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The Transformation of Motherhood in Modern America
by Rebecca Jo Plant
In the early twentieth century, Americans often waxed lyrical about "Mother Love," signaling a conception of motherhood as an all-encompassing identity, rooted in self-sacrifice and infused with social and political meaning.
By the 1940s, the idealization of motherhood had waned, and the nation's mothers found themselves blamed for a host of societal and psychological ills. In Mom, Rebecca Jo Plant traces this important shift by exploring the evolution of maternalist politics, changing perceptions of the mother-child bond, and the rise of new approaches to childbirth pain and suffering. Plant argues that the assault on sentimental motherhood came from numerous quarters. Male critics who railed against female moral authority, psychological experts who hoped to expand their influence, and women who strove to be more than wives and mothers--all for their own distinct reasons--sought to discredit the longstanding maternal ideal. By showing how motherhood ultimately came to be redefined as a more private and partial component of female identity, Plant illuminates a major reorientation in American civic, social, and familial life that still reverberates today.
"[A]n immensely smart and sensitive analysis of the causes of the cultural assault on maternalism...the reasons that women were often complicitous with that assault, and the resulting alienation from their maternal role that caused so many women to embrace second-wave feminism." —Victoria Brown, Women and Social Movements in the U.S.
This information about Mom was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Rebecca Jo Plant is associate professor of history at the University of California, San Diego.
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