publishing award-winning, innovative, and controversial feminist books since 1991

Spinifex Press is an award-winning independent feminist press, publishing innovative and controversial feminist books with an optimistic edge.

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Book Of The Week


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Sale Price: A$19.99 Original Price: A$24.95

Donna F. Johnson

For a mother, the death of a child under any circumstances is unbearable. When the child is severed from the mother’s life by his or her own hand, the cleaving is particularly brutal. It is a bereavement with no equivalence in human experience.

If you are a mother today, you are mothering in patriarchy. What that means, and how it might impact a mother grieving the loss of her child to suicide, is a subject Donna Johnson explores in this profound book. Johnson, in her counselling role in a police service, worked closely with mothers who lost a child to suicide, supporting them through those first traumatic days, weeks and months as the impact of suicide reverberated throughout their lives.

What struck her was the absence of specific supports for mothers and the prevalence of a type of paralysis in the mothers. The burden of overwhelming guilt, shame and a huge sense of failure – emotions not shared by the fathers of the children – impeded the possibility of mothers recovering from their child’s suicide. In Shattered Motherhood, Donna Johnson argues for specific supports for mothers in these circumstances; supports that meet their unique needs, recognise the depth of their suffering and provide them with proper care. Through a feminist lens, she considers the institutions of marriage, motherhood and the family as well as the suffering of mothers who have lost a child to suicide.

Johnson articulates her belief in the power of women coming together to name their own experiences, feel their own pain and search for their own solutions.

FEBRUARY 2025 | ISBN 9781922964144 | Paperback | 180 pages | 135 x 180 mm

THIS BOOK IS PART OF THE SPINIFEX SHORTS COMPLETE COLLECTION

Download our latest catalogue today!

Discover our Bestselling Books

1. Transsexual Transgender Transhuman by Jennifer Bilek (2024)
2. Trauma Trails, Recreating Song Lines by Judy Atkinson (2002)
3. Seven Sisters of the Pleiades by Munya Andrews (2004)
4. Doublethink by Janice G Raymond (2021)
5. The Women’s Pool edited by Lynne Spender (2021)
6. On the Meaning of Sex by Kajsa Ekis Ekman (2023)
7. “He Chose Porn Over Me” edited by Melinda Tankard Reist (2022)
8. Harvesting Darkness by Robin Morgan (2023)
9. The Rust Red Land by Robyn Bishop (2023)
10. Not Sacred, Not Squaws by Cherry Smiley (2023)
11. Detransition: Beyond Before and After by Max Robinson (2021)
12. Greek Actually by Penny Zagarelou-Mackieson (2023)
13. Invisible Women of Prehistory Judy Foster (2013)
14. The End of Patriachy by Robert Jensen (2017)
15. Grace & Marigold by Mira Robertson (2024)
16. Transgender Body Politics by Heather Brunskell-Evans (2020)
17. Haifa Fragments khulud khamis (2015)
18. Being and Being Bought by Kajsa Ekis Ekman (2013)
19. The Leaves  by Jacqueline Rule (2024)
20. Flying with Paper Wings (new edition) by Sandy Jeffs (2024)


updated January 2025

We’ve updated our Gender Critical Collection. Buy the pack and save. Order now.


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Statement from Spinifex Press

#WeStandWithUshaAkella

Men’s rights are alive and well in India.

We have been subject to a mass outpouring from Men’s Rights Activists who have targeted Usha Akella’s book I Will Not Bear You Sons and placing one star reviews on the Amazon India website and other sites in protest of its publication.

MRAs have taken exception to a line quoted in online book reviews (regarding aborting male fetuses) and have not looked at the poem in its full context. If they had looked at the context, it is the speaking character answering her tyrannical father-in-law who wants the speaker to have only sons.

Usha’s poetry is brave and brilliant. We stand behind this book and trust you will too.