Environment/Mother: Psychological Ecology, Gender, and Backlash, 1940–1990

This paper historicizes the connection between gender and environment by investigating constructions of “feminine environmentality”: depictions of women as environment, surrounding, and background that were promoted by a broad and influential body of psychological discourse throughout the twentieth century. It reads models of child development and the male life course against the grain, as guidelines for care work and reproductive labor, to show how psychologically oriented researchers, practitioners, and policymakers instructed women to provide, even embody, optimal conditions for children’s growth and men’s self-actualization. Above all, the paper draws attention to the normative implications of feminine environmentality, demonstrating how this was used as a tool of antifeminist backlash. In addition to challenging received understandings of the British pediatrician analyst Donald Winnicott and US émigré psychoanalyst Erik Erikson as proto-feminist, the paper also identifies a discourse of racial difference in maternal capacities, which has received little attention. It shows how praise of Black women’s maternal aptitude contributed to rationalizing racial discrepancies in maternal health care.