In the aisles of the local food co-op, the waiting room of the townʹs only homeopath, or the childrenʹs area of the public library, you might meet her. Some are inclined to label her ʺearth motherʺ or ʺretro hippie,ʺ but she defies categorization. One thing is certain: this woman is different. She gives birth to her babies at home; she homeschools her children; she grows much of her familyʹs produce and sews many of their clothes. She seems at first glance an anachronism, recalling a time when women derived their identities from raising their large families and excelling at the...

The thread of female moral reform runs through American history from the late eighteenth century up to the present. It has manifested itself in a variety of forms, including the antiabortion movement (see Ginsberg, 1989) and, I argue, natural mothering.¹

The story of female moral reform begins with a wave of Protestant religious revivals known as the Second Great Awakening (1797–1840). The revivals provided women with a female network of peers and armed them with ʺan ability to understand the world in new terms, from a standpoint that was centered in womenʹs experience and critical of society as it...

Natural mothering merges two lifestyle practices—Voluntary Simplicity and Attachment Parenting—while taking inspiration from Cultural Feminism (Figure 1). All three elements are closely intertwined, but I will attempt to disentangle these sometimes uneasy partners to demonstrate the most significant constitutive elements of natural mothering.

Voluntary Simplicity (VS), also known as Simple Living, dictates a lifestyle that derives meaning from relative austerity and minimized consumption. As Doris Longacre suggests, VS is predicated on the belief that individual well-being is entangled with the well-being of society at large. Proponents live frugally, rejecting material preoccupations and opting for recycling, bartering, and trading...

Because many of the natural mothers identified themselves as feminists or at the very least identified with feminist ideas, I wondered how they reconciled their feminist politics with a traditionally gendered lifestyle in which the father works outside the home, providing financial resources, and the mother works in and around it, providing unpaid care for family and home. I invited my informants to share their understandings of feminism. As we have seen, most women pledged allegiance to the broad aims of the movement, and in particular the pursuit of equal rights for women. Pay equity and equal opportunity were most...

Contradictions are embedded in both the ideology and the practice of natural mothering. Scrutiny of what natural mothers do and say about what they do and say reveals one reality, but a different reality emerges upon deeper examination. One reality does not necessarily negate the other, however. Rather, the two realities seem to rub and chafe against each other, each one simultaneously informing, shaping, and challenging the other. In Chapter 4, I observe that while the natural mothers profess tochoosetheir alternative lifestyle independent of conventional social pressure, they subscribe to a culturally constructed ideology of the body that...

We have explored what natural mothers do and why, but an important question remains: Can natural mothering effect social change? InRecreating Motherhood: Ideology and Technology in a Patriarchal Society(1989), Barbara Katz Rothman conceptualizes American motherhood as ʺrest[ing] on three deeply rooted ideologies—capitalism, technology and patriarchy.ʺ Each of these constitutes a ʺway a group looks at the world, a way of organizing our thinking about the world.ʺ Regarding the three ideologies not as separate, but as more like the ʺstrands of a tightly woven braid,ʺ she nevertheless defines the parameters of each as together they shape American motherhood...

This book has explored a style of parenting that reclaims nature and the home—a ʺway back home.ʺ The ʺwayʺ refers to the path along which natural mothers travel toward their destination: the home-based, nuclear family nurtured by Mother and Mother Nature. As the natural mothers enact a way of living that recalls an earlier era less dependent on technology and commercial culture to meet family needs, they go ʺback.ʺ Although the precise ʺwayʺ differs for each mother, similarities range across the sample I interviewed. It was those similarities, categorized as paradoxical themes, that drove my examination. Each woman offered...