SILENT NO LONGER: RHETORICAL DIMENSIONS OF MOOD MEMOIRS WRITTEN BY
TEENAGE MOTHERS OF THE 1960S, 1980S, AND TODAY
A Dissertation
by
AMANDA KAY CRUZ
Submitted to the Office of Graduate Studies of Texas A&M University-Commerce in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY August 2018
SILENT NO LONGER: RHETORICAL DIMENSIONS OF MOOD MEMOIRS WRITTEN BY
TEENAGE MOTHERS OF THE 1960S, 1980S, AND TODAY
A Dissertation
by
AMANDA KAY CRUZ
Approved by:
Advisor: Shannon Carter
Committee: Lucy Pickering Susan Stewart Renea Fike
Head of Department: Hunter Hayes
Dean of the College: William Kuracina
Dean of Graduate Studies: Matt A. Wood iii
Copyright © 2018
Amanda Kay Cruz
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ABSTRACT
SILENT NO LONGER: RHETORICAL DIMENSIONS OF MOOD MEMOIRS WRITTEN BY TEENAGE MOTHERS OF THE 1960S, 1980S, AND TODAY
Amanda Kay Cruz, PhD Texas A&M University-Commerce, 2018
Advisor: Shannon Carter, PhD
This dissertation extends conversations in rhetorical and medical discourses about the ambiguous nature of freely discussing postpartum depression (PPD) suffered by teenage mothers as well as feminist discussions about the changing role of the woman across three different, albeit deeply related eras: the 1960s, the 1980s, and today. What follows is a feminist rhetorical analysis of the ways PPD is represented within three popular memoirs to which I apply Katie
Guest Rose Pryal’s label of “mood memoirs”: Lee Campbell’s Stow Away, Sallie Foster’s One
Girl in Ten: A Self Portrait of the Teen-age Mother, and Farrah Abraham’s My Teenage Dream
Ended. My study of these texts presenting teenage PPD extends opportunities for the previously silenced depressed teenage mother to provide a concrete response to anxiously urgent uncertainties about her disorder and/or the existence thereof. In short, I use this dissertation to spearhead a look at the rhetoric of teenage PPD through my close reading of how young women suffering with PPD express and make sense of their daily PPD realities, and in doing so, engender identification with readers despite rhetorical barriers typically observed in memoirs v
depicting mental illness. Moreover, I ultimately analyze the ways their stories develop into rhetorical arguments in response to two of their most significant silencers: society and the medical field.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I want to first recognize my creator’s unmerited, unearned, undeserved grace and favor throughout the writing of this dissertation. I am thankful that God has paved a way for me to become successful in this season and a whole lot smarter, too. Second, I want to express my heartfelt gratitude to my greatest blessing, my husband Husseim Cruz, who has not only willingly entertained our three energetic children in the confines of a 325 square foot hotel room too many times to count, but who has also logged some tens of thousands of miles driving our brood from where we live in the very bottom of South Texas to where my doctoral program is in the tip-top of North Texas. Husseim’s unwavering words of encouragement are forever engraved on my heart, and I am so very grateful that he never once thought the quest for my PhD was too ambitious. To my son, Adam Cruz (pictured on the page that follows), whom I delivered at the tender age of 15, I am grateful he has been by my side for the last ten years of academic and professional pursuits. Becoming a teenage mother to Adam was and still is a driving force behind my every accomplishment. To my daughters, Hannah Grace and Emma Joy Cruz, who have too frequently disrupted their sleep schedules to check on their Mommy as she worked through the night on her schoolwork; they may not understand it now, but in the near future, I know my girls will be pleased that their Mommy spent all this time on her “puter” now so she would not miss out on important life events later. To my three sets of parents, Dad and Challie, Mom and Max, and my in-laws, Irma and Abelardo, gracias por siempre estar ahi cuando más te necesito. I want to express thanks in English and in Spanish to each of these beloved family members who have been there for me every time I have most needed them. I am forever appreciative of each of their relentless support, their steadfast love, and constant encouragement. vii
To my advisor, Dr. Shannon Carter, who helped me to overcome a serious case of
“imposter syndrome,” I am evermore appreciative that she has faithfully supported my every endeavor from start to finish. To my sounding board and citation guru, Dr. Scott Lancaster, I am grateful for his exemplary mentorship and guidance. I would also like to individually thank my committee members. To Dr. Renea Fike, whom I have had the privilege of knowing since taking her Foundations of Education course as a sixteen-year-old freshman in college, I am thankful for her coming out of retirement to partake in my educational journey coming full circle. To Dr.
Lucy Pickering, I thank her for teaching me not to editorialize my writing, and not to underestimate it, either. To Dr. Susan Stewart, who has inspired me professionally and personally, I thank her for always seeing potential in my wild plans. Finally, I owe a debt of gratitude to my unofficial committee member and dear friend, Megan Opperman, who has blessed me with untiring support, feedback, and reassurance. This world would be a better place if there were more people like Megan in it.
The writer of this dissertation is pictured here, one decade prior to the present, at age 15, with her son and inspiration, Adam.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
LIST OF FIGURES ...... x
CHAPTER
1. INTRODUCTION ...... 1
Research Question ...... 4
Statement and Contextualization of the Problem ...... 7
Methodology ...... 10
Purpose of the Study/ Contributions to Rhetorical Studies ...... 11
Outline of Chapters ...... 12
Literature Review ...... 14
Significance of the Study ...... 17
Delimitations ...... 25
Conclusion ...... 27
2. STOW AWAY IN CONTEXT ...... 28
Historical Context through the Lens of The Feminine Mystique ...... 28
Pryal’s Four Rhetorical Conventions of Mood Memoirs ...... 43
Convention 1: Apologia ...... 46
Convention 2: Awakening ...... 47
Convention 3: Criticizing Doctors ...... 48
Convention 4: Laying Claim ...... 50
Rhetorical Devices Employed to Depict an Extra-Verbal Experience of
Disordered Reality ...... 51
ix
CHAPTER
How Representations of Postpartum Depression Function Rhetorically ...... 53
Rhetorical Influence of Medical Discourses on Memoirist ...... 58
3. ONE GIRL IN TEN IN CONTEXT ...... 63
Historical Context through the lens of The Second Shift ...... 65
Pryal’s 4 Rhetorical Conventions of Mood Memoirs ...... 79
Convention 1: Apologia ...... 79
Convention 2: Awakening ...... 80
Convention 3: Criticizing Doctors ...... 81
Convention 4: Laying Claim ...... 82
Rhetorical Devices Employed to Depict an Extra-Verbal Experience of
Disordered Reality ...... 83
How Representations of Postpartum Depression Function Rhetorically ...... 85
Rhetorical Influence of Medical Discourses on Memoirists ...... 88
4. MY TEENAGE DREAM ENDED IN CONTEXT ...... 94
Historical Context of Abraham’s Memoir through the Lens of Lean In ...... 97
Pryal’s 4 Rhetorical Conventions of Mood Memoirs ...... 109
Convention 1: Apologia ...... 109
Convention 2: Awakening ...... 110
Convention 3: Criticizing Doctors ...... 111
Convention 4: Laying Claim ...... 112
x
CHAPTER
Rhetorical Devices Employed to Depict an Extra-Verbal Experience of
Disordered Reality ...... 113
How Representations of Postpartum Depression Function Rhetorically ...... 116
Rhetorical Influence of Medical Discourses on Memoirist ...... 118
5. CONCLUSION ...... 125
Implications ...... 126
Reflections ...... 128
Future Research ...... 129
NOTES ...... 130
WORKS CITED ...... 132
VITA ...... 149
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LIST OF FIGURES
FIGURE
1. Breakdown on Neumann’s Spiral of Silence Rhetorical Theory ...... 3
2. Three Circle Venn Diagram Showing Text Relationships ...... 7
3. The Feminist Mystique Cause and Effect Chart ...... 29
4. Image Depicting the Woman’s Silenced Sense of Self in the 1960s ...... 32
5. Image Depicting the Woman’s Silenced Sense of Self in the 1980s ...... 64
6. Bar Graph Demonstrating the Gender-Pay Gap Over Time ...... 96
7. Image Depicting the Woman’s Silenced Sense of Self in Current Times ...... 99
1
Chapter 1
INTRODUCTION
Long since Hollywood and reality television catapulted teenage pregnancy into the spotlight with Academy-Award nominated films Juno (2007) and The Pregnancy Pact (2010), along with real life news of TV star Jamie Lynn Spears’ pregnancy at age 16 (2008), and of course, MTV's incredibly popular docuseries 16 & Pregnant plus its spin-offs Teen Mom, Teen
Mom 2, Teen Mom 3 and Teen Mom Young+Pregnant (2009-present), rhetoricians have picked and pulled apart the structure and consequences of communication events regarding this controversial and now sensationalized topic. For over a decade, film/TV watchers and social media goers have seen young women experience everything from the shock of first discovering their pregnancies to their harrowing and often dramatic birth experiences, to their navigation through the ups and downs of their relationships, but there is a significant piece missing from the relaying of these young women’s stories, and that is their all too common struggle with postpartum depression. Theorist Cheryl Beck finds that teenage mothers are three times likelier than adult mothers to develop postpartum depression (PPD) in the first year after their child’s birth. This number is hard to trace in teenagers but given that approximately 15% of adult females report having symptoms of postpartum depression within a year after delivery, then close to 600,000 adult females here in the U.S. undergo PPD annually (Centers for Disease
Control 2). If we multiply that estimated 15% by three as per Beck’s findings, then out of the
229,715 babies birthed by teenage patients between 15 and 19 years old in 2015, this would indicate that approximately 45% of teenage mothers are affected. A “Young Mums Together
Report” by the Mental Health Foundation adds to the discourse that “Young mothers suffer many barriers to seeking support primarily related to fear of reprisal from social services, negative past 2 experiences, and perceived stigma” (7). That said, there are likely many more adolescent mothers unaccounted for in that 45% simply because they make the choice to be silent about their true feelings.
