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About Me

Rebecca Jo Plant is an associate professor in History at the University of California, San Diego, and incoming co-editor (with Judy Tzu-Chun Wu) of the electronic journal and database, Women and Social Movements in the United States. Her research interests focus on 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. She is the author of Mom: The Transformation of Motherhood in Modern America, and co-editor of Maternalism Reconsidered: Motherhood, Welfare, and Social Policies in the Twentieth Century. 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 (University of Sydney), she won the 2015 Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Prize and the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians’ Prize for the best article in the field of the history of women, gender or sexuality 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. Together they are currently completing a study of underage soldiers during the U.S. Civil War.

 

Recent Publications

MONOGRAPH AND EDITED COLLECTION

• 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 2010)

• 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
• “The Perfect Painless Labor: The Natural Childbirth Movement in the Mid-Twentieth-Century U.S.,”Mothers and History, special issue of the Journal of the Motherhood Initiative5:1 (Spring/Summer 2014): 148-60
• “Preventing the Inevitable: John W. Appel and the Problem of Psychiatric Casualties in the U.S. Army during World War II,” in Science and Emotions after 1945: A Transatlantic Perspective, eds. Frank Biess and Daniel M. Gross, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014, 209-38
• “The Gold Star Mother Pilgrimages: Patriotic Maternalism and Its Critics in Interwar America,”inMaternalism Reconsidered, 121-47 (full citation above)
• Rebecca Jo Plant and Marian van der Klein, “Introduction: A New Generation of Scholars Maternalism” and “Afterward: Maternalism Today,”in Maternalism Reconsidered, 1-20, 244-48 (full citation above)
• “Debunking Mother Love: American Mothers and the Momism Critique in the Mid-Twentieth-Century U.S.,”in Raising Citizens in the “Century of the Child”: The United States and German Central Europe in Comparative Perspective, ed. Dirk Schumann, New York: Berghahn Press, 2010, 122-40

Media Coverage

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

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Country Focus

United States

Expertise by Geography

United States

Expertise by Chronology

5, 8

Expertise by Topic

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