Rebecca Jo Plant
University of California, San Diego
My project, "The Repeal of Mother Love: Momism and the Reconstruction of Motherhood in
Philip Wylie's America" explores the transformation of motherhood as a social and civic role, as
well as a subjective identity, in the period from 1920 to 1960. I argue that these years witnessed
the demise of a longstanding sentimental model of motherhood that celebrated the mother-child
relationship as the most sanctified of human bonds. Beginning in the 1920s, and increasingly in
the 1930s and 1940s, psychiatric experts and their popular exponents advocated a less emotive
and intrusive maternal style - one that promised to foster the psychological autonomy that
democratic self-government seemed to require. Although this new model stressed the
importance of early mother-child attachment, it sought to limit maternal influence after the first
few years of life, calling for greater paternal involvement as an antidote to potentially
pathological mother love. Moreover, women were strongly discouraged from "living through"
their children or deriving their entire identities from their maternal role. Preoccupied with
averting crippling ties of dependency between generations, experts argued that mothers needed
to be more emotionally self-sufficient, cultivating interests that extended beyond the home.
Ultimately, I hope to show that the foundation for much present-day thinking about motherhood
can be traced to the very period that is typically viewed (by both left- and right-wing critics) as
so distant from our own.
My research in the Philip Wylie Papers at Princeton's Firestone Library is at the core of my
project. An extraordinarily successful commercial writer, Philip Wylie (1902-1971) enjoyed a
wide readership during the 1940s and 1950s; over the course of his career, he published over 34
novels, 13 nonfiction books, and countless magazine articles and serialized stories. His claim to
fame, however, rests on his 1942 surprise bestseller, Generation of Vipers, a satiric critique of
American morals and manners. In a chapter entitled "Common Women," Wylie attacked the
iconic all-American Mother and diagnosed the nation as suffering from a severe case of
"momism." Wylie's neologism was quickly appropriated by psychiatrists and sociologists,
lending the concept a degree of professional legitimacy. As a result, Wylie came to be regarded
as a popular expert on such subjects as motherhood, fatherhood, mental health, and sexual
relations. His publications and his enormous body of correspondence - which includes
thousands of letters from readers - is a treasure trove for anyone interested in how popular
culture and psychiatric experts helped to reshape mainstream gender ideology in the mid-
twentieth century U.S. Materials in the archive are valuable for shedding light on the close
collaboration between psychiatrists and their popularizers, as well as the complex ways in which
average, middle-class Americans responded to prescriptive literature.
I am very grateful for the Friends of the Princeton University Library Research Grant for
allowing me to return to the archive as I begin revising my dissertation for publication. During
my stay, I concentrated on fan mail that Wylie received in the 1950s. These letters demonstrate
that the momism critique remained influential well into the Cold War, shaping the attitudes of a
new generation of parents. In particular, numerous letters from women vowing to avoid the
pitfalls of momism suggest that Wylie's caricature served as a powerful negative stereotype
against which young mothers of the baby boom sought to define themselves. The Research
Grant thus provided me the opportunity to gather sources for extending my narrative forward in
time-sources that help demonstrate that an anti-maternal strain resided at the very heart of Cold
War domesticity.
libraryf@princeton.edu
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