Ruth Feldstein is Assistant Professor of History and of History and Literature at Harvard University.
Summary
The apron-clad, white, stay-at-home mother. Black bus boycotters in Montgomery, Alabama. Ruth Feldstein explains
that these two enduring, yet very different, images of the 1950s did not run parallel merely by ironic coincidence,
but were in fact intimately connected. What she calls "gender conservatism" and "racial liberalism"
intersected in central, yet overlooked, ways in midÐtwentieth-century American liberalism.
Motherhood in Black and White analyzes the widespread assumption within liberalism that social problems--ranging
from unemployment to racial prejudice--could be traced to bad mothering. This relationship between liberalism and
motherhood took shape in the 1930s, expanded in the 1940s and 1950s, and culminated in the 1960s. Even as civil
rights moved into the mainstream of an increasingly visible liberal agenda, images of domineering black "matriarchs"
and smothering white "moms" proliferated.
Feldstein draws on a wide array of cultural and political events that demonstrate how and why mother-blaming furthered
a progressive anti-racist agenda. From the New Deal into the Great Society, bad mothers, black or white, were seen
as undermining American citizenship and as preventing improved race relations, while good mothers, responsible
for raising physically and psychologically fit future citizens, were held up as a precondition to a strong democracy.
By showing how ideas about gender roles and race relations intersected in films, welfare policies, and civil rights
activism, as well as in the assumptions of classic works of social science, Motherhood in Black and White speaks
to questions within women's history, African American history, political history, and cultural history. Ruth Feldstein
analyzes representations of black women and white women, as well as the political implications of these representations.
She brings together race and gender, culture and policy, vividly illuminating each.