Silencing is likely to occur among teen moms given the rhetoric around mental health and teenage pregnancy that prevents so many of them from being diagnosed. The narrative of social stigma surrounding mental illness and society’s common you made your bed, now lay in it approach to the aftermath of teenage pregnancy also plays a significant role. Elisabeth Noelle-
Neumann's spiral of silence is a rhetorical theory that explains the growth and spread of public opinion. Neumann coined the spiral of silence theory in the early 1970s (see fig. 1) as she recognized the power of public opinion as a crucial component of discourse. Neumann’s theory assumes that “in the social collective, cohesion must be constantly ensured by a sufficient level of agreement on values and goals, and that this agreement is termed public opinion” (“Theory of
Public Opinion” 43). But how does one know what the public opinion is? Neumann’s theory ascribes a quasi-statistical organ that all people have which helps to assess public opinion. It is through use of this sort of sixth sense organ that people discover public opinion premissed upon one’s social milieu, one’s assessment of the dissemination of stances which oppose and/or agree with one’s ideas, and most significantly, one’s evaluation of the strong suits, exigencies, and the likelihood of given propositions and points of view succeeding. Put simply, if a person thinks his or her opinion is not shared by the majority, that person will most likely either express the opinion he or she thinks the majority does hold or choose to be silent.
3
Figure 1. 1973 Representation of Spiral of Silence from: Glynn, Carroll. “A Closer Look at
Public Opinion” Special Forces, 10 July 1973, p. 3.
Moreover, as demonstrated in fig. 1 above, Neumann’s spiral of silence rhetorical theory assumes the fear of isolation is as an integral part of the process of public opinion. Any lector is vulnerable to social pressure, sanction, and punishment, but only those who depart from the course established by society are susceptible to ostracism and isolation (“Turbulences in the
Climate of Opinion” 189).
Scholars like Katie Guest Rose Pryal have long sought to highlight how the stigma of adult depression functions as a rhetorical disability, but little, if any, research has been done in our field to identify similar findings among adolescents who undergo PPD. What follows is a 4 rhetorical analysis of three popular autobiographical memoirs that feature insight into teenage women’s self-described battles with PPD from the American twentieth and twenty-first century:
Lee Campbell’s Stow Away, Sallie Foster’s One Girl in Ten: A Self Portrait of the Teen-age
Mother, and Farrah Abraham’s My Teenage Dream Ended. These memoirs were chosen because of their incredible popularity and because of each author’s distinctive ability to expose their lived realities of what they determine to be PPD both in contrast to and parallel with rhetorical and medical discourses which changed drastically in their interpretation of PPD between the 1960s,
1980s, and today. To be clear, some of the women who share their stories in these texts were formally diagnosed by medical professionals with PPD. Others were not. Many of them self- diagnosed either at the time of their experiences as new mothers, or in hindsight once they were armed with new knowledge of the condition and its symptoms. With that said, Campbell’s,
Foster’s, and Abraham’s responses to rhetorical and medical discourses generate a significant opportunity for readers to utilize the narrative genre as a vehicle through which they identify with the shifting moods—whether formally identified or not—depicted by the young women in the memoirs.
Research Question
This dissertation, therefore, addresses the following research question:
1. How have popular, mainstream memoirs represented postpartum depression in
teenage mothers across three particularly dramatic moments in women’s
history—the 1960s, the 1980s, and today?
To answer this question, I seek to classify Campbell’s, Foster’s, and Abraham’s texts as what rhetorical scholars recognize as mood memoirs, or more specifically, “first person narratives of living with mood disorders” (Pryal 113), and I limit my study to the writings by those young 5 mothers medically- or self-diagnosed with "mood disorders" listed and defined in the American
Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
(DSM), such as depression and postpartum depression, and these subcategories of said diagnoses: clinical depression, major depression, persistent depressive disorder, and bi-polar disorder. To be clear, Campbell’s, Foster’s, and Abraham’s national best-selling texts were not written solely to emanate their struggles with PPD; they were written to capture foremost past life experiences of a sundry of women who had a child while still of school-age, and their struggle with PPD is just one of those experiences. However, with that being said, these texts would fit nicely within the mood memoir genre, for as I will soon demonstrate, they each behold the following four common features Pryal finds to be foundational to the mood memoir:
1. discusses in an apologia the motivations for writing the memoir, to justify the
project and defend it from detractors;
2. experiences a moment of awakening to the existence of their illness (and
additionally, to their exclusion from society);
3. criticizes "bad" doctors; mood memoirists typically write about interactions
with doctors who ignore their stories in favor of other forms of knowledge, such
as observations and diagnostic criteria;
4. lays claim to other sufferers of mood disorders in order to normalize the illness
and amplify (via auxesis) the memoirist's authority (Pryal 111).
In my rhetorical analysis of memoirs depicting teenagers’ experiences of motherhood as well as their battles with PPD, I likewise identify these same rhetorical moves—(1) apologia, (2) awakening, (3) doctor's criticism, and (4) auxesis—and situate them within both a historical 6 context and within the rhetorical practice of silencing, in this case referring to a use of restraint enforced upon this unique group of teenage mothers by societal expectations. 1
I historicize Stow Away, (originally published in 2013 but depicting Campbell’s teenage pregnancy which occurred in 1963); One Girl in Ten: A Self Portrait of the Teen-age Mother,
(originally published in 1988 but depicting multiple teenage pregnancies which occurred in 1981 and 1982); and My Teenage Dream Ended, (published in 2014 but depicting Abraham’s teenage pregnancy in 2009) with the help of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (originally published in 1963), Arlie Hochschild’s and Anne Machung’s The Second Shift (first published in
1989), and Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In (originally published in 2013). Each of the latter-noted works serve as the foundation of my feminist rhetorical analysis as I investigate the role silence plays in the memoirs—my primary texts (see fig. 2).
Furthermore, I follow each description of the historical context I am studying with a thorough investigation into how postpartum depression surfaces among teenage mothers in their own words and the ways in which they were silenced in their pasts (and for some, in their presents). With regard to silence, I identify multiple rhetorical moves made by all of the memoirists whose works I am studying. In the course of my feminist rhetorical analysis, I also explore conversations in mental health and mental illness in rhetorical studies and the medical humanities to provide a clear background on postpartum depression and its medical evolution. 7
Figure 2. Three Circle Venn Diagram Showing Text Relationships
Statement and Contextualization of the Problem
Many active rhetorical scholars have agreed in recent times that rhetorical participation is limited within depictions of limited psychiatric ability. For example, in Neurorhetorics, Jordynn
Jack investigates "the problem of granting rhetoricity to the mentally disabled: that is, rhetoric's received tradition of emphasis on the individual rhetor who produces speech/writing, which in turn confirms the existence of a fixed, core self, imagined to be located in the mind" (157). In other words, the rhetorical agency of the mentally ill is often destroyed, for such individuals are dismissed as rhetorically unsound. As Margaret Price aptly observes in Mad at School, “To lack rhetoricity is to lack all basic freedoms and rights, including the freedom to express ourselves 8 and the right to be listened to” (27). This suggests that mental and psychiatric disabilities strip people of their rhetorical ability, thus indicating that psychiatric disability does, indeed, impede rhetorical participation.
What is missing from the discussion of mental illness are groups of people who may be similarly deemed unsound and rhetorically disincluded: teenage mothers who experience postpartum depression. Adding the known stigma associated with mental illness to that of teenage parenthood equivalates to another group of people uniquely disenfranchised by society. I do not argue that teenage motherhood is a mental illness, though some have depicted them this way. Instead, I am using Pryal’s idea of the mood memoir as an access point for studying the rhetorocity of teenage mothers who are medically- or self-diagnosed with PPD. I am also leaning on rhetorical studies of mental illness as a basis of my exploration into teenage motherhood through memoirs written by and about teenage mothers. Moreover, I am relying on Pryal’s findings in her study Life of the Mind Interrupted in which she draws on narrative and genre theory to demonstrate the ways in which neurorhetorics—the assessment of neuroscientific research from a rhetorical standpoint—represent disabilities, and lived experiences of said disabilities, across specific lines of plot and dramatic effect, in Pryal’s case in ways that “may shape experience of disability as well as available lines of authority” (110). With my adaption of
Pryal’s perspective, neurorhetorics will prove to become an important site of inquiry for my research as well, considering the current research gap between the depiction of adult postpartum depression (extensively studied) and the depiction of teenage postpartum depression (almost never studied).
