Miranda J. Brady, Mother Trouble: Mediations of White Maternal Angst after Second Wave Feminism. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2024. 148 PP. $40.00 Cloth. ISBN: 9781487556945.
Media portrayals of “maternal angst” are everywhere. The image of a frazzled white woman struggling to juggle a successful career or home business with the demands of caring for young children is instantly recognizable. Setbacks and loss of composure are generally minor or temporary, and thus relatable and entertaining to audiences. But how are we to understand maternal angst and what does this tell us about modern motherhood?
As Miranda Brady tells us in Mother Trouble, these images form part of a long history of culturally constructed notions of “good” and “bad” motherhood. They also suggest that the goals of second wave feminism were never fully realized. Since the 1980s, women’s earnings for paid labor have improved considerably. While this is laudable, Brady notes that women’s unpaid labor in the home, including notably their reproductive labor as mothers, remains uncompensated and undervalued. Even as some second-wave feminists recognized this issue and advocated for waged housework and socialized childcare, these tasks have instead become largely commodified and privatized. A parallel process can be observed vis-a-vis healthcare, a development that has led many mothers to seek other ways of managing their medical care and that of their children.
Brady’s objective in this book is to investigate how the struggles of specifically white, cisgender mothers feature in our popular imagination. Brady explores the discourse of “angst” featured in popular media portrayal of white motherhood and what this tells us about the “unrealized potential and admissions of the second wave as we inhabit a newer feminist era”. (7) Brady argues that second wave feminism held considerable promise and opened new possibilities for all mothers; yet in the process of improving gender equity in paid labor, the issue of unremunerated reproductive labor remained invisible. Not only has reproductive labor remained sidelined, but mothers are frequently blamed for systemic problems that further devalue “motherhood” in Western societies.
The specific problems of white mothers, a highly visible demographic category in popular media, are merely one dimension of a larger set of lingering inequities for women long after the era of second wave feminism. In addition to analyzing the enduring nature of gendered inequality, Brady offers a way forward. Brady argues that feminism does not have to be at odds with mothering, but could instead recognize the unique challenges and labor performed by mothers without having to fall back on regressive gender determinism traditionally associated with pronatalist discourse Brady argues further that “such a feminism would also address the devaluation of mothers and their unpaid work as well as the erasure of motherwork performed by women of colour and other minoritized groups in mediations of motherhood.” (8)
Following the introduction, the book explores maternal angst in individual case study chapters. Chapter two begins with the Ira Levin novels Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and Stepford Wives (1975), as well as their film adaptations. Brady situates both novels in their historical context: a period of considerable change marked by greater female participation in the labor force, rising rates of divorce, expanded access to female-controlled contraception, and feminist activism. Rosemary, the lead character in Rosemary’s Baby, is a traditional housewife. Her husband is controlling, asserts his ownership of Rosemary’s body, and ultimately orchestrates her rape and impregnation by the devil. Joanna the main character of Stepford Wives is a feminist who is unnerved by the eerily conventional housewives of Stepford. Eventually she succumbs to her husband’s desire to transform her into a servile android who will cater to his every whim. Brady notes that neither woman fully understands that her inescapable exploitation was part of a process of reproducing wage relations. Both existed within a social hierarchy in which their reproductive labor as mothers and wives is devalued, uncompensated, and ultimately an essential feature the system of oppression in which they remained trapped.
