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All Moms Are Bad Moms

All moms are bad moms. Today's "good" mom would not have been a good mom in the 1700s and vice versa. Parenting standards change. The ideal is generally also based on the norms that the higher social classes in society project. Yet most people are not well off. When people of color, immigrants, and poor people are added together, the group used as the standard is a rather small one. And even those mothers who seem to best fit society's ideal conception of a mother - white, middle class, heterosexual, married, and the "correct" age to be a mom - mess up. Feminist author Angela Garbes (2018: 5) writes about the impossibility of living up to all the expectations: "[y]ou are a 'bad mom' if you have the occasional glass of wine during pregnancy, experience anxiety or ambivalence about having a baby, look forward to an epidural, feed your baby formula, or take a pull off a joint once the kids are in bed because children are exhausting." No human being can be perfect constantly for years. What mother has not stood up to grab something a few feet away only to turn around and find that her baby has rolled off the couch in a split second? Or insert equivalent situation. Thankfully, most of the time, the child is fine. But in the cases where they aren't, where the baby broke a bone, or worse, no one realizes a bone got broken until months later at the ER for something entirely different, that good mom could face an abuse investigation.

As historian Paula Fass (2016) reminds us, parenting was never easy. Mothers died in childbirth. Parents of both sexes died from diseases, spoiled food, and accidents. Young children died from childhood diseases and diseases that struck everyone, unclean water, contaminated milk, inadequate milk replacements, and accidents. Mothering has also never been monolithic. The conditions of a southern enslaved woman and her child and those of her well-off owners differed dramatically, as did those of poor, immigrant white women who settled in northern cities, although all were at the mercy of the tragedies mentioned above. Many women, by accident of birth, could never meet the archetypes of the mother held out before them. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, this meant that only well-to-do mothers, often with servants, could live up to the separate spheres ideology which kept them in the home and out of economic transactions including paid labor. Women who had to work to support themselves and their families had few protections from economic and sexual exploitation.

In the 1900s, advances in science changed mothering. Advice books for mothers took off, yet the guidance not only varied by decade but also from author to author, leaving even middle-class women from similar backgrounds following different trends in childrearing. By the end of this century, attachment parenting versus letting a child cry it out was far from resolved and, even though numerous studies pointed to children of working mothers being just fine, the press continued to harp on the so-called "mommy wars" and debate the merits of moms in the labor force. This history should leave us suspicious of modern advice books, even the ones we like, and help us recognize that there is not just one way to be a good mom.

Post World War II, mother blaming was rampant because society viewed mothers as responsible for their children's psychological well-being. When a child or adult had issues, it was always the mother's fault. This created a new kind of anxiety for moms, one that only deepened as mothers took on more and more roles for their children as the century progressed, including prepping them for academic achievement. Fear of strangers and other dangers led moms to keep their children barely further than arm's length, rather than allowing them to play with other children or to be supervised by older siblings, and this, along with a decrease in chores for kids, further burdened mothers. By the last decade of the twentieth century, the ideology of intensive mothering was so pervasive that it was slipping beyond the confines of middle-class white moms to all mothers of different ethnicities and socioeconomic statuses, even those who had fewer resources with which to provide it (Ishizuka 2019).

While most moms have internalized some degree of intensive mothering, the diversity in particular parenting styles continues to create divisions among moms today (Crane and Christopher 2018). Some mothers, including moms of color, teen moms, moms living with a disability, and moms who do not fit traditional gender and sexuality categories, face more opprobrium than others (O'Reilly 2021b). All moms encounter challenges with their children, blame when things go wrong, and lack of political support for combining work and family.

Nineteenth century

As industrialization diversified people's labor and cities swelled, the family also changed. Families became more nuclear, affective ties within the family became more important, and the broader community commanded less influence (Shorter 1975). The late 1800s ushered in the idea of separate spheres for men and women. Mothers became the guardians of morality, and as such were cast as too pure to be sullied by economic and political matters. Thus women were confined to the home while men dealt with commerce, at least in well-to-do families. The separate-spheres arrangement left out not only most black women but also poor white women while simultaneously depending on their labor to keep middle-class and wealthy women comfortably at home.

Slaveholders sought to keep enslaved women alive and sometimes procured medical help for them, but most enslaved mothers suffered from overwork, poor foodstuffs, corporal punishment, rape, and forced pregnancy, and losing their children when they or their offspring were sold or inherited by another owner (Cooper Owens 2018; Roberts 1997). In spite of, or because of, the sexual abuse they endured, black and some white immigrant women were portrayed as licentious, uncontrollable "breeders," and even as "missing links" between animals and humans who could be used for medical experimentation (Cooper Owens 2018). White, US-born women from "good" families were viewed as chaste and driven by maternal instinct. Only bourgeois women were seen as respectable, given their ability to be fully devoted to domesticity.

Unlike black women in the decades that followed slavery, white immigrant women were eventually able to change their status. While numerous immigrant women from Ireland, Italy, and elsewhere faced grueling toil outside their homes or prostitution to support themselves, some managed to marry US-born white men, as did their daughters. Marriage was the ticket to status for many white women, but it was also a golden cage. Some women, however, used this status to their advantage to lobby for causes that mattered to them. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, mothers transformed their private power as guardians of hearth and morality into public power through political action as mothers. Fighting for temperance, social welfare, labor standards, and health initiatives were all the domain of women protecting the health of the nation's citizens, young and grown. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, reformers pushed for child protections and the increasing involvement of public institutions and the state in children's lives.

Previously largely confined to the interior, and well away from politics, especially if she was "well bred," a woman could now legitimately spout public policy demands from a stump if those demands could be attached to caretaking and morality, her designated role expanding to ensuring the protection of all and not just her family. Women seeking suffrage turned the argument that they could not vote because of their morality on its head: "Women deserved the vote because they were virtuous, sober, devout, respectable, and maternal" (Thurer 1994: 215), and their votes would make society better. The National Congress of Mothers, founded in 1897, which became the Parents and Teachers Association of America, initially connected being a good mother to caring for all children from all homes, tying advocacy for one's own child to concern for everybody's children (Fass 2016).

Twentieth century

Advances in science and industry dramatically influenced mothering in the 1900s. During the twentieth century, physicians and psychologists became the experts, and mothers were expected to trust them and avail themselves of their knowledge, including parenting how-to books, rather than turning to female relatives for advice (Fass 2016). Thurer writes that

"scientific" motherhood upgraded mothers' domestic tasks and endowed them with an aura of professionalism . . . The bad news was that much of the science was questionable; it undermined mothers' confidence in themselves; and it placed mothers under the thumb of self-appointed - usually male - experts. It also needlessly complicated inherently simple tasks - feeding, for example, became clock-bound; burping a baby was elevated to a fine art; providing fresh air became a complex exercise - all of which may have enhanced motherhood's mystique, but was pedantic, superfluous, and just plain silly. (Thurer 1994: 226)

The questionable scientific ethos of the early twentieth century included eugenics. Although Irish women and later Eastern European and Italian women...