Momism

The “momism” critique, a scathing attack on American mothers during World War II and the early Cold War, asserted that the nation's young men lacked the rugged, independent character possessed by their forefathers and necessary to national strength. Popular writers and psychiatric experts blamed pathological moms who “smother-loved” their children, particularly their boys. They viewed the phenomenon as uniquely American, and largely confined to the middle class.

Momism was rooted in a male reaction to the modernization of gender roles. In the early twentieth century, as women entered the competitive realms of paid labor and politics (achieving national suffrage in 1920), men increasingly questioned the Victorian belief in female moral superiority and challenged the assumption that mother love was a wholly benevolent force. Whereas Victorians had believed that boys became self-governing men by internalizing the moral mother, modern experts began to regard such internalization as an obstacle to healthy masculinity.

Hostility toward maternal influence reached its zenith in the 1940s, and was expressed most memorably by the popular writer Philip Wylie. Wylie coined the term momism after witnessing a Mother's Day spectacle: a division of soldiers spelling, in formation, “MOM.” To Wylie, the soldiers' tribute suggested that American men were more skilled at sentimental gestures than heroic acts. In his 1942 bestseller, Generation of Vipers, Wylie argued that the decline of manly labor, the saccharine character of radio programming, and the influence of women's clubs all pointed to encroaching momism. During World War II, Wylie's satiric critique resonated with commentators who worried that American men seemed “soft” compared to their fascist enemies.

In the postwar period, psychiatrists and social scientists lent momism a degree of scientific legitimacy by employing it as a kind of diagnosis. In a 1946 bestseller, Their Mothers' Sons, the psychiatrist Edward Strecker attributed the high incidence of neuropsychiatric disorders among U.S. draftees and servicemen to widespread maternal pathology. Likewise, in Childhood and Society (1950), émigré psychoanalyst Erik Erikson analyzed “Mom” as a distinctive national prototype, the American counterpart to the authoritarian German father. Experts were especially anxious about the role that mothers played in fostering male homosexuality, which became widely associated with communism during the Cold War. To stave off this threat, they urged fathers to forge closer relationships with their sons, portraying engaged fatherhood as the cornerstone of democratic manhood. They also promoted groups like the Boy Scouts that allowed boys to escape the presumably suffocating confines of domesticity.

Historians have tended to view the momism critique as part of an antifeminist movement that sought to re-establish stable gender roles after World War II. Indeed, the critique was decidedly misogynist, and it fueled the rampant homophobia of the postwar era. But its political implications were actually complex. Many liberals, both men and women, supported Wylie's attack on moms, viewing it as an assault on moral hypocrisy, sexual repression, and intolerance. In the 1960s, feminists such as Betty Friedan appropriated the derogatory stereotype of the neurotic suburban mother to argue that women's energies should no longer be confined to the home.

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