ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews some of the mainstream feminist analyses of domesticity and the reproduction of mothering, including theories about the complicity of popular culture in what feminists such as Susan Faludi and Marilyn French insist is a postfeminist, if not an all-out war on women who refuse domesticity. It explores the failures and surprising consequences of some of the critiques and argues that White feminism's inability to tame down domesticity may be related to its refusal to attack it at its roots, to interrogate the cult of domesticity as a deeply historical national narrative that is finely raced as well as profoundly gendered. The ideological work that can be affected by means of mechanical media is one element that distinguishes the modern cult of domesticity from earlier versions. Domesticity and good motherhood have been and remain the cornerstones of nation building, the fertile ground on which White patriarchy reproduces itself.