This dissertation extends Pryal’s research by considering how a different, understudied group of the psychiatrically disabled (teenage mothers diagnosed with postpartum depression 9 after delivering their infants) is using the mood memoir as a narrative genre to engender participation. While the proposed study does not approach teenage pregnancy as a mental illness, the mood memoir remains a useful theoretical lens through which to examine memoirs which specifically detail the experiences of teenage mothers with postpartum depression over three generations—1960s, 1980s, and 2000s. The 1960s are known as the “baby scoop era” during which teenage mothers were sent away to homes for unwed mothers until delivery and then were forced to give their babies up for adoption shortly thereafter. The 1980s—also known as the “Me
Decade,”—are known for the increasing prevalence of sex among high school students (though still kept secret) during which the young women who share their stories in One Girl in Ten: A
Self Portrait of the Teen-age Mother believe the American stigma against unwed adolescent pregnancy started to wane, leading the number of teen births to rise across the country. Lastly, the 2000s and 2010s have become recognized as the “Me, Me, Me Decades” of millennials (the first group to grow up in the current digital era)—consisting, as per Farrah Abraham, of teenage sex, miniskirts, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, and more teenage sex.
Abraham’s beliefs regarding the sexual acitivity of today’s adolescents is not unfounded statistically speaking, with 2011-2013 reflecting an estimated 64% of females and 69% of males engaging in unmarried sexual intercourse between ages fifteen and nineteen (Giggey 177), although with abortions and birth control becoming more accessible, today’s rate of teenage pregnancies is lower than either of the prior decades analyzed in this dissertation. Abraham describes the present as a time when a pregnant woman has more of a say over her body than she ever had before. She also says it is a time when teenage pregnancy has transformed into a regularly used punchline of jokes employed in popular culture, has begun to be sensationalized in television shows, and, therefore, has begun to be filmed and photographed more than the 10 previous eras, which kept relatively all pregnancies private, but teenage pregnancies all the more so (Abraham 34).
Methodology
Like Pryal, this study employs narrative theory (that we live our lives by and through our stories) and genre theory (that genre depends on conventional sequencing patterns) to expose rhetorical strategies mood memoirists employ to build ethos in defiance of the stigma of simultaneous adolescent parenthood and postpartum depression. In her articulation of mood memoir, Pryal treats rhetoric as "the central means through which humans access and understand themselves, others, and the world”—an important exception to the common tendency to define rhetoric as the theory of communication broadly conceived (Gordon et al. 223). Also taken into careful consideration is Kenneth Burke’s theory of identification for which he asserts that “We become influenced by an appeal, only when we can see the person depicted in that appeal in a way similar to how we see ourselves” (202). But how does one do that? As I demonstrate in the chapters that follow, this question begins to be answered only when a rhetorical space is created for teenage women with PPD to re-claim authority, defy time-specific medicalized interpretations of their illnesses, and erect new narratives of postpartum depression. Ultimately, in my feminist rhetorical analysis of popular, mainstream memoirs on teenage motherhood, each of these theories will be employed as additional avenues to understand, especially, how teenage mothers with PPD are silenced in ways adult mothers with PPD are not. I suggest that classifying
Campbell’s, Foster’s, and Abraham’s works as mood memoirs naturally gives voice “to rhetorical exclusion”—those previously silenced by the stigma of mental illness. By extension, I argue that teenage mothers with PPD are similarly silenced by the stigma of their circumstances 11 but through their writing, they are able to, as Pryal says, “reclaim reliable social ethos for the mentally ill” (p. 480).
Moreover, my methodology for this dissertation involves a feminist rhetorical analysis of how selected memoirs of teenage motherhood, which, I argue, may be effectively understood as what Katie Rose Guest Pryal calls mood memoirs, depict young women’s experiences with postpartum depression. Through this genre, I argue that authors normalize teenage postpartum depression in a context where it is typically pathologized or altogether ignored. To do so, I simultaneously analyze conversations between disability studies and rhetoric studies, the medical humanities, and, most importantly, the rhetorical moves teenage mothers with PPD make within memoirs that coincide with significant moments in women’s history.
Purpose of Study/ Contributions to Rhetorical Studies
My study contributes to the work conducted by the following scholars: Katie Guest Rose
Pryal (mental disability equates to rhetorical disability), Catherine Prendergast (a rhetorical analysis of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), Cynthia Lewiecki-
Wilson (privileging of symbolic language), and John Schilb (significance of the physical, material body in a world of virtual reality). Furthermore, like each of these scholars, my study subscribes to the growing body of scholarship that draws attention to the memoired or first- person accounts in their examination of psychiatric matters. However, relatively little is known about the mood disorders experienced by historically marginalized populations like teenage mothers. To date, rhetorical constructions of teenage postpartum depression has received scant, if any, attention in our field.
Though my focus is on the rhetorical constructions of teenage PPD specifically as opposed to mood disorders in general, a review of existing scholarship on psychiatric issues is 12 nonetheless useful given my focus on the mood memoir. While postpartum depression prevalently stems from biological/bodily causes in existing studies on PPD narratives, mood memoirs about adolescent PPD convey narratives across some pretty blurred lines. Considering depression, in and of itself, remains a contested diagnosis to this day—and this will soon be demonstrated in my incorporation of the various definitions of depression provided by the DSM over the past several decades—it is irrefutable that postpartum depression in teenagers thirsts for more rhetorical attention. To this day, PPD among adults is not 100% identified as a biological disorder in the medical field. As such, medicine’s representation of PPD since the 1960s has been grounded in biological as well as moral justifications of the causes of PPD. While likely nerve wracking for sufferers, this is advantageous for my dissertation. My feminist rhetorical analysis of the ways PPD is represented within mood memoirs across three vastly different periods of time is imperative since ambiguity seems to smother the spectacle of PPD. Clarity is desperately needed. My study of mood memoirs presenting teenage PPD extends opportunities for the previously silenced, depressed teenage mother to provide a concrete response to anxiously urgent uncertainties of the medical field. In the chapters that follow, I aim to spearhead a fresh look at the rhetoric of teenage PPD through my close reading of how young women suffering with PPD express and make sense of their daily PPD realities along with the ways their stories develop into rhetorical arguments in response to two of their most significant silencers: society and the medical field.
Outline of Chapters
In addition to the contributions I listed above, there are three unique offerings to rhetorical studies my classifying Lee Campbell’s Stow Away, Sallie Foster’s One Girl in Ten: A
Self Portrait of the Teen-age Mother, and Farrah Abraham’s My Teenage Dream Ended as mood 13 memoirs bring. Beginning in the second chapter, this study describes how narrated experiences with teenage postpartum depression bring clarity for non-PPD effected readers notwithstanding the evolving ways PPD is articulated across the medical field throughout the 1960s. Second, in
Chapter 3, this study considers how narratives about teenage PPD elicit identification with other sufferers to perform rhetorical work. Third, in Chapter 4, I explore the impact of scientific innovations on personal senses of oneself and others, as well as the rhetorical invention birthed by the depressed teenage mothers’ stories. Finally, this dissertation concludes by demonstrating how my study collectively reflects upon the similarities of silencing that carry across three different periods of women’s history.
After the introductory chapter, the second chapter centers around Campbell’s mood memoir: I focus on reading the lived experiences of a silenced teenage mother who battles PPD at the cusp of changing women's roles. This chapter draws in the rhetoric which surrounded the
1950s women and the new, 1960s/70s women as depicted in Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique.
This was a time of sexual liberation for the young and frantic policing by the older generation culminating in Friedan dubbing subservient women’s unhappiness as “the problem that has no name” (2). The third chapter centers around Foster’s mood memoir: I focus on reading the representation of teenage postpartum depression and consequential silencing at the dawn of the
“second shift” (Hochschild and Machung 1). This chapter draws in Hochschild's and Machung’s rhetoric of having it all, meaning women would do everything; they would work a day-long shift at their jobs to come home to work a night-long job in their home. Finally, in the fourth and final chapter before the conclusion, I center my research around Abraham’s mood memoir: I focus on identifying the representation of teenage PPD and their being silenced during the present time period in which having it all is deemed as nothing more than a “myth” (Sandberg 9). This 14 chapter draws in Sandberg’s rhetoric of continuing to work together toward equality. Sandberg takes a long, hard look at the controversial question frequently posed to working women in today’s day and age: "How do you do it all?" “Doing it all,” of course, is “the assumption that a woman who is achieving in her career must not have time to spend with family, and this same question is not asked to men in business” (6). Meanwhile, along the way in each of these chapters I discuss what it means to be the subject of discourses that are so deeply silenced by society that the marginalized, depressed teenage mothers internalize this to the point that it becomes truth and part of their identity. I also discuss what it means to be a teenage mother with
PPD in each given era politically, socially, mentally, etc.
