Academics began to study mediated motherhood in the early 2000s. Many of these scholars (Chae, âAm Iâ; Lagerwey; OâBrien Hallstein; Podnieks; Williams et al.) agree that Susan J. Douglas and Meredith Michaelâs book, The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How it Undermined Women was the landmark text in terms of analyzing the popular culture obsession with motherhood generally and the rise of celebrity moms specifically that first emerged in the 1980s and 1990s. Writing in 2016, for example, Jori Lagerwey argues, âthe first critical articulation of the current cultural preoccupation with maternity may have come from Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaelsâ a decade agoâ (8). Moreover, Heather Hundley and Sara Hayden note that Douglas and Michaelsâs first work explored âhow various forms of media, including celebrity journalism, network newscasts, daytime television, and evening situation comedies and dramas, promote and extend the ânew momismâ â (3). While Douglas and Michaelsâs larger project was focused on how various forms of media promoted the new momism, their specific focus on celebrity motherhood explored early, or what I now refer to as the first iteration of, celebrity mom profiles in the chapter âAttack of the Celebrity Moms.â
In that chapter and elsewhere in the book, Douglas and Michaels argued that celebrity mom profiles primarily worked to encourage guilt and failure in mothers because the profiles always showed celebrity moms juggling it all â work, family, and mothering â with ease and without difficulty. Douglas and Michaels also argued that these profiles emerged when mothers became a marketing niche and with the rise of celebrity journalism. As they put it humorously, âBeginning in the 1980s, and exploding with a vengeance in the â90s, celebrity journalism brought us a feature spread that spread like head lice through the womenâs magazines, as well as the more recent celebrity and âlifestyleâ glossies: the celebrity mom profileâ (16). The hallmark of these profiles was to show celebrity moms glowing, happy, content, and with their children, often one-to-two years postpartum, while the moms extolled the virtues of motherhood. Douglas and Michaels, in fact, report, and are worth quoting in length, that the celebrity mom:
had to be photographed displaying a brood toothy grin, her child in her lap or lifted with outstretched arms above her head, an accessory who made her look especially good on her sofa or balcony. Celebrity mothers are invariably surrounded by pastels and suffused in white light; the rooms we often see them in feature white or pastel furniture. Often they are backlit or simply shot against a white backdrop for a nice halo effect.
(113)
Moreover, the profiles also conveyed a key message: celebrity mothers found motherhood the best and most important experience in their lives. Everything about the profile â from the titles, staging, and lighting â highlighted and reinforced the key ideas that celebrity moms loved motherhood, had found their âcallingâ once they became mothers, and were serene, calm, content, and able to âjuggle it allâ with ease, while also allowing the moms to show off and/or be pictured with their well-dressed and well-behaved child or children. Additionally, while looking and feeling fabulous were important in these first profiles, clearly, celebrity mom profiles primarily worked rhetorically â persuasively â to communicate clear messages and âargumentsâ about motherhood: that celebrity moms believe that being devoted, attentive mothers is not only the best kind of mothering, being a mother is the best and most important part of who they are now, regardless of any success that the celebrities might have had previously. In short, celebrity mom profiles worked to promote and persuade mothers to adhere to and enact a very specific ideology of âgood mothering.â Indeed, Douglas and Michaels also argued that celebrity mom profiles are at the heart of the new momism, a term they coined to describe mediated intensive mothering.
The new momism is the form of intensive mothering that emerged in the 1980s and continues to be in full force today, albeit in new and more intensive ways. Drawing on Sharon Haysâs work, Douglas and Michaels argued that this âgood motheringâ ideology rests on three core beliefs and values: âthe insistence that no woman is truly complete or fulfilled unless she has kids, that women remain the best primary caretakers of children, and that to be a remotely decent mother, a woman has to devote her entire physical, psychological, emotional, and intellectual being, 24/7, to her childrenâ (4). These three core principles also mean that the new momism requires mothers to develop professional-level skills, such as therapist, pediatrician, consumer products safety instructor, and teacher, in order to meet and treat the needs of children (Douglas and Michaels 6). In addition to creating impossible ideals of mothering, the new momism also defined women first and foremost in relation to their children and encouraged women to believe that mothering was the most important job for women, regardless of any success a woman might have had prior to motherhood. As such, Douglas and Michaels suggest that the new momism no longer makes women subservient to men; rather, âit is about subservience to childrenâ (299, italics in the original). Thus, Douglas and Michaels concluded, âthe celebrity mom profile was probably the most influential media form to sell the new momism, and where its key features were refined, reinforced and romanticizedâ (113).
