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  • Working Mothers and Happy Housewives:Grocery Stores, Mothers, and The Loss of Power
  • Katherine Leonard Turner (bio)
Rebecca Jo Plant . Mom: The Transformation of Motherhood in Modern America. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010. xi + 264 pp. Notes and index. $37.50.
Tracey Deutsch . Building a Housewife's Paradise: Gender, Politics, and American Grocery Stores in the Twentieth Century. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010. 352 pp. Illustrations, tables, notes, bibliography, index. $35.00.

In two recent books, Rebecca Jo Plant and Tracey Deutsch examine the twentieth-century transformation of women's traditional roles as mothers and food shoppers. Both find that women's power and authority diminished even as women were told that their horizons and personal freedoms were expanding.

Plant narrates a fierce cultural conflict over the uses of motherhood during the twentieth century. She argues that the nineteenth-century cult of motherhood lasted longer than historians have previously thought, but also that the postwar critique of motherhood had deeper roots. In the early twentieth century, women drew political and social power from their identities as mothers. "Mothers of the nation" claimed political power based on the sacrifices they had made for and of their children, particularly sons who had died during war. Mothers were martyred by the inevitable suffering of childbirth and were sainted by the transformative experience of raising children; hence they claimed moral authority over the home and community. This political and social identity had been the basis of countless and varied women's organizations, from municipal reformers to temperance reformers, from pacifists to patriots.

During the 1920s, however, numerous voices began to assail this formerly unassailable identity, and the chorus of voices grew stronger until it reached a climax in the 1950s. Plant demonstrates thoroughly that "antimaternalism" was not limited to misogynists, or indeed to any one group; "their critiques could sound strikingly similar, even when fueled by radically different motives and political visions" (p. 8). Some in the 1920s painted organized mothers [End Page 106] as meddling and sanctimonious; Plant tells the fascinating story of the controversy over government-funded pilgrimages to Europe so that "gold star mothers" could visit their sons' graves. Philip Wylie's 1942 Generation of Vipers attacked "momism" with a vicious critique of American mothers as parasitic, priggish, selfish "domestic tyrants." Plant points out that, despite Wylie's "breathtaking misogyny," many female readers wrote to agree that mothers didn't deserve social adulation simply on that basis. Many women, mothers themselves, told Wylie that they had adopted a less sentimental and more "modern" approach to parenting to avoid being identified with "momism." An influential new psychological perspective suggested that American mothers had been smothering their children to the point of damaging them, inflicting lifelong guilt complexes with their martyrdom, and pushing sons into neurotic helplessness or homosexuality. Overbearing mothers were blamed for the inability of soldiers to cope mentally with the stress of battle during World War II; far from raising soldiers, mothers were now accused of permanently damaging them. Motherhood lost its martyrdom in other ways as well. The increased availability of pain relief for childbirth weakened the "martial metaphor" that had compared women's suffering in childbirth to a soldier's suffering in battle. Finally, a wave of midcentury feminist critiques (led by Betty Friedan) argued that motherhood was a hollow, stultifying, and unsatisfying life choice. Friedan drew on the psychological critique to argue that women who passed up careers for full-time mothering would find only frustration, and their children would suffer as well with a bored, neurotic mom.

Plant concludes her study with Friedan and a nuanced discussion of the implications of antimaternalism. As she emphasizes throughout the book, just as widely disparate groups of women had invoked motherhood as a source of political or social power, so too widely disparate groups attacked motherhood for their own purposes. Thus Friedan and many other progressive women found themselves in agreement with misogynists such as Wylie, piping an old tune, sneering at those who embraced motherhood as a full-time "career." Plant asks, "Was it necessary to launch a full-scale assault on the notion that motherhood and homemaking could be the basis...

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