Literature Review
Teenage mothers who battle PPD have long suffered exclusion from public life. As it is, the very diagnosis of teenage pregnancy, let alone PPD, has been kept a dark secret throughout history. As Anne Helen Petersen explains in Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman, it was not uncommon in the 1960s for young women to disappear from public view until several months after the baby was delivered (most often in the domestic space, not a hospital, and managed by midwives), to ensure the visible signs of pregnancy had diminished (49). In Rhetorics of Motherhood, Lynn O’Brien Hallstein adds that like all things hidden for fear of being frowned upon (e.g., women’s sexuality, menstrual periods, feces), a woman’s pregnancy could not be openly discussed for fear of societal rejection, even if she was a married adult woman. Needless to say, this helps establish the framework for the silence experienced by the women depicted in Campbell’s, Foster’s, and Abraham’s memoirs. Silencing pregnant women has been a phenomenon since the beginning of time, so certainly the said memoirs (my primary texts) are not anomalous. As a matter of fact, according to historians Carol 15
Brooks Gardner and Gerhard Falk, in early to mid-twentieth-century America “talk of pregnancy was forbidden even between mother and daughter, if either hoped to claim breeding and gentility” (399). Petersen even explains that in the era of the 1960s specifically “colloquialisms were developed to refer tactfully to the obscenity of a young woman’s condition: she was ‘with child’ or ‘in a family way,’ never ‘pregnant’” (51).
Until the 1950s/60s, the word “pregnancy” was considered a taboo use of language in the typical American household, as well as in the television and film industry. Belinda Southard points out that “In 1953, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) refused to approve the script for The Moon Is Blue solely because it included the word “pregnant” (132). As it happens, the MPAA also published a catalog of “13 Don’ts and 31 Be Carefuls,” which dictated what was and was not allowed on-screen from the 1920s all the way up to the 1960s, including
“a ban on any depiction of childbirth, even “in silhouette” (Petersen 48). During what film scholars and historians dub the “Silent Film Era” in Hollywood from 1910-1927, it was common for actresses to avoid becoming pregnant at all costs so they would not sabotage future job opportunities. Meanwhile, actresses who did conceive went into hiding, as previously noted, likely not wanting fans and producers to know of their diagnosis. As late as the close of the
1950s, noteworthy stars like Debbie Reynolds and Elizabeth Taylor were photographed postpartum—during the joyful bonding that occurs after delivery—but they were seldom photographed while pregnant.
An attempt to erase all pregnant bodies and certainly any unjoyful occurrences that occur thereafter (i.e., postpartum depression) from the film space and public discourse paralleled important court cases that enabled women to choose when they conceive. Gardner and Falk explain that this new freedom was first launched in 1965 by way of the Supreme Court’s 16 decision to uphold women’s right to privacy about their birth control usage if they so chose to use it. Come 1973, with Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court upheld women’s right to get an abortion. Then, in 1974, the Supreme Court turned down a school in Cleveland that sought to fire an expecting teacher, for “the administration worried that her pregnant body would alternately disgust, concern, fascinate, and embarrass her students” (Gardner and Falk 400).
With this much stigma attached to the narrative surrounding what was in most cases a married female pregnant body—the “appropriate” pregnant body—consider the magnified stigma attached to the pregnant body of an unmarried woman, let alone that of an unmarried teenage woman. Then consider what few options an unmarried teenage woman would have if she faced postpartum depression, a mood disorder she would not have developed without being pregnant too soon as society harshly reminds her. It is the pregnant teen body medically- and/or self-diagnosed with PPD to which I will turn my attention in this study. My goal is to examine what can be learned about the rhetorical construction and silencing of teenage PPD by studying the ways that teenage mothers rhetorically construct themselves as well as the way they describe being rhetorically constructed by others.
It was during the 1970s that the term “teenage pregnancy” emerged in America (Macleod
437). Likewise, this was the very time period that teenage pregnancy officially became a public problem, and young women who became mothers while still of school age were stigmatized as being “rebellious, promiscuous, and products of dysfunctional homes” (Field and Pierce 172).
Teenage pregnancy became socially and rhetorically constructed as a problem “paralleled with economic development and social trends” (Field and Pierce 174). These changes are likely to show up in Campbell’s, Foster’s, and Abraham’s memoirs and in the three different eras they depict, which are situated amongst significant historical changes for women. The memoirs, as 17 they will soon remind us, are a part of a larger historical context that cannot be disregarded. In the late 1970s/ early 1980s, doctors went as far as labeling unmarried adolescent mothers as psychiatrically disabled for their decision to conceive (not for their development of any actual mental illness) and isolating them in asylums, merely because they believed that “between 70 and 90 percent of insanity cases were curable, but only if patients were provided treatment in specially designed buildings" (Dietrich 67). Some doctors at that time even suggested that courts should have imposed forced sterilization on adolescent mothers long before they conceived, believing that "heredity plays an important part in the transmission of insanity" (Buck v. Bell
206).
Using these shared conventions, I will soon prove that Campbell, Foster, and Abraham are able to construct a reliable ethos—referring to the character readers infer about a memoirist from his or her writing. Creating a reliable ethos is important to build a reader’s trust and one’s reputation as a writer, but there is definitely a gap in the literature in the creation of a reliable ethos for the ambiguous teenage mother who suffers from PPD. As previously noted, I seek to fill that gap by applying the four rhetorical conventions Katie Guest Rose Pryal unearthed to the three memoirs I am studying in order to a) prove their suitedness for inclusion in the mood memoir genre, b) reveal their representations of PPD and silencing, and c) consider them within the bigger historical picture. My timing for filling said gap is pertinent considering the mood memoir genre has gained extraordinary popular appeal since the twentieth century.
Significance of the Study
As Jordynn Jack reminds us in Neurorhetorics, “Using narrative to convey their experiential knowledge, mood memoirists overcome rhetorical exclusion by creating a narrative space in which the authors’ voices can be heard, generating a rhetorical capital grounded in 18 narrative logic rather than scientific logic” (45). In other words, it is significant to use the memoirs I am classifying as mood memoirs in order to give voices back to the previously silenced, yet as Northrop Frye has observed, "The purpose of criticism by genres is not so much to classify as to clarify . . . traditions and affinities, thereby bringing out a large number of literary relationships that would not be noticed as long as there were no context established for them" (247-248). This means the mood memoir, can be traced to relational ties with other multiple other narrative genres depicting different types of rhetorical silencing. After all, all genres come from other genres, meaning “a new genre is always the transformation of an earlier one, or of several: by inversion, by displacement, by combination" (Todorov and Berrong 15).
While acknowledging that a genre is little more than “the codification of discursive properties" (Todorov and Berrong 15), and that it is “constantly evolving with new members,” I join scholars Pryal and Miller who situate the mood memoir as a new autobiographical genre
(Todorov and Berrong 16; Miller 149). I then independently argue that the mood memoir genre is motivated by the rhetorical spiral of silencing as it effects the societally marginalized such as the teenage mother with PPD who is told her sadness is her own fault so she should just deal with it. In doing so, I further argue that my primary texts, as mood memoirs, establish an authoritative and reliable ethos for the young women whose lives they depict and for others who suffer the consequences of teenage PPD.
I aim to resolve how the memoirs I am studying vindicate the experiences of other sufferers of silencing in an attempt to make teenage parenthood over three different, albeit deeply related eras, more accessible. I accomplish this by considering the following: (a) the rhetorical construction of teenage PPD painting them as “undeserving of help” and (b) the rhetorical construction of teenage PPD sufferers as “dependents who come to terms with their 19 circumstances.” First, rhetorically constructing young moms with PPD as taking up the roles of
“burdens” to society—used synonymously with the adjective “deviant”—is primarily inspired by deviance theories under which one’s behavior is determined by societal norms to be dissimilar to expected behavior, and therefore is someway depicted as “wrong” or “bad.” In “Gender and
Deviance,” Danielle Dirks argues that deviance is “not a quality that lies in behavior itself, but in the interaction between the person who commits an act and those who respond to it” (287).
Thus, Dirks says “the use of the words ‘bad’ or ‘deviant’ behavior is premised on society’s ability to label an individual as ‘deviant’ or ‘burden’” (288). Needless to say, its common application to delinquents, drug/alcohol abusers, the disabled, and other less valued members of society who hold very little say so makes this construction’s negative connotation inescapable.
Moreover, “undeserving” images presented in predominant oral discourse such as “incapable,”
“stupid,” “dishonest,” and “selfish” further characterize what is expected from the “deviant”
(Dirks 290). As will be discussed in depth later, said images are also prevalent in Lee Campbell’s
Stow Away, Sallie Foster’s One Girl in Ten: A Self Portrait of the Teen-age Mother, and Farrah
Abraham’s My Teenage Dream Ended. Each of these memoirists cite experiences of teenage mothers with PPD being the victims of negative discourse which designates them as rejected/ unworthy of treatment for their mood disorder which society views as their fault to begin with.
This type of discourse creates a norm in society that is used as a measure of social control (The
Archaeology of Knowledge 77). According to Michel Foucault, norms are concepts that are constantly used to evaluate, control, and silence society (The History of Sexuality 14). Therefore, a law-abiding citizen who is acting in accordance with these norms is considered a sane,
“obedient” person who is deserving of care (i.e. a married adult female who develops PPD) whereas a person who does not act in accordance with these norms (i.e. an unwed female 20 teenager who develops PPD) is “abnormal” and deviant, and therefore undeserving of care. This is how silencing works according to Foucault. Norms do not only serve as a measure of control, but also exclude those individuals who do not conform to "normal" (The Birth of the Prison
190). Hence the teenage mother who suffers from PPD is now faced with being stigmatized as ineligible of receiving the help she needs because she made the wrong life choice by falling pregnant at a young age and outside of wedlock.
