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About Me

Rebecca Jo Plant is a professor in History at the University of California, San Diego, and editor of the electronic journal and database, Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000. Her research interests focus on the US Civil War; women’s, gender, and family history; the history of therapeutic culture and the psychological professions; and the social and psychological impact of war in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. Her most recent publication, with coauthor Frances M. Clarke, is Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era (Oxford UP, 2023). She is also the author of Mom: The Transformation of Motherhood in Modern America (Chicago UP, 2010), and a co-editor of Maternalism Reconsidered: Motherhood, Welfare, and Social Policies in the Twentieth Century (Berghahn, 2012). She has been named a Distinguished Lecturer by the Organization of American Historians and has held fellowships from the American Association of University Women, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Australian Research Council. Along with her collaborator Frances M. Clarke, she won the 2015 Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Prize and a Berkshire Conference of Women Historians’ Prize article prize for “‘The Crowning Insult’:Federal Segregation and the Gold Star Mother and Widow Pilgrimages of the Early 1930s,” which appeared in the Journal of American History in 2015.

Recent Publications

MONOGRAPH AND EDITED COLLECTION

• Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era, New York: Oxford University Press, 2023.
• Mom: The Transformation of Motherhood in Modern America, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010; paperback, 2012. “Editors’ Picks,” Choice Reviews, February 2011
• Maternalism Reconsidered: Motherhood, Welfare and Social Policy, Marian van der Klein, Rebecca Jo Plant, Nichole Sanders, and Lori Weintrob, Oxford: Berghahn Press, 2012; paperback, 2014

ARTICLES AND BOOK CHAPTERS (since 2015)

• Coauthored with Cayla Regas and Frances Clarke, “‘Do not toss this letter away’: Women’s Hardship Petitions to the U.S. Federal Government during the Civil War,” Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000, 27:1 (Spring 2023)
• “‘Combat Exhaustion’ versus ‘Psychoneurosis’: American Psychiatrists and the Terminology of War Trauma during the Second World War,” Gender and Trauma since 1900, ed. Paula Michaels and Christina Twomey, London: Bloomsbury, 2021, 79-100
• Coauthored with David Dawson, “Women and the Obligations of Citizenship during World War II: U.S. Debates over Proposals to Conscript Civilians,” Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000, Fall 2020
• “’No private school could ever be as satisfactory’: The Fight for Government-Funded Child Care in Postwar Los Angeles,” in World War II and the West It Wrought, eds. Mark Brilliant and David Kennedy, Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020, 143-160
• Michelle Moyd, Frances M. Clarke, and Rebecca Jo Plant, “Moral Panic versus Moral Blindness: Responses to Children’s Militarization in Uganda and the U.S.,” in Micol Seigel, ed., Panic, Transnational Cultural Studies, and the Affective Contours of Power (Routledge, 2018), forthcoming
• Rebecca Jo Plant and Frances M. Clarke, “Studying Underage Enlistment in the American Civil War,”Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth11: 1(Fall 2017): 47-52
• Frances M. Clarke and Rebecca Jo Plant, “No Minor Matter: Underage Soldiers, Parents, and the Nationalization of Habeas Corpus in Civil War America,” Law and History Review35:4 (November 2017): 1-47
• Rebecca Jo Plant and Frances M. Clarke, “‘The Crowning Insult’: Federal Segregation and the Gold Star Mothers Pilgrimages of the Early 1930s,” Journal of American History, 101:4 (September 2015): 406-32
• “Betty Friedan’s Feminist Critique of Suburban Domesticity” in Feminist Moments: Reading Feminist Texts, ed. Kathy Smits and Susan Bruce, London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015, 147-54
• “Anti-Maternalism: A New Perspective on the Transformation of Gender Ideology in the Twentieth-Century U.S.,”Social Politics22:3 (Fall 2015): 283-88
• “Motherhood,” in Rethinking Therapeutic Culture, eds. Trysh Travis and Tim Aubry, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015, 72-84

Media Coverage

Derek Hawkins, "Insulting African American Gold Star Widows has a History," Washington Post, October 25, 2017

Social Media

Country Focus

United States

Expertise by Geography

United States

Expertise by Chronology

19th century, 20th century

Expertise by Topic

American Civil War, Family, Gender, Military, Politics, Race, Women