Department of History
University of California, San Diego
9500 Gilman Drive MC 0104
La Jolla, California 92093-0104

Vita

Rebecca Jo Plant is an assistant professor of history. She received her Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins in 2001. Her work focuses on gender relations and the rise of the psychological professions in the twentieth-century American culture. Currently, she is writing a book on the history of motherhood.

Publications

• "William Menninger's Campaign to Reform American Psychoanalysis, 1946-1948," History of Psychiatry, 16:2 (2005): 181-202.
• "The Veteran, His Wife, and Their Mothers: Prescriptions for Psychological Rehabilitation after World War II," in Tales of the Great American Victory: World War II in Politics and Poetics, eds. Diederik Oostdijk and Markha G. Valenta, Amsterdam: Vrije University Press, 2006, pp. 95-100.

Courses Taught

• HILD 2A. History of the United States: The 19th Century.
• HILD 90. Documenting American Culture in the 1930s.
• HITO 192. Women and the Law. Colonial Era to Reconstruction
• HIUS 156. American Women/American Womanhood, Colonial Times to 1870.
• HIUS 157. American Women/American Womanhood, 1870 to the present.
• HIUS 173. Historical Perspectives on the Family and the Emotions.
• HIUS 181. The Rise of a Therapeutic Culture.
• HIGR 205.Feminist Historical Scholarship.
• HIGR 265C. In Pursuit of the Good Life: Getting and Spending in Modern America.
• CGS 104. Mothers and Motherhood: Transnational Perspectives.

Research

• Maternalism Reconsidered: Motherhood, Welfare and Social Policy in the Twentieth-Century, eds. Rebecca Jo Plant, Nichole Sanders and Lori Weintrob and Marian van der Klein, Berghahn Press, to appear in 2007. This volume explores how ideas about motherhood affected the development and implementation of social welfare policies in a wide range of national and international contexts in the twentieth century. The essays expand upon and reassess 'maternalism', a concept that has figured prominently in discussions of gender and the welfare state since the early 1900s. Consisting of eleven essays that focus on nine different nations and regions, the volume showcases recent innovative scholarship on the connections between welfare regimes, nation states and gender ideologies. My own contribution, entitled "Gold Star Mothers: Patriotic Maternalists and Their Critics in Interwar America," focuses on a remarkable government programme that sent more than 6,000 mothers and wives of World War I dead to Europe in the early 1930s to witness the gravesites of their loved ones.
  
• The Repeal of Mother Love: Momism and the Reconstruction of Motherhood in Philip Wylie's America explores the transformation of motherhood as a social role, a cultural ideal and a subjective identity in the U.S. from 1920 to the 1970s. It charts a shift away from a tendency to exalt maternal love as the most selfless of human sentiments, toward a more skeptical and psychological view of motherhood. It also explores the widespread implications of this anti-maternal strain, which affected everything from women's political activities to intimate relationships within the home.