Dirks has found that even policy makers in our government have used this common knowledge of how valueless the teenage mother is in order to enact punishment-oriented policy, seemingly without any consideration whatsoever of her mental state. As such, policy makers
“need not fear electoral retaliation from the group itself if the general public approves of punishment for groups that it has constructed negatively” (Dirks et al. 292). It seems that target populations who are labeled as “undeserving of help” receive little beneficial policy from the government. Of course, this is a total contrast to the positive connotations of more powerful members of society (i.e. college graduates, stockholders, business owners) to whom beneficial policy is in many ways oversubscribed. Dirks tells us, “Negatively constructed powerless groups will usually be proximate targets of punishment policy, and the extent of burdens will be greater than is needed to achieve effective results” (293). Teenage mothers with PPD fundamentally defy requirements for their membership to a powerful group according to society/culture/etc.
This construction of being “undeserving of help” and therefore silenced has been applied directly to teenage mothers, further disabling them in societal discourse. As conveyed by Howard Becker in the journal Outsiders: Sociology of Deviance, “conservative political figures including Charles
Murray, Edward Banfield, and George Gilder have spent years engaging in negative rhetoric about the societal effects of teenage pregnancy” (389). The rhetoric Becker refers to here is a 21 rhetoric similar to that which is shared about those who receive government assistance for having disabilities yet are marked narratively as lazy rather than disabled. Said individuals argue that teen parenthood is to blame for a myriad of political and social snags (i.e. juvenile delinquency, poverty, welfare dependency, and low rates of high school completion). In this way, poverty, for example, is thought as the effect of teenage mothers who are deemed “unjustified/ unworthy”; therefore, they are in need of being chastised and silenced. Put differently, a community’s social woes are the fault of teenage mothers’ “irresponsibility” and “promiscuity,” and the construction of rhetoric which labels teenage mothers as in need of silencing is premised upon “the neurotic deficiencies of low-income girls in order to cast them as an ‘undeserving’ population,” very similarly to the disabled population, whether or not they actually have any type of postpartum depression (21).
Parallel with what Helen Ingram and Anne Schneider contend about the influential role damning rhetorical constructions have on society’s views, the depiction of adolescent moms as
“engines of national malaise” have inevitably resulted in retributive welfare policy that has both revoked many benefits previously offered to school-age parents and has cripplingly depicted them as deserving of consequential social “silencing”—a stigma that is not easily forgotten. The more current rhetoric branding teenage mothers with PPD as “undeserving of help,” suggesting that they made their bed so now they can lay in it enables and empowers the general public to pathologize them.
Secondly, in contrast to the approach of labeling teenage mothers with PPD as
“undeserving of help,” other teenage prevention policy supporters, including those who advocate for reproductive and feminist rights such as Planned Parenthood, for example, advocate for a common rhetorical construction of teenage mothers as “dependents who come to terms with their 22 circumstances” and further contribute to my argument that teenage mothers with PPD are characterized similarly to the disabled. While feminist groups and reproductive rights advocates inevitably do not engage in rhetoric portraying teenage mothers with PPD as fit to parent per se, they do avidly engage in the promotion of adolescent pregnancy prevention, and they uphold their view by corroborating the “adverse” effects of premature mothering (PPD being one of them), chiefly as they are medically-related and can lead to harmful outcomes for both mom and baby (Hipwell et al. 11). Furthermore, these groups often place their views within a pocket of a reproductive rights theoretical framework whereby adolescent pregnancy—and any of its associated effects—in the first place is due to the government’s failure to deliver sufficient reproductive health services such as access to birth control, contraceptives, annual exams, etc.
Flouting the contrasting construction’s unease with the morality of unwed sexual activity at a young age, this rhetorical construction of unfit teen parenthood posits teen mothers as
“accepting” their circumstances and diagnoses. Constructing teenage mothers as “dependents who reach a level of acceptance and stop asking questions” is a step toward a positive direction though it is still a form of silencing—not a win for feminism, but more favorable nonetheless— to whom beneficial policy nevertheless remains undersubscribed: “For the dependent groups, such as children or mothers, officials want to appear to be aligned with their interests; but their lack of political power makes it difficult to direct resources toward them” (Schneider et al. 320).
Therefore, “symbolic and hortatory tools will commonly be used for dependent groups even when the pervasiveness of the problem would suggest that more direct intervention is needed”
(Schneider et al. 323).
Remarkably, as some members of society have even embraced the teen mother facing
PPD as “owning up to her circumstances” rather than as “undeserving of help,” the resulting 23 beneficial policy formation is growing at a snail’s pace. For instance, as Schneider points out, free health clinics still “require clients to present themselves to the agency in order to receive benefits and as such, the policies promoted by reproductive rights advocates only reach a handful of the target population” (Schneider et al. 322). Moreover, though reaching a level of
“acceptance” is not as explicitly demonizing as being “undeserving of help,” not allowing teenage mothers with PPD to ask questions about their condition is a form of silencing that can only be attributed to their being “label[ed] and stigmatiz[ed]” as well as reminded that they are
“helpless, powerless, and needy” (Schneider et al. 325).
Now, not all rhetorical constructions of adolescents with PPD have been disparaging.
According to Kathleen McConnell, the feminists who rally for “reproductive rights of low- income women” have engaged in positive rhetoric about teenage mothers (48) in the sense that again, they do not contend that teenagers are fit to parent, but they imply that teenage mothers who suffer from PPD are dependent “on the generosity of the more powerful to not only know what is in their best interest [delaying early childbearing], but to solve their problems on their behalf [the ability to avoid ‘unintended’ pregnancy]” and to help them accept that their PPD is a consequence of their behavioral/sexual choices and they need not question it but rather just accept it (48). On top of that, teenage mothers—or mothers perceived to be young—who deal with PPD are often policed and rhetorically labeled as needing to silence their questions about
PPD in the form of advice from those societally perceived to be more knowledgeable and credible than they.
Through my study of the ways teenage mothers rhetorically represent PPD as well as the role silence plays in such representations, I will inevitably draw attention to how each of the memoirists whose work I am focusing on, elicit an emotional response from their readers as they 24 each divulge their life experiences that, in addition to their already stigmatized status as adolescent mothers, dramatically affect how they see and interact with the world, others, and themselves. According to Kenneth Burke, a considerable amount of what people accept as
“reality” is “the spinning out of possibilities implicit in the words they choose” (202). This means a teenage mother’s rhetorical symbols and the meaning behind them aid in the creation of the very meanings of reality. With the meaning behind intense life experiences such as PPD unclear, a study of how popular autobiographical accounts of teenage PPD from authors
Campbell, Foster, and Abraham generate further uncertainty, but also and more significantly, certainty, about the need to give voice to the silenced.
Furthermore, the depiction of the experience of PPD in teenage mothers carried out in each of the autobiographical narratives I am studying through the lens of Pryal’s four mood memoir conventions and the historical context they illuminate, will be examined in this dissertation for their execution of the rhetorical perspective from which they portray the “real reality” of adolescent PPD and the ways in which that reality is silenced. In doing so, I will also supply a rhetorical perspective on the biomedical revolution—during which urbanization led to what many perceived as a ‘degradation’ of medical care. Lee Campbell’s depiction of her struggle with PPD after being pregnant as a teenager in 1963 in Stow Away gives readers perspective before the biomedical revolution; Sallie Foster’s One Girl in Ten: A Self Portrait of the Teen-age Mother, which shares the experiences of adolescent motherhood and PPD in the actual words of multiple young girls who had their first child in the 1980s before finishing high school, gives readers perspective during the occurrence of the biomedical revolution; and finally,
Farrah Abraham’s My Teenage Dream Ended which details her struggle with event-induced PPD 25 she experienced after giving birth and losing a loved one almost simultaneously in 2009, gives readers perspective several years after the biomedical revolution.
Delimitations
It would be remiss if I proceeded any further without noting that there are hindrances that can disable rhetorical possibilities of narratives written by adolescent mothers. First of all, these narratives are limited to sharing only the worldview of the young women’s stories who I analyze, not that of all teenage mothers who recall undergoing postpartum depression. Second, the very fact that they are narratives is a limitation in and of itself, considering no narrative is written without filters. A memory immediately following an event is inevitably different than a memory years after that event. Add to that the pressure that comes from societal norms and one’s innate desire not to deviate far from those norms, along with the unmovable role of an editor who can considerably change content, the accuracy of these memoirs cannot be determined, though that is ultimately irrelevant as that is not the focus of my research. It should be noted though, that each of my primary texts are in many ways incomplete and that One Girl in Ten: A Self Portrait of the
Teen-age Mother, in particular, went through a great deal of filtering by Foster herself, given her selection of which interview excerpts to include in her book and which ones she did not include.
