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  • Reshaping Expectations and Emerging Anxieties:Ideal Womanhood Receives a Makeover in Twentieth Century America
  • Tarah Brookfield (bio)
Carolyn M. Goldstein, Creating Consumers: Home Economists in Twentieth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 2012)
Rebecca Jo Plant, Mom: The Transformation of Motherhood in Modern America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2010)
Kristin Celello, Making Marriage Work: A History of Marriage and Divorce in the Twentieth-Century United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 2009)

Prior to the twentieth century, being a loving mother, a loyal wife, and a skilled homemaker was viewed as the pinnacle of ideal womanhood, a standard set for and often by white, middle class women. Many works in colonial and nineteenth-century American history have analyzed the reverence for women who appeared to embody this trifecta.1 An equal amount of attention has been given to understanding the consequences for women viewed as not [End Page 295] living up to this ideal, including those who rejected these identities, as well as those whose race and class excluded opportunities to properly access these roles.2 The dogma shifts in the twentieth century, when the very notion of ideal womanhood was deconstructed, critiqued, and remade. Most dramatically, enfranchisement, paid work, and family planning rights came to be seen by many women as critical components of modern womanhood. By the end of the century, increased frequency and acceptability of single parenthood, divorce, and even same sex marriage had radically transformed familial roles and household types. Alongside these changes, conservative voices continued to praise the importance of the traditional mother, wife, and homemaker ideal, while simultaneously tweaking the responsibilities attached to each role. Efforts to understand the origins and meaning behind the shifting gender norms, the subsequent anxieties and tensions caused by them, and their impact on women, families, and society have dominated the historiography of twentieth century American women’s and gender history.3

The three books reviewed for this essay add to this discourse with fresh looks at how the conceptions of and qualifications for being a mother, wife, and homemaker evolved over the course of the twentieth century and withstood – some better than others – challenges to their deemed social value and association with ideal womanhood. Although women often held all three identities at once, each book is devoted to examining only one persona. This approach allows readers to appreciate the independent nature of these roles, particularly in regards to public perceptions that separate the images and responsibilities associated with motherhood from wifely and other domestic duties. Despite the different foci, the books share a similar chronology and set [End Page 296] of players, including the two world wars, feminist activism, the rising prominence of experts, and the influence of certain texts in the popular press. The books also demonstrate how closely the ideal representations and expectations of what it meant to be an ideal woman were rooted for much, if not all, of the century in middle class values and closely associated with white privilege. Reading these three texts in conjunction allows readers to see how fragmented the values and labour associated with and between mother, wife, and homemaker became over the course of the twentieth century until it was no longer a presumed trifecta of American womanhood.

From Mother to Plain Old Mom

Rebecca Jo Plant’s Mom: The Transformation of Motherhood in Modern America, the most engaging and creative of the three books, reminds readers that while mothers have occupied an especially sacrosanct status in American culture for most of the nation’s history, the twentieth century treated them as a highly contested figure. Plant ascribes this decline in status to the erosion of moral motherhood, which was a “sentimental domesticity” rooted in antebellum and later Victorian ideals that “exalted the mother as the angel of the house,” charging her with the moral guardianship of her family, home, and nation by emoting “a love so powerful, enduring and selfless as to border on the divine.”4 By the interwar period, a new maternal ideal had been born, one founded in a functional biological role devoid of sentiment. Plant argues this departure was prompted by “white, middle-class women’s gradual incorporation...

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