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Created: January 13, 2003
Latest Update: January13, 2003
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

"Bad" Mothers: The Politics of Blame in Twentieth-Century America by Moly Ladd-Taylor and Lauri Umansky

Site Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individual Authors, January 2003..
"Fair use" encouraged.

This teaching essay is based on the book, "Bad" Mothers: The Politics of Blame in Twentieth-Century America by Moly Ladd-Taylor and Lauri Umansky, New York University Press, 1998. ISBN: 0-847-5120-2 (pbk.) We used this as an optional text in Women and Crime a couple of years ago. Each chapter tells the story of how women are blamed and often made to feel like criminals or worse in the social expectations of motherhood. The book reads well and brings to awareness many feminist issues we often leave unaddressed for they seem to get lost in the false consciousness that such matters count for little in the new global order. Not true. Women's issues across the world permeate the difficulties encountered by half the population: women, and their children, the whole population of the future.

Chapter 8: "Momism" and the Making of Treasonous Homosexuals

The authors attribute "momism," to Philip Wylie, a popular writer, who wrote a bestseller, Generation of Vipers, in 1942. Wylie coined "the term "momism' to describe the destructive tendency among the overwhelming majority of American mothers to stifle, dominate, and manipulate their children---particularly sons---into submission and cripppling weakness. Wylie, a self-described 'motherless' man, stressed the importance of American military might in earlier magazine columns warning of the