Mom: The Transformation of Motherhood in Modern America - Softcover

Plant, Rebecca Jo

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226670228 ISBN 13: 9780226670225

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2012

Synopsis

 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.

About this title

About the Author:

Rebecca Jo Plant is associate professor of history at the University of California, San Diego.

Review:

"[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. 

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0226670228
• ISBN 13: 9780226670225
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 250