Status Updates From The Lost Children of Wilder...

Through the 1950s, the rise of psychiatry and family-conflict theories of deviant juvenile behavior provided another gloss on the idea that acceptance of motherhood could transform an uncontrollable adolescent into a good woman-or at least a "well-adjusted" one. It was an approach that concorded particularly well with Catholicism. Pope Pius XII had declared in 1945 that every woman was called upon to be a mother...

When Italian immigration swelled, SPCC workers - Anglo-Saxon Protestants all - condemned garlic as a dangerous aphrodisiac; mothers who persisted in cooking with the herb were considered neglectful of their daughters' morals.