Rebecca Jo Plant

William Menninger and American psychoanalysis, 1946?48

In the aftermath of World War II, a struggle ensued over the direction of American psychoanalysis. Led by William Menninger, who reluctantly assumed the presidency of the American Psychoanalytic Association in 1946, a cohort of American-born psychoanalysts sought to make their profession more responsive to other medical practitioners and the general public. Insisting that divisive theoretical debates should be relegated to the past, these psychoanalysts promoted a medicalized, Americanized and popularized version of psychoanalysis that deliberately blurred the distinction between psychiatry and psychoanalysis. They were opposed by a group of more orthodox psychoanalysts, including many émigrés, who viewed their efforts as undermining psychoanalysis from within.

Studying Underage Enlistment in the American Civil War

Abstract:Drawn from a panel created for the 2017 American Historical Association Conference in Denver and framed by Michael Grossbergs commentary, this roundtable offers case studies of three very different moments when the law attempted to define the nature of childhood. Rebecca Jo Plant and Frances M. Clarke explore that definition in the context of underage soldiers during the American Civil War; Nicholas L. Syrett examines it in the context of miscegenation and illegitimacy at the turn of the twentieth century, and Jennifer Robin Terry investigates it in the context of legislation protecting child performers in the first few decades of the twentieth century.

No Minor Matter: Underage Soldiers, Parents, and the Nationalization of Habeas Corpus in Civil War America

In the aftermath of the Civil War, state judges lost their long-held right to inquire into the legality of federal detentions, and habeas corpus—once almost solely the business of state courts—was largely transformed into a federal remedy. We argue that the wartime furor surrounding underage enlistees was a key factor in driving this legal change. Scholarship on the use of habeas corpus during the war generally concentrates on cases involving freedom of speech or political association, but thousands of parents and guardians also petitioned Union authorities and state courts to retrieve minor children who had enlisted without their consent. Angrily demanding that the military discharge such youths, they portrayed control over the personhood and labor of minor children as fundamental to American liberty. At the same time, state court judges fought to retrain jurisdiction over such cases as a critical check on federal and military power. We illuminate these conflicts by drawing on a rich array of sources that capture the competing perspectives of federal and state court judges, Lincoln Administration officials, elected representatives, military officers, parents and guardians, and minors themselves. In the process, we show the halting and contested transformation of habeas corpus, the outcome of which ultimately redefined the relationship between American citizens and their government, preventing aggrieved parents from using state courts to safeguard their rights against federal and military authorities, and blocking state courts from querying the legality of federal detentions of any kind.

Book Review: I Could Not Call Her Mother: The Stepmother in American Popular Culture, 1750-1960LindenauerLeslie J.2013. I Could Not Call Her Mother: The Stepmother in American Popular Culture, 1750-1960. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. 196 pp.

Rebecca Jo Plant, review of Leslie J. Lindenauer, I Could Not Call Her Mother: The Stepmother in American Popular Culture, 1750-1960 (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2013). Forthcoming in the Journal of Family History. Scholars have devoted a great deal of attention to the history of mothers and motherhood in recent years. Whereas this literature encompasses numerous works on adoptive mothers, another group of non-biological mothers—stepmothers—has been largely overlooked. Leslie J. Lindenauer seeks to remedy this neglect by tracing the cultural history of the stepmother as revealed primarily by popular fiction, advice literature and film. She not only seeks to show how representations of stepmothers varied over time, but also to demonstrate how the figure of the stepmother served as “a lens on the changing constructions of motherhood itself over time.” (xxi) While the book meets the former objective with verve, it is not wholly successful in achieving the latter. The book’s first chapter charts a shift from the widespread demonization of stepmothers in the late 18 th and early 19 th centuries toward more ambiguous and positive portrayals beginning in the mid-19 th century. The wicked stepmother loomed large in the cultural landscape of the Revolutionary and early national periods, serving as a counterpoint for the emergent ideal of the Republican mother. Lindenauer astutely notes the role that the political context played in shaping depictions of stepmothers, who were deemed “tyrannical, corrupt, avaricious, selfish” and “unnatural”—terms that reflected the ascendant language of republicanism and natural rights (21). Indeed, so resonant was the image of the wicked stepmother that rebellious colonists readily employed it to describe the deteriorating relationship with England; as one critic of the Stamp Act wrote, the once “beloved Mother country” had become a “cruel step-mother, unbounded in her malice.” (8) By the mid-19 th century, however, the privileging of “natural” motherhood diminished somewhat, as the intense cultural idealization of motherhood expanded so as to encompass stepmothers as well. In fact, some writers represented stepmothers as the ideal exemplars of mother love, for they gave selflessly even in the absence of a biological connection. In the period from 1860 to 1890—an era Lindenauer characterizes as witnessing the “redemption of the stepmother”—popular magazines ran numerous stories that portrayed stepmothers winning over initially suspicious and resentful stepchildren through patience and love. Other vignettes challenged the stereotype of the cold and greedy stepmother who connived to snare a widower by featuring virtuous women lured into loveless marriages by widowers who wanted only their domestic labor. While Lindenauer ably sketches this shift, the reasons why the stereotype of the evil stepmother waned remain somewhat murky. She suggests that large-scale shifts in the economy that threatened to destabilize the family, combined with the rise of advanced education for women and their increasing forays into public and political realms, led to efforts to shore up the familial ideal, lest women abandon domesticity. But this argument seems quite general. Could changing demographics (the fact that stepmothers became less common as the average life span rose) have played a role? Did it matter that, by the mid-19 th century, that women themselves were writing many of the popular stories featuring stepmothers? Or might actual changes in parental practices, such as the decline in the apprenticing of children and corporal punishment, somehow have rendered stepmothers less objectionable? While the reasons underlying cultural transformation

