Mother Media: Hot and Cool Parenting in the Twentieth Century

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Synopsis
An essential history for understanding how we mother now, and how motherhood itself became a medium—winner of the Brooke Hindle Award from the Society for the History of Technology.From the nursery to the prison, from the clinic to the commune, Mother Media tells the story of how we arrived at our contemporary understanding of what a mother is and how understandings of &“bad&” mothering formed our contemporary panics about &“bad&” media. In this book, leading historian of psychology Hannah Zeavin examines twentieth-century pediatric, psychological, educational, industrial, and economic norms around mediated mothering and technologized parenting. The book charts the crisis of the family across the twentieth century and the many ingenious attempts to remediate nursemaid and mother via speculative technologies and screen media.Growing out of her previous award-winning book The Distance Cure, which considered technologized care, the book lays bare the contradictions of techno-parenting and how it relates to conceptions of &“maternal fitness,&” medical redlining, and surveillance of children, parents, and other caregivers. The author offers narratives of parenting in its extremity (for example, Shaken Baby Syndrome) and its ostensible banality (for example, the Nanny Cam) and how the two are often intertwined. Ultimately, Zeavin grapples with a simple contradiction: technology is seen and judged as harmful in domestic and educational spaces, even as it is a saving grace in the unending labor of raising a family.
Copyright:
2025

Book Details

Book Quality:
Publisher Quality
Book Size:
320 Pages
ISBN-13:
9780262382038
Related ISBNs:
9780262049559
Publisher:
MIT Press
Date of Addition:
Copyrighted By:
Hannah Zeavin
Adult content:
No
Language:
English
Has Image Descriptions:
No
Categories:
Nonfiction, Parenting and Family, Technology, Social Studies
Submitted By:
Bookshare Staff
Usage Restrictions:
This is a copyrighted book.

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