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This chapter concludes Part III of the book. Unable to leave the workforce, the women in the interviews settle for resting the measure of motherhood not on being there every moment but on being visible at key moments and logging what many call “family time.” Streamlining employment is the compromise for these women, and their success in this attempt depends on their skill sets. Women are giving up their personal time, social life, and outside hobbies so that they can be home on time for day care pickups or in time for dinner, things that are essential to them. Crucial to these women's survival on this fault line is help with child care. Besides surrounding their child with people who care, the final test of good mothering for these women is providing the social capital for middle-class citizenship.

This chapter argues that mother-love is highly idealized in Indian Buddhist literature as the most intense, compassionate, and self-sacrificing type of love possible. As such, mother-love often serves as a metaphor for the compassion of buddhas and bodhisattvas, who are said to love all beings “just as a mother loves her only son.” At the same time, however, the particularistic love characteristic of the mother stands in sharp contrast to the universal love characteristic of the Buddha, and thus mother-love is also condemned as the most pernicious form possible of attachment and suffering. As metaphor, mother-love is idealized; as reality, it is ultimately condemned. The Buddhist depiction of mother-love is further clarified not only by contrasting mother-love with father-love, but also by comparing good mothers and bad mothers, and by contrasting the mother’s love for the son with the idealized son’s love for the mother.

This chapter looks at how underlying social processes of status inequality, anxiety, and shame shape infant feeding orientation. It examines this connection by looking at the ways in which status anxiety experienced through shame makes infant feeding an emotionally intense feature of early mothering. Infant feeding is often experienced as emotionally intense, not only because of practical concerns with how one's baby might be growing and thriving, but also because of the moralised approach to promotion strategies. When breastfeeding is established as the hallmark of good mothering, the feeling that one is failing can be very damaging, whether one is not breastfeeding at all, not breastfeeding appropriately, or not breastfeeding with sufficient dedication. It should be no surprise that advertising for infant formula explicitly reassures non-breastfeeding mothers that this approach to feeding also signals devotion to infant health, bonding, and taking pride in children's development. However, this chapter argues that the shaming effects of current breastfeeding advocacy also undermine attempts to normalise the practice, as avoiding potential shame can mean avoiding breastfeeding completely.

This chapter illustrates the justifications homeschoolers have developed to fight the emotional stigma of irresponsible mothering that came with keeping their children out of conventional schools. The term “stigma” in itself is much more nuanced in sociological terms, as it comes with the understanding that stigma is created via perceptions of a wrongdoing being committed. And one way for homeschoolers to deal with a stigma is to influence others' perception by making statements to cast themselves in a positive light. Homeschoolers defended their maternal identities by mining the discourse of good mothering to justify their feelings, a finding that suggests emotions play a crucial yet heretofore unexamined role in our cultural conceptions of good mothering.

This chapter examines representations of pregnant women who cope with “unwanted newborns,” as seen in infant abandonment prevention advocacy, safe haven legal advocacy, and media coverage of women who have abandoned or safely surrendered newborns. Safe haven laws encourage “a subtle structure of surveillance over women, warning society to be alert to mothers who might abandon—or abort—their children.” The chapter considers how this surveillance structure is advanced by advocates who target teenagers and school-age populations. To understand how baby safe haven advocates have publicized the laws and educated the public about the need for them, the chapter looks at public service announcements, short videos, television and radio stories, websites, school curricula, and Facebook pages. It considers how these safe haven awareness campaigns promote visible images of good and bad mothers, and thus narrow ideas about the nature of maternal love and who deserves to be a mother.

This chapter demonstrates how a host of social justice causes remain at the core of U.S. leftist women's postwar activism, including civil rights and women's equality, and more importantly, peace. Response to their attempts to push the boundaries of good mothering to include such endeavors as political organizing and peace activism suggests the difficulties they would face balancing the personal and the political in the immediate postwar era. The experiences of a group of Progressive Party organizers working across the nation at both national and local levels shows how their determination to continue working for leftist causes, while also performing their social roles as mothers, wives, daughters, and waged workers, was increasingly complicated by domestic reaction to international events.

This chapter examines birthmothers’ maternal identity as related to their sense of parental obligation, moral status, and personal loss. Drawing on first-person accounts, the chapter explores how western ideals of motherhood contribute to birthmothers’ decisions to relinquish their children. It then turns to a discussion of current adoption practice and policy as a factor in birthmothers’ experiences of relinquishment. The chapter considers feminist alternatives to the tradition model of parenting as a means of transforming our approach to adoption. But to more fully address the complexities of adoption policy and practice, the social and economic inequities between most birthmothers and adoptive parents must be taken into account.

This chapter discusses Sinyŏsŏng (New Women, 1923-1926, 1930-1934), the first commercially successful magazine in Korea that targeted women readers. Specifically, it traces changes in New Woman discourse from the publication’s beginning in 1923 to its final issue in 1934, marked in part by a shift in targeted readership from female students in the early years to educated young housewives by the end. Also by the end Sinyŏsŏng had become more glamorous, more focused on entertainment, while the previous emphasis on social and gender identity issues subsided. A common denominator throughout the publication run is that the majority of contributors to the magazine continued to be male, which affords a basis for comparison when Sinyŏsŏng is contrasted with its brother magazine Kaebyŏk (Creation), from the same publisher but intended for male readers.

This chapter shows how new discourses on sexuality and domestic practices which emerged in nineteenth-century Bengal focused on remodelling women’s roles as health-conscious good wives and mothers. Essays focussing on the degeneration of health of Bengalis published in many Bengali periodicals pointed out that social customs like child marriages as well as harmful practices like masturbation and nocturnal pollution, indiscriminate coital indulgence, and excessive sexual intercourse might harm a woman’s health leading to maternal mortality or birth of sick babies. Medical and quasi-medical literature of this period included guidelines for an ideal housewife for proper home management, scientific nurturing of children, regulation of dietary habits, creation of hygienic environment, and so on. As biological reproducers of the race, mothers and good wives were required to give birth to and raise healthy children who would become representatives of a strong, masculine nation.