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In the late 1960s and 1970s, feminist critiques of the ideology of motherhood coincided with significant social changes in US culture. A growing percentage of mothers during this period were divorced, single, and working outside the home; the most rapidly increasing segment of the workforce was women with pre-school aged children.1 As Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels observe, these transformations spawned a number of anxieties relating to motherhood and childrearing, which were reflected in contradictory representations of mothers in popular culture. While on the one hand women's magazines, for example, embraced some tenets of liberal feminism and "gave voice to the experience and concerns of everyday mothers," they also displayed a concern that motherhood was being "put down." Therefore, they promoted the values of "intensive mothering," an ideology of unachievable standards of perfection that framed mothers as solely responsible for regulating the emotional, physical, and psychological needs of their children (73). Mothers were told they should neither be too strict nor too permissive; they had to make children feel completely loved without being overinvested; they had to encourage independence without neglecting their children (62). Noting how experts of the time blamed neglectful mothers for the rise in violent crime, Douglas and Michaels argue that discourses of intensive mothering suggested that "any imperfection in the child" was due to the "misguided failings" of mothers, implying that mothers who failed to bond properly with their children would "raise someone who buried bodies in the backyard" (63). Mothers of the time were thus haunted by "the specter of the hurt, lonely, damaged child" (73).
This specter likewise troubles the narratives of novels by two critically ac- claimed and popular children's writers of the 1970s. Zilpha Keatley Snyder's Newbery Honor Book, The Witches of Worm (1972), and the initial trilogy of Phyllis Reynolds Naylor's Witch Saga (1975, 1977, 1978) are notable for their use of a trope that Steven Bruhm calls "the Gothic child"-the possessed, demonic, or evil child exemplified in works like The Exorcist, The Omen, and Rosemary's Baby-to explore cultural fears related to children and the changing maternal roles of women. Though unexamined by scholars to date, these unsettling and creepy novels were part of a growing number of children's stories about the occult and the supernatural...