Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

9-2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Program

History

Advisor

Dagmar Herzog

Advisor

Gerald Markowitz

Committee Members

David Waldstreicher

Michele Mitchell

Subject Categories

African American Studies | American Popular Culture | Cultural History | History of Gender | United States History | Women's History | Women's Studies

Keywords

United States History, Women, Gender, Race

Abstract

This project traces the history of that at once vaunted and contested aspirational image, “the woman who has it all,” from the late nineteenth century through the early twenty-first, attending throughout to the complex intersections of race, gender, class, and sexuality. It establishes both notable consistency and critical change over the twentieth century by linking and contextualizing multiple iterations of this perfect working mother ideal in the United States. It adds to scholarship on the mutual construction of race and gender by showing the eugenic origins of the white ideal, which emerged concurrently with the complementary ideal of the “New Negro Woman,” as it ultimately tracks as well both the practical and conceptual innovations Black women pioneered and the ideological policing of racialized notions of proper motherhood that ensued. Along the way, it offers new insights into the role of feminine advice culture in neutralizing economic discontent and stoking racial animus while pretending not to. Significantly, this dissertation connects this cultural ideal, in its multiple variants, with the ongoing lack of structural support for caregiving as it details how the ideal paradoxically continued to tie women to work in the home while opening possibilities beyond it.

This work is embargoed and will be available for download on Wednesday, September 30, 2026

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