditions that Black communities developed across generations to care for new mothers — practices that were systematically suppressed by the white medical establishment and largely erased from mainstream awareness. This book is her effort to bring them back.
The result is part cultural history, part practical guide, and part act of reclamation. Monroe weaves together personal narrative, ancestral wisdom, and concrete postpartum care practices — belly binding, heat therapy, herbal remedies, the lying-in period, community rituals — into a framework that feels both deeply rooted and urgently relevant. The backdrop is impossible to ignore: Black women in America face disproportionately high rates of maternal mortality and morbidity, and Monroe makes a clear and compelling case that reconnecting with these traditions isn't nostalgia — it's a matter of survival.
But perhaps the most quietly radical thing this book does is insist that motherhood is sacred. In a culture that treats childbirth as routine precisely because so many women experience it, Monroe pushes back with tremendous grace. The nurturing that runs through every page — the food, the rituals, the community care, the attention to a mother's body and spirit — is a sustained argument that what is common is not therefore ordinary, and that what women carry and endure and create deserves to be honored rather than minimized.
The recipes, rooted in the belief that food is medicine, are woven into this philosophy rather than tacked on. They feel like love made edible.
What makes this book extraordinary is that its warmth extends even to readers who never gave birth — and perhaps especially to those who wanted to and couldn't. Monroe writes with such encompassing tenderness that the book becomes an invitation rather than a document. You don't have to be a mother to feel held by it, or to grieve a little for the care you didn't receive.
As one who had a condition that disproportionately affects African American women — and that the white, male-dominated medical establishment met with a "wait and see" approach — was allowed to progress untreated for so long that by the time a doctor in another state was willing to explore options beyond the most drastic intervention, the damage had already been done. Uterus intact. Ability to conceive, gone. Monroe's book made clear that medical disparity is not an isolated story. It is a pattern with deep historical roots, and it is exactly why work like hers matters. Monroe wrote a book with enough heart and truth in it to reach a reader who had every reason to feel on the outside of its subject matter, and instead made her feel like the book was written specifically for her. That's the power of someone who knows what it means to mother.
As a brand new release — published in January 2026 — this is a book that feels both timely and long overdue. It belongs in the hands of birth workers, health professionals, and mothers. But it also belongs in the hands of anyone who has ever longed to be nurtured, or to nurture someone else, and understands instinctively that those acts are among the most important things we do for one another.
The result is part cultural history, part practical guide, and part act of reclamation. Monroe weaves together personal narrative, ancestral wisdom, and concrete postpartum care practices — belly binding, heat therapy, herbal remedies, the lying-in period, community rituals — into a framework that feels both deeply rooted and urgently relevant. The backdrop is impossible to ignore: Black women in America face disproportionately high rates of maternal mortality and morbidity, and Monroe makes a clear and compelling case that reconnecting with these traditions isn't nostalgia — it's a matter of survival.
But perhaps the most quietly radical thing this book does is insist that motherhood is sacred. In a culture that treats childbirth as routine precisely because so many women experience it, Monroe pushes back with tremendous grace. The nurturing that runs through every page — the food, the rituals, the community care, the attention to a mother's body and spirit — is a sustained argument that what is common is not therefore ordinary, and that what women carry and endure and create deserves to be honored rather than minimized.
The recipes, rooted in the belief that food is medicine, are woven into this philosophy rather than tacked on. They feel like love made edible.
What makes this book extraordinary is that its warmth extends even to readers who never gave birth — and perhaps especially to those who wanted to and couldn't. Monroe writes with such encompassing tenderness that the book becomes an invitation rather than a document. You don't have to be a mother to feel held by it, or to grieve a little for the care you didn't receive.
As one who had a condition that disproportionately affects African American women — and that the white, male-dominated medical establishment met with a "wait and see" approach — was allowed to progress untreated for so long that by the time a doctor in another state was willing to explore options beyond the most drastic intervention, the damage had already been done. Uterus intact. Ability to conceive, gone. Monroe's book made clear that medical disparity is not an isolated story. It is a pattern with deep historical roots, and it is exactly why work like hers matters. Monroe wrote a book with enough heart and truth in it to reach a reader who had every reason to feel on the outside of its subject matter, and instead made her feel like the book was written specifically for her. That's the power of someone who knows what it means to mother.
As a brand new release — published in January 2026 — this is a book that feels both timely and long overdue. It belongs in the hands of birth workers, health professionals, and mothers. But it also belongs in the hands of anyone who has ever longed to be nurtured, or to nurture someone else, and understands instinctively that those acts are among the most important things we do for one another.
Review of advance copy received from Goodreads Giveaways
This was a very informative book. It was interesting to learn how and why the author became a midwife/doula. And to read about the African American postpartum traditions, healing and the recipes. Thank you to Goodreads Giveaways and Grand Central Publishing for the ARC.
February 12, 2026
Highly recommended. Every mother and her family, Dula and Dr. needs this book. This gives everything they need in one place.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews