This collection of essays brings together some of the most exciting recent scholarship on mothers and motherhood. Motherhood is a significant experience for the overwhelming majority of American women, and the work of mothering-in individual families and in communities-has shaped the lives of all Americans. But it is only recently that historians have begun to examine mothers and motherhood as a phenomenon distinct from, yet deeply intertwined with, family history and women's history. Rima D. Apple is professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, School of Human Ecology and Women's Studies Program. She is the author of Vitamania: Vitamins in American Culture and Mothers and Medicine: A Social History of Infant Feeding, 1890-1950 and editor of Women, Health, and Medicine in America: A Historical Handbook. Janet Golden is associate professor of history at Rutgers University, Camden. She is the author of A Social History of Wet Nursing in America: From Breast to Bottle and coeditor of Framing Disease: Studies in Cultural History.