How has the popularity of "Gilmore Girls" influenced perspectives on teenage pregnancies? How did the mother-in-law assume such monstrous proportions? Did the Republicans' view of motherhood and their continual hectoring of Hillary Clinton for putting ambition ahead of family cost them the 2008 election? "Mommy Angst: Motherhood in American Popular Culture" considers questions like these as it probes our country's views on mothers, and how those views shape and are shaped by the habitually oversimplified portrayals of mothers in pop culture, politics, and the media.

"Mommy Angst" gets...