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.
MOTHER MEDIA:
Hot and Cool Parenting in the Twentieth Century
by Hannah Zeavin
MIT Press, April 2025
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)
From the nursery to the prison, from the clinic to the commune, MOTHER MEDIA tells the story of how our contemporary understanding of what a mother is came to be 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.
Hannah Zeavin is a scholar, writer, and editor. Zeavin is an Assistant Professor of the History of Science at UC Berkeley. She is the Founding Editor of Parapraxis, a new magazine for psychoanalysis. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming from Bookforum, Dissent, The Guardian, Harper’s Magazine, n+1, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and beyond. Zeavin was a recipient of a 2022 Works in Progress Grant from the Robert B. Silvers Foundation for an essay about the children of psychoanalysis, “Composite Case.” She is the author of The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy (MIT Press, 2021).