Conventional accounts of postwar women's history often emphasize the regressive character of the era, suggesting that the drumbeat of mother-blaming by Freudian psychiatrists and the shrill attacks on “mom-ism” by misogynists such as Philip Wylie were part of an effort to force women back into the home after World War II. What these accounts miss is that stay-at-home mothers who constructed their identities around their role as nurturers were as often, if not more often, the subject of these attacks as were women who worked outside the home. In Mom, Plant tells a more complex and interesting story about the ideological campaigns waged against women in the middle decades of the twentieth century.
In the nineteenth century, the Victorian cult of domesticity bestowed upon middle-class white women a unique moral authority as mothers, even as it justified their exclusion from individual political and economic rights. By that century's end, the exaltation of maternal self-sacrifice gave women a powerful—indeed, often the primary—claim on their children's love and loyalty well into adulthood, while also allowing some women to claim a voice in the regulation of public morality.
But the emotional impact of the “silver cords” that bound children to mothers could be coercive as well as cloying, as Plant shows through letters, poems, and public statements about “Mother Love” that will stun most modern readers. Further, the moral authority that proponents of “maternalism” accorded to mothers was based on white, middle-class, Victorian sensibilities. As such, Plant shows, it provoked resistance from many different quarters. Plant deftly uses a wide range of primary sources to demonstrate that opposition to maternalism crossed political lines and was associated more with modernists (including many liberals and left-wingers) than with defenders of nineteenth-century gender relations.
This does not mean that anti-maternalists were sympathetic to feminism. In fact, Plant notes, most anti-Mom crusaders wanted to eliminate the ideological and emotional esteem that middle-class women had received as compensation for their exclusion from individual rights, without extending them such rights in return. Nevertheless, many women who later became feminists were equally hostile to the white middle-class moralism and essentialist definitions of femininity that characterized maternalist ideology. The new idea that motherhood was a temporary stage of life rather than a lifelong calling and master identity helped to justify the reintegration of women into the workforce after, as well as before, the early years of childrearing.
Plant does a superb job of tracing the multi-stranded origins and mixed legacy of the assault on maternalism that peaked in the years between Wylie's 1942 attack on Mom-ism and Betty Friedan's 1963 critique of “the feminine mystique.” Her work sheds new light on the origins of the modern women's rights movement, and on the ambivalent, contradictory ideas about motherhood with which we still grapple. This well-documented, clearly written account of the social transformations in motherhood ideology will engage established scholars and students alike. It would be excellent for classroom use.
