"[A] rigorous academic study. . . . Policymakers, health-care providers, and scientific researchers will want to take note."

Publishers Weekly

"A rich, elegantly argued analysis of the long history of scientific and popular thinking about 'maternal effects' on the fetuses that women gestate, full of well-articulated plunges into the archives of scientific texts and journals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This is an important, beautifully researched, and well-written book by an author whose prior works have literally changed their fields."

Rayna Rapp, New York University

"Richardson reveals that epigenetics is not just the newest cutting-edge, pro-social, plasticity-favoring, anti-genetic, and anti-reductionist field to emerge from modern molecular genetics. Rather, it is also the vector of newly problematic images and social roles that limit women and diminish the status of pregnancy and motherhood, in ways that are disturbingly similar to nineteenth-century societal notions of women's roles. Richardson's exquisitely documented arguments will be compelling to all with an interest in the complex interface of science and society."

Michael J. Wade, Indiana University

"This is a major contribution from a feminist STS scholar who deftly interweaves scientific, epistemological, and ethical considerations into a tour-de-force book on a topic with implications for mothers, families, and communities."

Alexandra Minna Stern, author of Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America