Book Review: I Could Not Call Her Mother: The Stepmother in American Popular Culture, 1750-1960

Rebecca Jo Plant, review of Leslie J. Lindenauer, I Could Not Call Her Mother: The Stepmother in American Popular Culture, 1750-1960 (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2013). Forthcoming in the Journal of Family History. Scholars have devoted a great deal of attention to the history of mothers and motherhood in recent years. Whereas this literature encompasses numerous works on adoptive mothers, another group of non-biological mothers—stepmothers—has been largely overlooked. Leslie J. Lindenauer seeks to remedy this neglect by tracing the cultural history of the stepmother as revealed primarily by popular fiction, advice literature and film. She not only seeks to show how representations of stepmothers varied over time, but also to demonstrate how the figure of the stepmother served as “a lens on the changing constructions of motherhood itself over time.” (xxi) While the book meets the former objective with verve, it is not wholly successful in achieving the latter. The book’s first chapter charts a shift from the widespread demonization of stepmothers in the late 18 th and early 19 th centuries toward more ambiguous and positive portrayals beginning in the mid-19 th century. The wicked stepmother loomed large in the cultural landscape of the Revolutionary and early national periods, serving as a counterpoint for the emergent ideal of the Republican mother. Lindenauer astutely notes the role that the political context played in shaping depictions of stepmothers, who were deemed “tyrannical, corrupt, avaricious, selfish” and “unnatural”—terms that reflected the ascendant language of republicanism and natural rights (21). Indeed, so resonant was the image of the wicked stepmother that rebellious colonists readily employed it to describe the deteriorating relationship with England; as one critic of the Stamp Act wrote, the once “beloved Mother country” had become a “cruel step-mother, unbounded in her malice.” (8) By the mid-19 th century, however, the privileging of “natural” motherhood diminished somewhat, as the intense cultural idealization of motherhood expanded so as to encompass stepmothers as well. In fact, some writers represented stepmothers as the ideal exemplars of mother love, for they gave selflessly even in the absence of a biological connection. In the period from 1860 to 1890—an era Lindenauer characterizes as witnessing the “redemption of the stepmother”—popular magazines ran numerous stories that portrayed stepmothers winning over initially suspicious and resentful stepchildren through patience and love. Other vignettes challenged the stereotype of the cold and greedy stepmother who connived to snare a widower by featuring virtuous women lured into loveless marriages by widowers who wanted only their domestic labor. While Lindenauer ably sketches this shift, the reasons why the stereotype of the evil stepmother waned remain somewhat murky. She suggests that large-scale shifts in the economy that threatened to destabilize the family, combined with the rise of advanced education for women and their increasing forays into public and political realms, led to efforts to shore up the familial ideal, lest women abandon domesticity. But this argument seems quite general. Could changing demographics (the fact that stepmothers became less common as the average life span rose) have played a role? Did it matter that, by the mid-19 th century, that women themselves were writing many of the popular stories featuring stepmothers? Or might actual changes in parental practices, such as the decline in the apprenticing of children and corporal punishment, somehow have rendered stepmothers less objectionable? While the reasons underlying cultural transformation