Popular depictions of 20th-century American motherhood have typically emphasized the joy and fulfillment that a new mother can expect to experience on her child's arrival. But starting in the 1950s, discussions of the "baby blues" began to appear in the popular press. How did articles about the baby blues, and then postpartum depression, challenge these rosy depictions? In this article, we examine portrayals of postpartum distress in popular magazines and advice books during the second half of the 20th century to examine how the unsettling pairing of distress and motherhood was culturally negotiated in these decades. We show that these portrayals revealed a persistent reluctance to situate motherhood itself as the cause of serious emotional distress and a consistent focus on changing mothers to adapt to their role rather than changing the parameters of the role itself. Regardless of whether these messages actually helped or hindered new mothers themselves, we suggest that they reflected the rarely challenged assumption that motherhood and distress should not mix.

Cameron points to some very significant problems with the notion that men and women have a natural inability to communicate with one another. She describes this particular account as having a comforting quality because it suggests that there are 'no real conflicts, just misunderstandings' (p. 98). Most significantly, Cameron charges that viewing conflict between men and women as an age-old issue of natural misunderstandings both ignores the social and political arrangements responsible for male-female conflict and precludes any possibility of making meaningful changes to these conditions. At various points throughout her book, Cameron highlights other reasons why myths like that of Mars and Venus matter. It would have been even more effective, however, to have reiterated these points in the concluding chapter so that readers were left with not only a sense that there are reasons not to believe that men and women are fundamentally different in their use of language, but also that viewing men and women in this way can result in significant and detrimental consequences socially, economically, and politically.Cameron lays out two goals in her acknowledgements: (1) 'to dispel some myths that currently surround the subject of male-female differences in language and communication' and (2) 'to put something in place of those myths, by making the relevant linguistic research accessible to a wider audience'. The Myth of Mars and Venus achieves these goals. It represents a serious challenge to widely held beliefs about natural differences in the way men and women communicate and has done the important job of synthesizing a great deal of academic research that otherwise would likely be inaccessible to a non-academic audience.