When Andrea O’Reilly received a call from a publisher expressing interest in an encyclopedia on motherhood, she knew her field of expertise had finally arrived.

O’Reilly, an associate professor of women’s studies at York University and the founder of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement (MIRCI), has dedicated her career to the study of motherhood and having it recognized as a legitimate topic of scholarly inquiry.

This month her Encyclopedia of Motherhood was released by Sage Press – a 1,500-page, three-volume collection featuring 700 entries on just about every aspect of the complex topic.

O’Reilly weighed her work. It came in at more than 11lbs., which is more than “any of my babies weighed,” she joked.

An academic examination of motherhood didn’t exist when O’Reilly worked to earn her PhD in English at York, she said, and that prompted her to design a course dedicated solely to the subject in 1990 – the first of its kind in Canada.

“When I first started teaching my course they thought I was teaching women how to diaper babies … you wouldn’t say that about a history of war. If you were taking a course on war you wouldn’t say you’re teaching people how to load a gun and it was very insulting,” she told CityNews.ca.

“They just assumed motherhood does not have a history, does not have a culture, doesn’t have an ideology, it just is. And that’s completely wrong. Motherhood’s an institution like anything else and it has a very complicated history and differences cross-culturally. It has a psychological, cultural, anthropological element, but because it’s so naturalized in our culture we don’t give it any economic value, societal value.”

O’Reilly noted she may not have noticed the “invisibility” of motherhood in the academic world at the time had she not been a mother herself – she started her doctorate studies with a two-year-old child and gave birth to two others within the next three years.

Her efforts led to change. The study of motherhood in North American universities is growing with about 100 courses on the subject now being taught, she said.

But it still remains a “sidebar” subject, she added, even in women’s studies departments.

“What isn’t really happening is motherhood is still not being taught in the mainstream courses, so it’s still being kind of ghettoized,” she said.

Aside from creating the first university course in Canada on mothering, O’Reilly also founded the world’s first feminist association for the study of motherhood.

“At the time, I just assumed one existed somewhere else, I just thought we’d do a Canadian chapter and then when I started researching I found no, there was no association for the study of motherhood,” she said.

“That really shocked me.”

MIRCI, formerly known as the Association for Research on Mothering, or ARM, launched in 1998 due to the overwhelming response O’Reilly received when she hosted an academic conference on the subject a year earlier.

O’Reilly said she knew she’d hit a nerve when she received the enthusiastic feedback.

Six months after launching ARM at York, the group began an academic journal and in 2006 it ventured into publishing with Demeter Press, which has put out just over a dozen books on mothering-related topics.

The association recently shut down, temporarily, due to funding issues. O’Reilly said it’s been reborn as MIRCI and has moved out of the university setting and will operate as a non-profit.

“Women need this, not just academics, but mothers need this. So many mothers wrote to me and said you gave legitimacy to what I was doing, that it was serious and worthy of intellectual discussion,” O’Reilly said of the response after word spread of ARM’s closure, noting she’d received emails from as far away as Nepal.

MIRCI is throwing a fundraising gala as part of its conference at Ryerson on May 21 and 22. Several writers, including Governor General’s Literary Prize winner Miriam Toews, will hold readings at the event.

Information on the MIRCI conference and fundraiser

Related: The Growing Motherhood Movement: When Parents Get Political

shawne.mckeown@citynews.rogers.com