“Some version of the pristine influencer mother has been pushed on American women since the 1800s — and it’s always been a lie.”
There are two diametrically opposed concepts of motherhood that dominate conversation in America today. There’s the Instagram influencer’s vision of the ideal mother with perfectly groomed, smiling children set against a backdrop of high-end appliances. And there’s the gritty real talk of comedians and writers like Ali Wong, who described her early days of motherhood as “a never-ending festival of feces.
As economic production moved outside the home, the immediate family became a separate unit, independent of its neighbors. By the early 19th century, what historians call “the cult of true womanhood” emerged. That was the notion that men faced the gritty, morally suspect outside world of moneymaking and politics, while morally superior women kept home and family pure.
The pressure to stuff down every bad feeling while also raising unblemished children was starting to get to women by the mid-1800s; their diaries and letters express emotions that could have been written last week, save for the antiquated language. “I fear I am not very charitable towards babies,” wrote Loula Kendall Rogers after the birth of her first child in 1864, “as I find myself at such times wishing for a ‘lodge in some vast wilderness, where the cry of babies might never reach me more.
At the same time, Freudian theory warned that it was dangerous for children to get too close to their mothers and that it was wrong for mothers to expect veneration. So women lost the reverence they had previously received from both their children and society, Ms. Coontz said. By the 1950s, we got the smiling and never-tired Donna Reeds and June Cleavers of black-and-white television: “a fly on the wall, but with the hands to stir coffee,” as Ms. Coontz described them.
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