terature regarding children abandoned and rejected because their mothers worked. This societal pressure caused American women to embrace a feminine mystique that turned motherhood into a full-time career and stifled their ambitions for achievements apart from domestic ones.
Dr. Benjamin Spock's Pocket Book of Baby and Child Care, in 1946, marked a shift away from the practicality and concern for the needs of the mother which characterized the Children Bureau's popular needs of the mother childrearing manual, Infant Care--which had been referred to since 1914.
Despite an objective to encourage natural motherhood and spontaneity, Spock's manual actually fostered maternal insecurity based upon the endless need to attend to the child's emotional, as well as physical, development, and upon the pervasive fear that improper maternal love could harm the child. The child-centeredness advocated by Spock implied an a
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