Anti-maternalism

A tribute to Sonya Michel and her influential scholarship, this essay argues that, to understand the transformation of gender ideology in the twentieth-century United States, we need to appreciate the power of “anti-maternalism.” As I define it, “anti-maternalism” refers to the belief that motherhood had become too freighted with political meaning and too laden with sentiment, and that it ought to be construed in a more limited and rational manner. From the 1920s through the early 1960s, numerous American critics advanced anti-maternalist arguments to discredit some of the central principles that undergirded the dominant maternal ideal. They typically fell into one of three categories: modernist commentators who railed against sentimentality, hypocrisy and sexual repression; social scientists and psychologists who sought to extend their professional expertise; and women who disliked the Victorian construction of motherhood, with its associations of self-sacrifice and suffering. Some consciously rejected the ideal of the self-sacrificing mother as a worthy goal, while others simply lashed out at modern mothers for falling short of it. But in both cases, anti-maternalist critics helped to erode the ideological bedrock of maternalist politics—the image of American mothers as high-minded, politically disinterested actors who worked on behalf of the public good. As a result, mainstream American culture ceased to represent motherhood as a life-long, all-encompassing identity rooted in notions of self-sacrifice. Instead, it came to be widely viewed in more narrow terms—as a private, deeply fulfilling experience, and a single (albeit still central) component of a more multifaceted female identity

Aesthetics · Ideal (ethics · Ideology · Mainstream · Meaning (existential · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Sacrifice · Scholarship · Sociology · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · Psychology · Gender Studies · History · Law

• Shape-shifting Around the Maternal

  Julie Stephens•Australian Feminist Studies•2016

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