Mother Made Her Mad: “Mother-Blaming” and the Pathologization of Female Juvenile Delinquents in the Twentieth-Century United States

In this paper, I use critical disability theory and a critical history of disability to analyze the intersections among gender, sexuality, and “modern” science in the creation of mad identities. My specific focus is on the ways in which a diverse group of male and female “experts” deployed psychological, psychiatric, and eugenic discourse not only to pathologize mothers, but also to “blame” them for creating their delinquent daughters. Whether through their “germ plasm” or their own perceived “neuroses,” mothers became the critical link in the creation and perpetuation of social deviance. Throughout the first forty years of the twentieth century, mothers and motherhood became intimately bound up with notions of eugenic fitness and psychological and psychiatric normality. The twenty years between 1940 and 1960 marked an important transformative period in which older eugenic notions of fitness were replaced by a seemingly more modern taxonomy of deviance rooted primarily in Freudian psychoanalytic theory and psychopathology. Despite such apparent scientific, social, and cultural “advances,” mothers and their delinquent daughters continued to find themselves pathologized by various diagnostic and treatment regimes. This paper highlights the central role of mothers and motherhood in the formation of an ostensibly modern discourse on “mental illness” and delinquency, and also elucidates the apparent continuities in the creation of mad identities. In the process, it shows the instability and complexity of “mental illness” itself, as a means of classification, as an identity, and as a type of embodiment.