AWARDS:
2021 Brooke Hindle Award (Society for the History of Technology)
REVIEWS: Harper’s Magazine, The Washington Post, Protean Magazine, The Cleveland Review of Books, Lit Hub.
MEDIA: Interview Magazine, Los Angeles Review of Books (excerpt), Lux Magazine, Lit Hub (excerpt) Of This World (podcast), Culture Study (podcast), Ordinary Unhappiness (podcast)
Mother Media tells the complicated story of American techno-parenting, from The Greatest Generation through millennials, for an object lesson in how using technology in our most intimate relationships became a moral flash point. Growing out of The Distance Cure’s consideration of technologized care, Mother Media contributes a history of the contradictions of techno-parenting via an investigation of how the use of some technologies are interrelated with concepts of “maternal fitness,” medical redlining, and socio-medical surveillance of children, parents, and other caregivers. Zeavin offers narratives of parenting in its extremity (Shaken Baby Syndrome) and its ostensible banality (the Nanny Cam) and how the two are often intertwined (one did indeed beget the other).
At its core, Mother Media takes on a simple contradiction: on the one hand, many argue, we have too much technology in domestic and educational spaces and that this technology is harmful. On the other hand, the world is terrifying, the labor of making family unending, and technology poses itself as a salve, if not an answer, to our problems. Put another way, technology in the home, and as an extension of parenting, either gets termed an answer to a problem or the problem itself.
Mother Media: Hot and Cool Parenting in the 20th Century (MIT Press, 2025) is now available.
ADVANCE PRAISE:
With rigor and grace, Zeavin interrogates the deep history of a parental shame so close-fitting it has come to feel like skin—the fear of being simultaneously too much and not enough. Her synthetic, penetrating account, at once merciless and compassionate, invites us to see centuries of caregiving in entirely new ways.
~Leslie Jamison, author of Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story
Who will be cared for? Who must oblige? These are questions of minutes and moments—desire, effort, cost. Here, between libidinal economy and political economy, Hannah Zeavin uncovers the early stirrings of that now-familiar beast, the attention economy.
~Gabriel Winant author of The Next Shift
From wire monkeys to smart homes, Zeavin crafts a compelling study of modern motherhood and technology. You’ll never look at your baby monitor the same way!
~Malcolm Harris, author of Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World
In this thoughtful and thought-provoking book, Hannah Zeavin uses the insights of media theory and cultural studies to deconstruct and subvert various modern ideologies of motherhood.
~Ruth Schwartz Cowan, author of More Work for Mother
This is a brilliant exploration of mothers’ labor, which Zeavin illuminates as both subterranean and ubiquitous, both ignored and fundamental to a society’s conception of itself. Profound work for a profound topic.
~Lydia Kiesling, author of Mobility