Investigating the evolution and transformation of white motherhood in the twentieth century, Rebecca Jo Plant offers a new perspective in locating the American mother against a changing sociopolitical background. In the early decades of the twentieth century, the primary duty of white mothers was to be an “angel,” providing “mother love,” which, according to Plant, was assumed to have “the capacity to transform and redeem” (5). In this sense, American motherhood, she writes, became both institutionalized and sacred. Tracing motherhood's changing meaning, Plant focusses on the period from the interwar years to the beginnings of second-wave feminism, interrogating in particular the impact of Betty Friedan on the meaning of “motherhood.”

Providing a comprehensive summary tracing the impact of Smith College's President William Allan Nielson's satirical remarks in 1937 equating “mother love” to “self-love,” Plant finds that the interwar period was an incubator of antimaternalist critique, producing a shift from motherhood being viewed as a “sacred estate,” valorized by the American public, to a less formal and more private role within the nuclear family. Historicizing Nielson's remarks against growing antimaternalist criticism, Plant interrogates Philip Wylie's notorious “momism” critique: in The Generation of Vipers (1942), Wylie accuses American mothers of feminizing their children, specifically their sons. In her review of the growing antimaternalist sentiment, Plant provides succinct analysis regarding how the pathologization of white mothers contributed to shifting perspectives on patriotic maternalism. No longer were mothers viewed as privileged with the underlying notion that raising a soldier was a mother's civic duty, rather motherhood became viewed as one facet of a woman's life and the medicalization of childbirth eliminated the notion that childbirth was a painful, yet womanly, duty.

Overall, Plant provides a fresh account of the white American mother's changing position in American society. However, her examination of motherhood would have been improved had she further developed her analysis of how maternal mental health and childbirth contributed to the changing dynamic in the construction of the dominant maternal ideal. While drawing upon the impact of psychiatry and psychology on the evolution of social motherhood, Plant misses the opportunity to further the debate on how the medicalization of white motherhood contributed to the transformation of “mothers” into “mom” in the national psyche. Nevertheless, Plant succeeds in locating how post-World War II mothers, the offspring of “mother love” parenting, grappled with the evolutionary nature of American motherhood in her examination of the work of Betty Friedan. Emphasizing the work of Friedan, Plant locates the transformation of motherhood as rooted in the interwar antimaternalism critiques, while noting that the liberal and conservative women's movements of the 1960s and 1970s were critical in continuing the cultural and social shifts in constructions of white motherhood.