80.00, ISBN 9780739166819.

Rebecca Jo Plant, review of Leslie J. Lindenauer, I Could Not Call Her Mother: The Stepmother in American Popular Culture, 1750-1960 (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2013). Forthcoming in the Journal of Family History. Scholars have devoted a great deal of attention to the history of mothers and motherhood in recent years. Whereas this literature encompasses numerous works on adoptive mothers, another group of non-biological mothers—stepmothers—has been largely overlooked. Leslie J. Lindenauer seeks to remedy this neglect by tracing the cultural history of the stepmother as revealed primarily by popular fiction, advice literature and film. She not only seeks to show how representations of stepmothers varied over time, but also to demonstrate how the figure of the stepmother served as “a lens on the changing constructions of motherhood itself over time.” (xxi) While the book meets the former objective with verve, it is not wholly successful in achieving the latter. The book’s first chapter charts a shift from the widespread demonization of stepmothers in the late 18 th and early 19 th centuries toward more ambiguous and positive portrayals beginning in the mid-19 th century. The wicked stepmother loomed large in the cultural landscape of the Revolutionary and early national periods, serving as a counterpoint for the emergent ideal of the Republican mother. Lindenauer astutely notes the role that the political context played in shaping depictions of stepmothers, who were deemed “tyrannical, corrupt, avaricious, selfish” and “unnatural”—terms that reflected the ascendant language of republicanism and natural rights (21). Indeed, so resonant was the image of the wicked stepmother that rebellious colonists readily employed it to describe the deteriorating relationship with England; as one critic of the Stamp Act wrote, the once “beloved Mother country” had become a “cruel step-mother, unbounded in her malice.” (8) By the mid-19 th century, however, the privileging of “natural” motherhood diminished somewhat, as the intense cultural idealization of motherhood expanded so as to encompass stepmothers as well. In fact, some writers represented stepmothers as the ideal exemplars of mother love, for they gave selflessly even in the absence of a biological connection. In the period from 1860 to 1890—an era Lindenauer characterizes as witnessing the “redemption of the stepmother”—popular magazines ran numerous stories that portrayed stepmothers winning over initially suspicious and resentful stepchildren through patience and love. Other vignettes challenged the stereotype of the cold and greedy stepmother who connived to snare a widower by featuring virtuous women lured into loveless marriages by widowers who wanted only their domestic labor. While Lindenauer ably sketches this shift, the reasons why the stereotype of the evil stepmother waned remain somewhat murky. She suggests that large-scale shifts in the economy that threatened to destabilize the family, combined with the rise of advanced education for women and their increasing forays into public and political realms, led to efforts to shore up the familial ideal, lest women abandon domesticity. But this argument seems quite general. Could changing demographics (the fact that stepmothers became less common as the average life span rose) have played a role? Did it matter that, by the mid-19 th century, that women themselves were writing many of the popular stories featuring stepmothers? Or might actual changes in parental practices, such as the decline in the apprenticing of children and corporal punishment, somehow have rendered stepmothers less objectionable? While the reasons underlying cultural transformation