Mom

A cultural history of motherhood in America during and between the two world wars. Motherhood in the early 20th century was viewed as being sentimental, moral, and patriotic. These views came under dispute as the century progressed, first in a semi-serious and individual way (a speech by a president of Smith College, a polemical book by a gadfly), and later in a more directed and organized way (the debate over the WWI Widow's Pilgrimage, medical control over childbirth, and psychological control over child rearing). Towards the middle of the century women began asserting their views on what motherhood is and should be (Betty Friedan and The Feminine Mystique). Plant weaves these strands together to show how motherhood was changed in the first half of the century, what it had become by the century's midpoint, and the trajectories it would follow in the ensuing decades under various feminist waves.