The same goes with My Teenage Dream Ended which is so sensationalized by the 16 &
Pregnant franchise that how much of it is specifically and intentionally framed as a commercial endeavor is frankly impossible to measure. Additionally, the limited number of scholarly critics who have rhetorically analyzed highly emotional memoirs by teenage mothers have tended to approach them with suspicion. Ann Jurecic, whose recent work in the medical humanities has concerned the tensions and contradictions between how literary critics and memoirists view narratives about the socially excluded, explains that the rhetorical practice of respecting logos 26 appeals over pathos appeals has an extensive history in Western thought (22). Jurecic describes pathos appeals as being viewed as “weak arguments” at best (19). More often, pathos appeals are deemed immoral and politically dangerous, however it is my belief that a very important bridge exists between the theoretical work by rhetorical scholars on “rhetorical silence” and medical humanists’ views of narrative disruption. A narrative that “disrupts” meets the criteria established by rhetorical scholars such as Einat Avrahami and Carole Blair for what is known as a “deliberative narrative” which encourages readers to reassess the ways they view contested areas of discourse (131). Moreover, the purpose of a narrative that “invites participation” is
Kenneth Burke names “an appeal for identification” (44).
To make evident precisely how narratives concerning the suffering of teenage mothers with PPD position themselves as rhetorical texts, I have to limit my identification of them as mood memoirs when engaging in language about the teenagers’ experiences with PPD. As noted earlier, present narratives presenting this topic are essentially about a diagnosis that is still contested to this day, so another limitation to my study is PPD is not as cut and dry of a diagnosis as several other diagnoses and for many of the young women whose stories I analyze, they are self- rather than medically- diagnosed with postpartum depression. Up to now, language has yet to conclusively identify depression as a biological disorder in public opinion, or in the field of psychiatry, leading scholarly discussion of PPD since the 1960s to locate the roots of
PPD within moral and biological elucidations. That said, revealing from a rhetorical standpoint how postpartum depression comes to be expressed in mood memoirs which recollect the experiences of adolescent mothers throughout significantly different periods of time and how it is comprehended by readers by way of this in-depth feminist rhetorical analysis will be especially significant to the field of rhetoric considering the phenomenon of depression lacks 27 clarity. Ultimately, by examining the teenage mother’s experience with PPD as silenced by society deeming them as “undeserving of help” and “accepting of their diagnosis without asking questions,” I extend opportunities for readers to join me in comparing the representation of PPD and silencing in the memoirs of these young mothers to relevant rhetorical models, theories, and concepts, as well as that of mental health and illness in rhetorical studies and the medical humanities.
Conclusion
This dissertation conducts a twofold process of close reading Campbell’s, Foster’s, and
Abraham’s works in order to expose both how adolescent mothers with PPD rhetorically express and comprehend their own lived-experience of teenage pregnancy while battling mental illness as well as how the shared experiences of each of these women function as public arguments during the differing time periods they depict. I intend for my findings to strengthen earlier research into the rhetoric of the societally disabled—specifically PPD-suffering teenage mothers.
I concentrate on how popular, mainstream autobiographical accounts of adolescent motherhood, though often pathologized by society, seek to normalize their varying experiences of PPD amongst three particularly significant moments in women’s history—the 1960s, the 1980s, and today. Additionally, I offer a fresh perspective on the narrative experience that lays claim to other sufferers of societal exclusion, which is advantageous because the narrative experience has seldom been studied for rhetorical insights, especially when it involves young mothers with PPD.
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Chapter 2
STOW AWAY IN CONTEXT
Through the lens of Betty Friedan’s Zeitgeist text, The Feminine Mystique, this chapter dives head first into the “Golden 60s”—the decade depicted in my first primary text, Lee
Campbell’s Stow Away. Published in 1963, the very year that Campbell gave birth as a teenager,
The Feminine Mystique was chosen for use in this dissertation because it is a touchstone text that adopts the idea of women finding their identities outside of traditional roles. Friedan originally earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology in 1942 from Smith College, but her boyfriend at the time convinced her to become a housewife. Dissatisfied, at her fifthteenth college reunion,
Friedan took a survey of her former classmates and discovered that all were extremely unhappy with their role as traditional housewives. Upon realizing that both she and other housewives were unhappy, she wrote The Feminine Mystique. This book catapulted Friedan into playing an incredibly significant part of the women's rights movement, for it became a nationwide sensation, creating social revolution and helping to inspire a second-wave of feminism in the
U.S. By 1966, along with Pauli Murray, Friedan co-founded and served as the first president of the esteemed National Organization for Women (NOW), which still advocates for women’s rights to this day. By 1969, Friedan become the sole founder the National Association for the
Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL) which also advocates to this day for the reproductive rights of women, and by 1971, Friedan aided in the establishment of the still existing National
Women's Political Caucus (NWPC) that equips women for elected and appointed office.
Historical Context of Campbell’s Memoir through the Lens of The Feminine Mystique
During World War II, with so many men fighting overseas, the U.S. government began campaigning for women to take up the jobs previously filled by men. However, post-World War 29
II and the return of male soldiers, after having their own jobs and realizing their potential as productive businesswomen, many housewives found themselves discontented with simply staying at home. The belief that women should stay at home is what Friedan referred to as "The
Mystique." What inspired Friedan’s establishment of this label as well as what ultimately resulted from it is outlined below (see fig. 3). From Friedan’s perspective, homekeeping was no longer a full-time job for all women, as many appliances now did what would have been an all- day job in only a few hours, hence this decade being named “Golden.”
Figure 3. Cause and Effect Chart Showing what Led to and Resulted from The Feminine
Mystique
Armed with experience and education, Friedan certainly challenged the norm. The
Feminine Mystique argued that the societal belief she perceived that women should remain uneducated homekeepers was wrong. Friedan argued that all women had certain rights, including the right to vote, become educated, and be whoever they wanted to be. She claimed that housewifery was not fulfilling these rights, as most women are reportedly unhappy. She also claimed that by leaving women uneducated, they never "grew up" and remained emotionally immature. Freidan then made a rhetorical call to action, pleading for women to break out of the mold of housewifery and become well-educated, adjusted women rather than immature, naive 30 girls. Because it was so radically different, this book had some huge impacts. By reading the book, countless more women realized they were not alone in their unhappiness with housewifery, propelling a wave of women's rights activists who abandoned the roll of housewife and began to search for their own place in life, becoming whatever they want to be in response to the painful, nagging question Friedan challenged them confront: "Is this all there is?" The
Feminine Mystique finally dug out from under a rug "the problem with no name"—that all too comfortable domesticity of women and the societal culture that supported it had become a bear trap for middle-class women, inhibiting them from what Friedan terms “authentic lives,” and from being “authentic citizens” (2).
Friedan’s historical philosophical account of women’s transitions from inauthentic to authentic lives that emerges in the 1960s provides an insightful lens through which to examine the meaning of autobiographical narratives about silenced and marginalized identity presented by teenage mothers with postpartum depression since in studying Campbell’s, Foster’s, and
Abraham’s memoirs under the umbrella of this broader context, I am able to examine how the telling of their experiences as teenage mothers with PPD might be deemed an authentic response to rhetorical and medical discourses about teenage pregnancy and resultant depression. As many a rhetorician has noted, unique rhetorical situations2 can birth or direct toward defining silenced
PPD itself as a rhetorical exigency that thirsts for its own stories (Bitzer 428). Furthermore, in examining these stories, I will reflect how mood memoirs normalize the non-normal experiences of the women depicted in Campbell’s, Foster’s, and Abraham’s texts and how this, in turn, lends to new implications of adolescent postpartum depression and identity. The memoirs I have chosen redefine the suffering of teenage mother mental illness that I hope will activate rhetorical and medical discourses on the meaning and value of the all too often silenced adolescent mother 31 with PPD. Ultimately, it is by reviewing these texts in light of their historical context (1960s,
1980s, and today) as well as their unceasing applicability to society, that the ground of my feminist rhetorical analysis is prepared.
I cannot historicize the setting of Stow Away any further without first discussing the historical development of authentic identity—again, as first coined by Friedan—as a moral imperative for women in the 1960s. I also hone in on the historical development of the rhetorical and medical discourse neighboring the “Golden 60s” during which Campbell experienced a simultaneous entrance into teenage motherhood and PPD. Finally, I demonstrate the contemporary relevance of Stow Away as well as this memoir’s potential for further shaping current rhetorical and medical discourse on postpartum depression, teenage pregnancy, and authenticity more generally.
