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Apr. 7 | MAASA Joint Conference—April, 2011
Joint conference on material culture, April 7-11, 2011, UW-Madison
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D'Amore, Laura. "American Supermom: Feminism, Motherhood, and the Superheroine Since 1962," American and New England Studies, Boston University, May 2009. Advisor: Jessica Sewell
The superheroine has indelibly altered the conception of American motherhood since the 1970s. The case study for this phenomenon is the supermom, a term that has historically described mothers who work outside the home. Originally, it symbolized the convergence of the second-wave feminist call to have it all via a career, and the resistant ideological pull of traditional domesticity that defined women as the most natural and capable rearers of children. The ideas associated with the superheroine—such as strength and capability—resolved those competing ideologies by providing a metaphor for the woman who could do it all. In the midst of the women’s movement, this was partly empowering because it insisted that women were capable of extreme feats. However, it was also an impossible ideal, born from the incompatibilities between feminist rhetoric and a social resistance to changing gender roles. The supermom simultaneously embodied empowerment and limitation, changing in meaning to suit the context of its usage. This project traces the evolution of the supermom, as represented in media and popular culture, from the 1970s to the present. Through analysis of comic books, women’s magazines, advertising, chick lit, television, and film, it uncovers how the competing rhetorics of feminism, motherhood, and domesticity have historically been mediated through the visual and linguistic texts of the supermom. It fills a void in scholarship about feminism and motherhood, by showing that the trope of the superheroine actually brought these often competing ideologies together through the supermom, and explicitly names the supermom as a crucial force in shaping the identities of working mothers. Even for women who never read a comic book or watched a superhero movie or television show, the trope of the superheroine seeped into their lives, establishing a standard of working motherhood—the supermom—that no one could achieve. Although the symbol proved resilient despite its well-reported problems, it changed over time, eventually symbolizing the active redefinition of the very parameters of feminism and motherhood responsible for its historical limitations.
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