Madness and Motherhood in Black and White
A History of Race, Maternal Mental Illness, and Diagnostic Privilege in U.S. Medicine
Madness and Motherhood in Black and White explores how medical constructions of maternal mental illness have long been entangled in the sociohistorical and ideological frameworks that have defined motherhood in the United States. Drawing on archival sources, medical and psychiatric literature from the 1820s to the present, legal and policy documents, and periodicals, the book demonstrates how maternal mental illness became a key diagnostic category through which physicians not only demarcated (in)appropriate maternal behavior but also forged racialized and classed hierarchies of reproduction by equating normative motherhood with whiteness, domesticity, and privilege. The book not only traces how this phenomenon was reflected in physicians’ diagnostic and therapeutic practices, but also at the intersections of medical knowledge, law, social welfare, public policy, child psychology, and popular culture.