The moral ideal of “authenticity” as presented by Friedan in The Feminine Mystique exploded into American consciousness in 1963, which as previously noted, was the very year that Lee Campbell gave birth to her son, Michael, at the age of 17. Friedan bases this ideal upon every woman having “sense of self” somewhere deep within, though this “sense of self” may be silenced by an idealized image of femininity. As will be explored later, Campbell’s “sense of self” certainly was silenced, in more ways than one, and thus justly represents the predominant perspective of most middle-class women in the 1960s. Solidifying the existence of a “sense of self,” Johann Herder and Michael Forster (1961) write, “Each of us has an original way of being human” (187). Whereas in today’s day and age there is a prevalent “sense of self” known to woman as a way of being that is her way and therefore true to her and only her, Friedan notes that for most of the 1960s, it was rare to acknowledge differences amongst women as being particularly morally noteworthy. 32
In the 1960s, any aspirations a woman had other than marriage, motherhood, and homekeeping—in that expected order—were labeled by society as inauthentic at best, or suppressed entirely at worst. The rhetorical suppression occurred because of the overwhelming presumption by society that what Herder and Forster refer to as “self-actualization”3 is a deeply personal matter, not to be encountered in public discourse (189). For Friedan, this lack of discussion of the idea of authentic living is derived from a misguided focus. She contends that instead of focusing on what authentic living is, the focus should be on how deeper forms of authentic living can be obtained. Michel Foucault finds renditions of authenticity that center on the surface level self, one’s atomistic self, as opposed to one’s inner-self to be shallow. This finding drove Foucault to determine greater, deeper-seated forms of authenticity. According to
Foucault, deeper authenticity can only be generated in light of the self that is embodied, lives in social and communicative conditions, and activates narrative sense making (The Archaeology of
Knowledge 42). Jeremy Gordon adds to this discourse that women are, in a sense,
“…perpetually outside of themselves, actively caught up attending to and caring for things that matter to them” (222). Here, Gordon refers to the ways women carry out their daily lives, their minds swamped with things to do, places to go, or desires to fulfill. In short, the “sense of self” is best understood as richer than one’s physical exterior (as indicated in fig. 4 below).
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Figure 4. 1960s Housewife from: Taintor, Anne. “The Problem that Has No Name.” Life &
Style, 8 May 1964, p. 22.
Self-actualization starts with a rich understanding of the human character—not an atomistic person in a bubble. As Friedan aptly unveils, women who cultivate authentic self-fulfillment recognize the unique, and deeper layered self, thus avoiding a misguided focus on the surface level self. As Friedan further elucidates, “ . . . I can define my identity only against the background of things that matter. But to bracket out history, nature, society, the demands of solidarity, everything but what I find in myself, would be to eliminate all candidates for what matters” (96). She goes on to say living authentically “ . . . is not the enemy of demands that emanate from beyond self; it supposes such demands” (97). In other words, as Foucault points out, having an authentic “sense of self” means accepting its conditions that are “equally social, embodied, symbolic, and historical” (43).
Campbell’s memoir demonstrates how multilayered are the roots of authentic identity, and how relevant to Friedan’s moral ideal Campbell’s memoir and that of Foster and Abraham all surprisingly are, even across three dramatically different periods of time, because each memoir presents issues with teenage postpartum depression that “critically matter” through accounts of a world that, at times, no longer matters. Each of the memoirs help cultivate new public discourses on postpartum depression suffered by marginalized teenage mothers toward what I consider “deeper” discourses and considerations. The fact that everything the young women depicted in these memoirs face goes against the grain for typical, societally acceptable entrances to motherhood is precisely why these memoirs are so significant to rhetorical studies.
These memoirists’ words are entrenched in previously silenced experiences of PPD birthed from premature entrance to motherhood that frequently get lost or buried due to others’ unwillingness 34 to acknowledge them and consequential practical demands of day to day life. These
“distractors,” as I term them, serve as a form of narrative relief. Readers of these silenced PPD realities whom possess normal mental capacity are able to read these relieving distractors as normalized involvements of the depressed teenage mother’s mood. It is my belief that this contributes, in part, to the popular appeal of these memoirs, for through them, readers’ appetites for greater, deeper-seated means of authenticity begin to be satisfied.
By drawing a broad historical background on each of my primary texts, I argue that the rhetorical power of these memoirs stems from their collective creation of a rhetorical intersection of rhetorical, medical, and personal discourses on conflicting representations of living with teenage PPD. If an authentic “sense of self” is, indeed, a woman’s innate desire to live a purposeful existence as indicated by Friedan, then memoirs about silenced and depressed adolescent identity might open up the opportunity to reflect on identity’s conditions of significance. They likely will also open up the opportunity to reflect on what it means to live day to day as a teen mom with PPD through the act of writing and their authority to interpret themselves with their unique and highly stigmatized circumstances.
As previously noted, Stow Away: They told me to forget. And I did. Now my memory has mutiny in mind, was originally published in 2013 but depicts a teenage pregnancy which occurred in 1962 and the birth of Lee Campbell’s son, Michael, in 1963—a time when Campbell says the prevailing social view of women was that they were the “weaker sex” and “subordinate to the male population” (12). Campbell thought most men held the perspective that females were only meant to cook, clean, and take care of children. She considered the predominant treatment of females to be biased and insensitive, and the lifestyle that women had to deal with, termed
“the problem with no name” by Friedan, ultimately became the driving force behind Friedan’s 35 writing of the aforementioned enduring text The Feminine Mystique. From Campbell’s perspective, women in this decade were expected to tend to their husbands, children, and home.
Campbell watched as her own mother was not allowed to handle her own finances without her husband’s dictation, she went to school, but she couldn't use her degree, and she stayed at home.
According to Frank Furstenberg, if women worked during the 1960s (which was becoming rare again by this time as noted earlier), they made 59¢ for every $1.00 men made, and it was not considered a widely accepted social norm that women work in professional fields (23). Campbell felt little hope that there was any future for her beyond being a homemaker like her mother. She felt she was expected to shelf any dreams of pursuing a path other than having a husband and children and that she would have to cater to her husband's every need and desire without complaints while also being responsible for all of the household chores such as washing clothes, cooking meals, cleaning the house from top to bottom, and still looking physically attractive while doing so (32).
Read in context with these moments Campbell perceives to be prevalent in many women’s lives in the 1960s, Stow Away should be studied for wordings that illuminate the moral purposes that inform its narrative features. Considering, as Furstenberg points out, that societal anxiety was elevated due to the increased use of nuclear weapons during the Cold War era (when
Campbell was attending high school), it is fitting that Campbell confesses her own anxiety about a domestic future, forced marriage in particular. For instance, Campbell writes:
It didn’t bother me that Tom’s family wanted to get rid of me or that we would never
marry and have a family. It bothered me that Tom could pay $900 in a court settlement
and move on with his life without looking back. That was like grinding another filthy
cigarette stub into the heaping ashtray that stunk up my mind (2). 36
Here, Campbell recalls questioning the norms of domesticity, even as a mere teenager. She ponders why it is that she suffers the consequences of their sexual intercourse while her ex- boyfriend, Tom, could pay a settlement sum—and plead nolo contendre at that—never to worry again about the aftermath of their joint actions. Campbell’s questions reveal a feeling of moral questioning as well, as if she is wondering whether her lack of desire to fulfill perfected domesticity the way she perceieves society wants her to is wrong.
Campbell felt strongly that in the 1960s, a future for her was bleaker than it was for Tim.
She even recalls that at that time, it was not uncommon for a bank to refuse to issue a credit card to someone like her, an unmarried woman, for an unmarried woman had little to no control over her own finances, if she even had any. Once married, Campbell was convinced that it was the husband who had control of his wife's income if she worked and also controlled all savings and other finances. Furthermore, Campbell’s own family discouraged her from becoming educated beyond high school because she was expected to eventually raise a family “the right way”. Even if Campbell did receive college educations—from schools that she says were segregated by gender—she doubted she would utilize her degree because of the same reason, making the change brought forth by The Feminine Mystique highly relevant to Campbell’s experiences. In the same year The Feminine Mystique was published, the Equal Pay Act was passed by congress to grant women equal pay for the same work. Soon after, the Civil Rights Act was enacted and prevented discrimination of employment based on color, gender, creed, and religion. Campbell recalls many women she knew being kept out of professional fields and occupations until these laws were passed. The more acceptable jobs for women before this legislation according to
Campbell included “nurses, teachers, or beauticians/cosmetologists” (37). With that said, one spark that helped ignite the flame that drew more attention to the improvement of women’s 37 social rights was The Feminine Mystique. With this text, Friedan was able to push the issue of women's inequality into the public circle and thus the 1960s became a decade of rapid change and creation of rights that women can enjoy freely today (Furstenberg 37). The Women's Rights
Movement that occurred across the 60s decade officially became credited with the start of the second wave feminism movement, which in turn has inspired third wave feminism and seeks to continue to bring forward progress for equality of the genders for years to come. Women have gained and are still improving their rights to control their own finances, bodies, and futures thanks, in large part, to the voice they were first given by Friedan.
While Campbell watched life satisfaction as she knew it improve for 1960s woman who fulfilled what she deemed to be the societally expected sequence of events—love, marriage, and then a baby in the baby carriage—the same could not be said of her, the teenage mother who challenged the status quo. In the early 1960s, the increasing rates of teenage childbearing led to a historical peak in the United States. Young teenagers who became pregnant often got married right after conceiving, in what were called "shotgun weddings" (Geronimus, “Teenage
Childbearing and Social Disadvantage” 1187). Campbell adds that to be "pregnant before marriage" and not correct it became detrimental to one’s place in their community. She explains that they were looked down upon by members of society who engaged in negative rhetoric about them, believing they had higher values and morals.
