Mom: The Transformation of Motherhood in Modern America (review)

The history of motherhood, fascinating as it is, has attracted little scholarship, particularly in the twentieth century. Although republican motherhood, scientific motherhood, and maternalist politics within social-reform movements have certainly received attention, “Mom,” a creation of the second half of the twentieth century, has only now found her biographer. Using an impressive array of printed and archival sources and giving close readings to such germinal works as Philip Wylie’s Generation of Vipers (New York, 1942) and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (New York, 1963), Plant provides a detailed analysis of the rise of the modern woman known as “mom,” uniting traditional historical sources with an effective analysis of the psychological literature of the interwar period.

Plant argues that the transformation of motherhood began in the wake of World War I and was nearly complete by the 1960s. Mother love, the dominant cultural ideal that held sway for generations, gradually surrendered its place in American life under assault from a cadre of experts who depicted it as pathological rather than praiseworthy. In making this claim, Plant is careful to note that this attack targeted only white, middle-class mothers and that the dialogue was never one-sided. Some women responded to Wylie, Friedan, and others by asserting the value of traditional motherhood in the face of a new psychology that depicted it as a threat to society as well as to individual offspring. Others expressed their wholehearted support for the new view. Setting her analysis in this framework allows Plant to foreshadow debates that arose in the era of second-wave feminism, even as she keeps her focus on the unraveling of traditional motherhood in earlier decades.

The most interesting and informative chapters concern the mothers of soldiers. Plant reports that Congress ironically was funding pilgrimages of gold-star mothers to the graves of their sons who had died fighting in Europe during World War I at the same time as it was ending the Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Protection Act. Even African- American mothers and widows were sent on these overseas trips—albeit in segregated second-tier ships. By World War II, the glorification of mothers who had sent their sons to war ended; mothers who sought sympathy for their sacrifice found, if not hostility, only grudging acknowledgment. Indeed, mothers were blamed for their sons’ rejection from service on psychological grounds, as well as for their sons’ neuropsychiatric discharges and their combat exhaustion. “Momism,” the pejorative term popularized by Wylie, threatened national security; the statistics concerning rejected servicemen gave evidence of the perils that it posed to the nation. Experts still advised the intensive mothering of infants, but for older children, a mother’s obligation was to diminish emotional dependency. The once-celebrated cords of love that bound children to mothers now became a psychological noose that threatened to strangle vulnerable offspring. An epidemic of mother blaming was about to get underway.

Readers will find much to think about in Plant’s fine book. Her analyses of anti-maternalism and its proponents will re-inform historians’ understanding of both the interwar years and the baby-boom era. Scholars of women’s history, family history, and modern American history and culture would do well to take notice.