Popular Culture and Mothering

Popular culture is a broad term deriving from the more general definition of culture as that which constitutes the customs, beliefs, behaviors, and productions of particular societies or groups of people. In the most basic sense, popular culture suggests the culture within the ordinary or everyday world in which people work, go to school, interact with others, and be entertained, for instance. The notion of the popular is rooted in preindustrial or folk culture, but today it is generally taken to refer to the goods and services created, consumed, and interpreted by members of societies in the specific historical context dating roughly from the industrial revolution in the Western world from the mid-19th century on. As such, popular culture is synonymous with mass culture, in which products are mechanically manufactured and reproduced via industrial and later electronic technologies.

Popular culture is also a commodity or commercial culture, in which products and activities are mass marketed to a populace whose tastes in and frequency of consumption determine levels of popularity. Popular culture is both widely disseminated in and represented by mass entertainment outlets such as radio, film, television, newspapers, commercial books, magazines, advertisements, songs and music videos, and the Internet. Mothers have been largely underrepresented in the past; however, from the 1980s and especially from the 21st century, they have been occupying an increasingly prominent position within popular culture, where they are not only the subject of representation but are also the creators and purveyors of maternal content.