Mother Media

An essential history for understanding how we mother now, and how motherhood itself became a medium—winner of the Brooke Hindle Award from the Society for the History of Technology.

From the nursery to the prison, from the clinic to the commune, Mother Media tells the story of how we arrived at our contemporary understanding of what a mother is and how understandings of “bad” mothering formed our contemporary panics about “bad” media. In this book, leading historian of psychology Hannah Zeavin examines twentieth-century pediatric, psychological, educational, industrial, and economic norms around mediated mothering and technologized parenting. The book charts the crisis of the family across the twentieth century and the many ingenious attempts to remediate nursemaid and mother via speculative technologies and screen media.

Growing out of her previous award-winning book The Distance Cure, which considered technologized care, the book lays bare the contradictions of techno-parenting and how it relates to conceptions of “maternal fitness,” medical redlining, and surveillance of children, parents, and other caregivers. The author offers narratives of parenting in its extremity (for example, Shaken Baby Syndrome) and its ostensible banality (for example, the Nanny Cam) and how the two are often intertwined. Ultimately, Zeavin grapples with a simple contradiction: technology is seen and judged as harmful in domestic and educational spaces, even as it is a saving grace in the unending labor of raising a family.Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Prologue: Analog Kids
Introduction: How Mother Became a Medium
Part One: The Media of Mothering
1. The First Technology is Human
2. Out of the Cradle
Part Two: Predictive Mothering
3. Hot and Cool Mothers
4. Screening Mother, Coding Baby
Part Three: The Mothering of Media
5. Screen Parking
6. Future, Tomorrow, Dream, Smart
Coda: Where AI Babies Come From (Or, How Baby Became a Medium)
Notes
Bibliography
Index“Hannah Zeavin’s Mother Media […] examines the heavy hand that social scientists have taken in the nursery.”
—Harper's“With rigor and grace, Zeavin interrogates the deep history of a parental shame so close-fitting it has come to feel like skin—the fear of being simultaneously too much and not enough. Her synthetic, penetrating account, at once merciless and compassionate, invites us to see centuries of caregiving in entirely new ways.”
—Leslie Jamison, author of Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story

“Who will be cared for? Who must oblige? These are questions of minutes and moments—desire, effort, cost. Here, between libidinal economy and political economy, Hannah Zeavin uncovers the early stirrings of that now-familiar beast, the attention economy.”
—Gabriel Winant, author of The Next Shift

“From wire monkeys to smart homes, Zeavin crafts a compelling study of modern motherhood and technology. You’ll never look at your baby monitor the same way!”
—Malcolm Harris, author of Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World

“In this thoughtful and thought-provoking book, Hannah Zeavin uses the insights of media theory and cultural studies to deconstruct and subvert various modern ideologies of motherhood.”
—Ruth Schwartz Cowan, author of More Work for Mother

“This is a brilliant exploration of mothers’ labor, which Zeavin illuminates as both subterranean and ubiquitous, both ignored and fundamental to a society’s conception of itself. Profound work for a profound topic.”
—Lydia Kiesling, author of MobilityHannah Zeavin is Assistant Professor of the History of Science in the Department of History and the Berkeley Center for New Media at UC Berkeley. She is the author of The Distance Cure (MIT Press) and Founding Editor of Parapraxis. In 2021, she cofounded The Psychosocial Foundation.