The final pillar of Douglas and Michaelsâs argument was that the new momism is also a postfeminist ideology because it both acknowledges and integrates second wave feminist rhetoric and ideas while also denying any ongoing need for feminist action. Indeed, the post-second-wave-feminist and middle-class premise that contemporary women now have the choice to âdo it allâ is now entrenched in the new momism. Specifically, first young girls and then young women are taught that they live at a time when women can âhave it allâ: education, a career, and a family as long as they make good choices. As Douglas and Michaels put it, embedded in the new momism is the idea that women:
have their own ambitions and money, raise kids on their own, or freely choose to stay at home with kids rather than being forced to⌠. Central to the new momism, in fact, is the feminist insistence that woman [sic] have choices, that they are active agents in control of their own destiny, that they have autonomy.
(5)
Situating their discussion of having it all in relation to postfeminism, Douglas and Michaels suggested that the new momism âhas become the central, justifying ideology of what has come to be called âpostfeminismâ â (24). While they are disdainful of postfeminism, Douglas and Michaels also argued: âPostfeminism means that you can now work outside the home even in jobs previously restricted to men, go to graduate school, pump iron, and pump your own gas, as long as you remain fashion conscious, slim, nurturing, deferential to men, and become a doting selfless motherâ (25). Douglas and Michaels thus conclude that the celebrity moms profiled, then, are postfeminist role models in that they are âwomen who had combined demanding careers with motherhood,â while being âhighly successful professionals with often grueling hours who also excelled at intensive motheringâ (118, italics in original). Consequently, from the beginning, the celebrity mom profiles that Douglas and Michaels first analyzed justified and reinforced privileged (at-least middle-class) cisgendered and heteronormative motherhood, the new momism, postfeminism, and grounded the general solution to âhaving it allâ within mothersâ abilities to make good post-second-wave choices.
Since the publication of Douglas and Michaelsâs book, media have become even more fascinated by and obsessed with motherhood. Indeed, contemporary scholars (Bishop; Jermyn; Lagerway; McRobbie, âYummy Mummiesâ; Nash, âPostmodernâ; OâBrien Hallstein; Podnieks), for example, also suggest that fascination with celebrity moms has only increased, even taking on new ânuancesâ and foci of attention. Understanding the importance of celebrity moms in representing âgoodâ motherhood also emerged as both popular culture and media became obsessed with all things related to motherhood. In fact, in Mediating Moms: Mothers in Popular Culture, editor Elizabeth Podnieks suggested in 2012 that popular culture had made a âmaternal embraceâ such that âwe are so âmothered up,â in fact, that we have created a whole new lexicon to define mothers in their various roles and identities within contemporary cultureâ (4). Moreover, writing in 2017, Jorie Lagerwey also suggests that American celebrity culture continues to be preoccupied or obsessed with motherhood and mothering in what she refers to as âmom or mommy culture, and its prominence in American popular culture in the early part of the twenty-first centuryâ (3). Moreover, Deborah Jermyn argues:
fascination with celebrity moms has continued since this time [2000], taking on new nuances as it has become focused, first, on new stars (cf. Victoria Beckham and Elizabeth Hurley); has been marked by an intense scrutiny of starsâ post-baby weight loss (cf. the cover story photograph montage of scantily-clad âHot bodies after babyâ on the UKâs Now magazine, 29 October 2007); and has come to co-exist with, if not actually facilitate, the rise of the âyummy mummyâ, a kind of linked demograph visible among aspirational âordinaryâ women and not merely celebrities.
(166)
Finally, as Jiyoung Chae (âInterest inâ) also contends, this media focus on motherhood is also part of contemporary celebrity culture and media coverage in New Zealand, Australia, and the United Kingdom (420).
