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  • Mom: The Transformation of Motherhood in Modern America
  • Joyce Antler
Mom: The Transformation of Motherhood in Modern America. By Rebecca Jo Plant. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2010.

As Rebecca Jo Plant argues persuasively in this fine book, the ideology of maternalism, always a central tenet in the definition of women's gender roles and behavior, underwent a profound shift in the mid-twentieth century, reversing previously dominant ideals of Victorian "moral motherhood" and setting the stage for a dramatic eruption of feminist thought and action in the 1960s. Plant believes that many previous scholars and historians failed to identify and understand the potent anti-maternalist critique that arose during the interwar period and World War II. Thus they missed the seeds of the transformative consciousness that would powerfully influence middle-class mothers' behavior and emotional lives later in the century.

Although standard views of postwar life glorified motherhood and suburban domesticity, Plant contends that the 1940s and 1950s witnessed not the "resurrection" of the Victorian ideal of mother love in mainstream American culture, but its demise. Beginning with Philip Wylie's 1942 Generation of Vipers and ending with Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique two decades later, along the way discussing the resistance to "patriotic maternalism" (gold-star mothers' pilgrimages); the "pathologizing" of mother love (especially mother-son intimacy); and the quest for painless childbirth as a further repudiation of the ideal of maternal self-sacrifice, Plant amasses a wealth of information to substantiate her claim about the metamorphosis of motherhood ideals in postwar America. A re-reading of Wylie's text is central to her argument. Whereas feminists and others have largely interpreted Generation of Vipers as a deeply misogynist diatribe, Plant explains that while Wylie's tirade about ugly [End Page 170] female consumerism expressed male resentment about materialistic, manipulative housewives and mothers, it coincided with contemporary social scientific critiques of cultural consumption and with Charlotte Perkins Gilman's earlier, famous rejection of "parasitism," as well as with the flood of emerging ideas about the harms of overbearing mother love. Plant sees Wylie' critique as only the latest in a group of anti-maternal screeds beginning in the 1920s, which rather than urge women to return to the home in fact helped legitimize a new trend in mothers' employment outside the home. She also follows a revealing group of readers who embraced Wylie's book because it seemed to acknowledge their own amorphous discontent with suburban homemaking. In this regard, Generation of Vipers emerges as a text of resistance and a harbinger of a major social realignment.

In her analysis of Wylie's work and later chapters which discuss the varied pathologies of maternalism, Plant revises judgments of historians who have written on mother-blame. Experts who "scapegoated" mothers, she suggests, may have attempted to alter perceptions of acceptable maternal affect and behavior in ways that coincided with women's own inchoate critiques. Plant reframes this fit between anti-maternalist critiques and the reality of mothers' lives in her final chapter on Friedan, providing a nuanced analysis of Friedan's influential book and the many letters she received from women about it, both in praise and in condemnation.

Plant's important book deftly develops the thesis that a "transformation of motherhood" ideas in modern America was an essential prelude to the historic shift in gender roles that took place later in the century. That transformation notwithstanding, contentious ideas about motherhood and its discontents continue to roil contemporary debates about women's lives as ever-new momism critiques emerge and flourish.

Joyce Antler
Brandeis University
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