Mothering, Time, and Antimaternalism: Motherhood Under Duress in the United States, 1920-1960

The book aims to broaden understanding of the diverse positions and meanings of motherhood by investigating understudied and marginalized mothers (rural itinerant, African American, and Irish Catholic American) between 1920 and 1960.

Fuelled by anxieties around feminism, a perception of men’s loss of status and masculinity, racial tensions, and fears about immigration, "antimaternalism" discourse blamed mothers for a wide range of social ills in the first half of the 20th Century. Mothering,...