From moron mother to tip-top mum: changing ideals of motherhood in Australia from the 1920s to the 1950s

Traditionally historical studies of Australian maternity in the early twentieth-century have relied heavily upon texts that privilege a medicalized, masculinist discourse of motherhood such as: infant welfare manuals; medical reports or hospital records. Australian women in the 1920s to 1950s as seen through such medical texts are passive vessels to be acted upon by health professionals and their labours managed by medical experts and infant welfare nurses. This paper questions why so much of the historical scholarship pertaining to Australian maternity from the 1920s to the 1950s is embedded within such contemporaneous parenting manuals and medical texts and attempts to locate an alternative analysis of motherhood through the illustrations, photographs and bold advertorial displays that accompanied medical tracts, infant welfare texts and women's magazines. An analysis of the visual aspects of parenting manuals, medical and religious texts has proved extremely useful to art historians of the early modem period. The role of women in childbirth and child labour is even more hidden within a masculinist discourse in this period than in the early twentieth-century. Women are present however, in the images of labour, breastfeeding and child-rearing that accompany such texts. Early modem scholars such as Lianne McTavish have drawn upon the sorts of methodologies employed by art historians to infer appropriate behavioural norms and social attitudes to maternity from the clues provided by the visual elements of medical publications and other texts referring to maternity. This thesis draws upon a similar methodology in order to examine the images of maternity as they appeared in Australian infant welfare texts and both the articles and advertisements found within Australian women's magazines from the 1920s to the 1950s. This in-depth analysis of the display of motherhood as it appeared to new and soon-to-be mothers includes discussion of the stylistic elements of the display as well as its placement within the text. The use of maternal iconography such as the Madonna and other easily recognizable allegorical elements appear as significant elements in the displays of maternity provided to young women, particularly in advertisements which relied heavily upon the visual as a short-hand method of transmitting ideals of behaviour in order to maximize sales. The Madonna mother was an easily recognizable icon of maternity that privileged self-sacrifice and complete devotion to the child on behalf of the mother. Medical texts and advertisers privileged this dyadic ideal of the relationship between mother and child in the illustrations, photographs and drawings that accompanied their texts. Indeed, it was such a pervasive element in the visual representation of maternity over the course of the first half of the twentieth-century that the ideal of the mother as devoted Madonna persists to this day in contemporary attitudes to mothers and the role of maternity in women's lives.