My comments will provide an introduction to Mothering magazine, a publication that originated in southern Colorado and northern New Mexico in the early 1970s and served as a clearing house for American women interested in applying the ideas of counterculture environmentalism to their own mothering. Much like its contemporary, the Whole Earth Catalog, Mothering provided an avenue by which countercultural ideas about the meaning of “nature” and “the natural” entered popular consumer practices, from unmedicated births to breastfeeding to baby carrying. (The magazine was a mainstay of the check-out line at Whole Foods grocery stores until its move to an exclusively online format in 2011). In the 1970s, Mothering’s founders contributed to and reflected a growing U.S. movement favoring unmedicated home and hospital births, a cause for which second-wave feminists were often active proponents. Yet these two rationales for “natural” birth—feminist and environmentalist--did not overlap comfortably in the magazine’s pages. Mothering’s writers and readers struggled to reconcile competing views of the natural even as they reaffirmed their desire for and their dedication to “natural” lifestyles. Examining Mothering provides insight into how natural practices influenced modern consumer culture, how the category of “natural practices” allows scholars to better view women’s roles in environmental history, and the advantages and disadvantages of applying women’s history and environmental history in tandem.
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