Chapter three moves into the present day by examining the phenomenon of entrepreneurial motherhood in home design reality TV. Brady focuses specifically on mothers like Joanna Gaines and Kortney Wilson. Both women have built successful businesses that revolve around their caregiving obligations which, on screen at least, appear mostly to fit seamlessly into their professional lives. Both project a white, middle-class aesthetic that is appealing and aspirational to audiences. The shows present the combination of flexible paid labor with unpaid reproductive labor as a choice that is hard work, but rewarding. This “marketplace feminism” could be read as empowering to mothers; yet it is not truly attainable and masks the more problematic aspects of confronting this “choice”. Brady argues that “making the labour of mothering superficially visible by performing it in such a cursory and commodified way, while at the same time concealing the actual labour of childcare, makes already invisible labour seem easy, manageable, and completely compatible with market demand.” (53)
Whereas the women of home design reality TV are presented as good mothers, the book also explores some types of mothers who receive a more mixed reception in media representations. This includes the “Karen” (an entitled white woman) which is frequently conflated with anti-vaccine mothers. Chapter four, which is co-written with Erika Christiansen and Emily Hiltz, explores memes and other online mockery of anti-vaxx Karens and anti-vaxx mothers. Vaccine hesitancy and anti-vaccination belief systems are a larger phenomenon not exclusive to white mothers. Yet Karens feature prominently in memes taking aim at the idea of doing one’s own research or seeking homeopathic remedies as an alternative to recommended vaccination. The authors note that behind lighthearted memes lurks the assumption that women are naturally the ones responsible for children’s health and well-being, and therefore the ones to blame for what is in fact a wider phenomenon of vaccine hesitancy. Memes and other examples of participatory visual culture fall into the same tendency to reduce mothers to the good mother/bad mother dichotomy, holding them singularly responsible for vaccine hesitancy.
Another negative depiction of mothers comes in chapter five. Here Brady explores examples of white coded maternal physical and emotional estrangement as seen in the series Shameless and Modern Family. Both shows feature dysfunctional mothers estranged from their families due to their own poor choices. In a process Brady dubs “televisual alienation,” these maternal figures are mostly absent and seen solely from the perspective of their families. As depicted in these shows, children’s life struggles can be linked to their mothers’ estrangement. Due to the behavior of the “bad mother”, other characters step up to perform essential caregiving roles and become effectively “good mothers”. Brady critiques this dichotomy as well as the way these “bad mothers” exist primarily as a plot device used to create drama for other characters and portray other characters’ personal growth. Brady advocates instead for a more nuanced way of understanding and portraying maternal estrangement, one that allows for a more complex reading of how that estrangement occurred and how families cope with such difficulties.
Finally, in chapter six, the author delves into a science fiction depiction of maternal angst through an android mother from Raised by Wolves. Here the depiction is full of clichés, including that of a “monstrous and increasingly unhinged woman transitioning out of her reproductive prime.” (83) For Brady one of the more interesting features of this plotline is that Mother and Father split reproductive labor and child rearing while Mother also provides for and protects the family. It is an ultimately unsatisfactory division of labor as the paternal figure appears to make minimal contributions. For Mother, achieving success both as a provider and nurturer, or “having it all,” triggers domestic strife. This leads Mother to disable Father as her behavior becomes more erratic. Brady concludes that this plotline mirrors the failures of second wave feminism as a movement that opened new opportunities for mothers outside the home, but ultimately did not lead to a true liberation. Still, Brady notes, “this is not destiny; it is just another story told by man.” (97)
For historians of motherhood and the family, second wave feminism looms large as a transformative movement. Historians have written extensively about how second wave feminist movements fought for improvements that would help mothers, including equal wages, affordable childcare, and equitable division of domestic housework. One of the important contributions of this book is that it investigates the continued importance of second wave feminism in the present day by highlighting the continued relevance of women’s unremunerated reproductive labor as a feminist issue, even though it was essentially sidelined in the late twentieth century. The chapters in the book speak in different ways to motherhood as the unfinished business of feminism. The chapter on Raised by Wolves represents something of an outlier in this discussion since it is a fantastical vision of potential motherhood. Collectively, the chapters connect nicely to the argument by showing the problematic way in which the image of mothers as caregivers responsible for their children’s wellbeing can be problematic. Our popular image of mothers, as seen in media, can alternate problematically between “bad” mothers who are absent or ignoring medical advice and “good” mothers achieving the misleadingly attainable goal of “having it all” by combining paid labor with unpaid reproductive labor.
Margaret Andersen is associate professor of history at the University of Tennessee Knoxville. She is the author of Regeneration through Empire: French Pronatalists and Colonial Settlement in the Third Republic published by University of Nebraska Press in 2015. She is also the co-editor with Melissa Byrnes of Fertility, Family, and Social Welfare between France and Empire: The Colonial Politics of Population, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2023. Her current research focuses on motherhood, demography, and infertility in modern French history. Her forthcoming book, Fertile Expectations: The Politics of Involuntary Childlessness in Twentieth-Century France, will be published by Manchester University Press in May of 2025.