‘Perk Up Your Looks and You Along With It’: Postpartum Depression and the Body in 1980s and 1990s US Self-Help Books

Abstract Using four postpartum self-help books published in the 1980s and 1990s US, I examine the advice that women could improve their ‘unruly’ postpartum minds by taming their ‘unruly’ postpartum bodies. The books framed a loss of control in new motherhood as one determinant of postpartum stress and mental illness, and encouraged women to assert control as recovery. While the books drew from a longer critique of American motherhood, the texts also reflected the politics of the 1980s and 1990s, framing control of the self as empowering and psychologically necessary. This vision of self-help assumed a middle-class audience, and reinforced ideals of thin and attractive mothering as evidence of a mother in control. The texts’ reiteration of beauty and thinness as recovery from postpartum distress offered assurance that problems of new motherhood could be managed with little social disruption, inadvertently undermining the seriousness of the distress the authors sought to legitimise.