Historians refer to the 1960s as the “Baby Scoop Era”—a time when unwed mothers were separated from their newborn children, without their consent. It was not uncommon at this time for teenage mothers like Campbell, who did not marry the father of their child, to be sent away to homes for unwed mothers until delivery after which their babies were forcibly
“scooped” up by state adoption authorities (Ellison, 1993; Mandell, 1992; Maza, 1979; Pelton, 38
1988). Marrill Ellison further explains, “From approximately 1940 to 1970, it is estimated that up to four million mothers in the United States surrendered newborn babies to adoption; two million during the 1960s alone” (3). “At this time there was different understanding of what the cause and consequence of motherhood should be,” Penelope Maza adds. “It was an almost scarlet lettering of these women who got pregnant, but one that could be removed, so to speak”
(9). In this same vein, Betty Reid Mandell asserts, “If the young woman, and they were nearly all very young, agreed (albeit very often with manipulation and coercion) to give up the child for adoption and not speak of it, they could go on to have what they were told was a ‘normal life’"
(42).
It was not until the close of the 1960s that condoms were lubricated and 42% of
Americans began relying on condoms to control conception (Ellison 4). This caused the rates of teenage pregnancy to begin to decrease, at least as far as such a decrease can accurately be measured in this post-World War II/ amid Cold War “marrying generation” (Hass 218). The
National census statistics of the 1960s revealed 96.4% of women and 94.1% of men in their early-to-mid twenties were married (Hass 219). Lee Campbell expresses a desire not to become one of these statistics. Her depiction of her struggle with what she today self-identifies as what was a severe case of postpartum depression after being pregnant as a teenager in 1962/1963 in
Stow Away, gives readers perspective of this condition before the biomedical revolution and before it was a diagnosis. I am not and cannot expertly diagnose Campbell as having PPD with absolute certainty, of course. Rather, I study her recollection of her experience of what she has decided was indeed, postpartum depression.
Like societal discourses, medical discourses play a pivotal role in “policing and regulating teenage women's bodies, in defining appropriate female behaviors, and in authorizing 39 socio-cultural constructions of femininity” (Aleff 127). Moreover, since most adolescent women in the 1960s had previously participated in little contact with medical services, pregnancy and childbirth signaled the beginning of an altered relationship between young women and doctors, and between young women and their bodies—all of which will soon be highlighted through
Campbell’s lived experiences.
A copious amount of the personal history detailed in Stow Away were remembrances of the 1960s when Campbell attended high school prior to falling pregnant and being kicked out. In the role of star-crossed high-school sweetheart, she was Juliet and Tom was her Romeo. But instead of dying at the end, Campbell got pregnant. And for a seventeen-year-old Catholic girl in early 1960s New Hampshire, that might have been worse. Campbell explains that she began writing this memoir in the 1990s by re-reading her early journals from 1960‒1965. Campbell’s early journals are filled with passages reflecting the destruction of her voice as a mother as well as her dissent into postpartum depression. By the late 1990s, when Campbell begins writing
Stow Away, she actually contemplated committing suicide. Now married, a successful professor, and mother of three more sons, Campbell presents a memoir that affirms discourses about 1960s domesticity norms and burgeoning medical discourses.
A few hours after the delivery of her son in 1963, Campbell recalls the ER doctor explaining her diagnosis of “neurasthenia” before releasing her to her perplexed father who would return her to the home for unwed mothers. In the 1960s, “neurasthenia” was a “one size fits all” diagnosis for several female conditions –new mothers who find themselves “unable to function due to strange, unexplainable symptoms” being one of them (Frank 194). These were
“pre-bi-polar, pre-agoraphobia, pre-postpartum depression days, in which most illnesses were 40 lumped into one large, and often unexplainable category” (Gill 549). Historically, these days ran parallel with medical discourses influencing the widely accepted public perception of psychiatry.
Stow Away depicts an era that involved two contested views of psychiatry that coincide
with two historical views of depression: the psychodynamic and the biological (Horowitz 112).
As such, the term “anti-psychiatry” refers more accurately to anti-biological psychiatry. In the
1960s, psychodynamic views—characterized by Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis which aided in
the release of repressed emotions, group therapy, and talk therapy—were more prevalently
upheld and played the largest role in cultivating public perception of psychiatric practice,
whereas many aspects of biological psychiatry (i.e. lobotomies, mental hospitals, asylums,
electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), etc.) were scrutinized, though not defunct, throughout the
1960s.
With the majority of the American population putting more trust in the approaches to
depression in the early post-World War II years, Shea Kerkhoff recounts that long-term
individual therapy was highly popular, though public perception of depression diagnoses, in
particular—there were no diagnoses or support for PPD sufferers at this time—were still
associated with derogatory rhetorical images of insanity and being imprisoned in an asylum, if
they were acknowledged at all (333). Public perception of psychiatrists in general, though, was
positive. If psychiatric talk therapy could enable WWII veterans to cope with the stress of their
combat experiences, it was believed that it must help in combatting depression. Maureen Phipps
describes psychiatrists being introduced to people in the 1960s as trustworthy doctors who use
proven weapons to treat their patients: “These weapons, although invisible, are nonetheless as
real as the emotion you feel when you watch your child or kiss your wife. [The psychiatrist]
does not use the stethoscope or the scalpel. His weapons are subtle human characteristics– a 41
sensitive intuition which aids him in feeling out the complicated unconscious conflicts of the
neurotic” (278).
In these years long before WebMD or Google, although a name had not yet been given to
postpartum depression, the language of depression symptoms and the more prevalent use of
shock therapy to treat depression was fairly accessible for the lay. But the use of shock therapy
and the already scrutinized use of institutionalization foregrounded the public’s changing opinion
and consequential anti-psychiatric discourse of the 1960s that I noted earlier. Emerging scholars
Thomas Szasz, Ronald David Laing, (psychiatrists) and Erving Goffman (sociologist), garnered
the public’s trust for their professional critiques of biological psychiatric practice in the 1960s.
Szasz, Laing, and Goffman argued that depression is more social than medical in nature
(Goodwin 1080).
Evidence of this burgeoning anti-biological psychiatry movement is embedded in Stow
Away in which Campbell describes her uncoerced reading of Snakepit and recalls in the year she became pregnant—1962—that there was “an incredible market for mental-hospital stuff” (43).
From these disclosures, readers pick up on another moral purpose shaping some Campbell’s wordings in Stow Away. First of all, Campbell’s mention of Mary Jane Ward’s dramatic best- seller The Snakepit is significant since this is a story that portrays the dreadful plight of those who are sent to psychiatric hospitals in the early twentieth century. First appearing in a family magazine in 1946 and made into a movie by 1948, The Snakepit called the public to question the usefulness of psychiatric hospitals. Second of all, Campbell’s description of all the “mental-help stuff” on the market surfaces further evidence that the anti-psychiatric movement was gaining momentum and societal respect. That said, given this pivotal moment in public and psychiatric history, Stow Away could not be assigned to a more perfect rhetorical situation. 42
Read in this rich historical context, Campbell’s silenced existence as a new teenage mother with PPD delivers an exigency that demands depiction in a memoir and that, in a roundabout way, demands a deepened discursive engagement between a societal and medical rhetorical situation that runs parallel in some ways and perpendicular in others. As will be elaborated further in company with Pryal’s mood memoir conventions, Stow Away also subscribes to “criticism of bad doctors” in her experience of psychiatrist-prescribed alienation.
For instance, once revealing the news of her pregnancy to her teachers, Campbell is kicked out of high school and sent to the Florence Crittenton Hastings House also known as Flo Crit—a secluded home not dissimilar to a mental hospital where she is treated inhumanely. To communicate her maltreatment, Campbell employs the rhetorical device of metaphor to de- humanize the Flo Crit workers by calling them names like “Doctor Screwed Things Up” and
“Nurse Soandso.” Campbell elaborates by stating, “I tried to re-arrange words to avoid calling
[the workers] by their names” (14).
Similar to Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, feminist readings of Stow Away cast it is as good of proof as any “that women can write themselves into being through a resistance to the patriarchal, male sexuality privilege” (Glejzer 10). Stow Away elaborately details Campbell’s first-hand exposure to the alienating male dominance that she found to be prevalent in the 1960s.
Take, for prime example, when Campbell tells her “very ex-boyfriend Tom” that she won’t marry him just because she is pregnant. And Tom retorts, “You’re crazy” (13). Likewise,
Campbell labels herself as “neurotic” for not conforming to the gendered roles she observes everyone else conforming to. She does so in such a way, however, that she seems confused. Like the women depicted in The Feminine Mystique, she knows she has a problem, but she has no idea what to call it. She also knows she is supposed to look “as wholesome as Marlo Thomas on 43
“That Girl,” but she does not want to (12). Campbell’s allusion to the 1960s American sitcom
“That Girl” gives us a visual of the big haired, light skinned, fancily dressed lady Campbell thought society expected every respectable woman to be. This is yet another reason why, ultimately, I say Stow Away is written so perfectly into the center of a melting pot of 1960s Cold
War Era-inspired quintessential standards of domesticity and an anti-psychiatry movement that was gaining rapid pace, thus making the rhetorical situation Stow Away births rich and significant.
Pryal’s Four Rhetorical Conventions of Mood Memoirs
In their representations of postpartum depression, Campbell, Foster, and Abraham each overcome rhetorical challenges in order to establish identification with their readers which premise their rhetorical critiques. The two rhetorical challenges I focus on through Pryal’s four conventions of mood memoirs are (1) silencing, that is, limited rhetorical participation or
“rhetorical disability” as termed by Kim Hensley Owens who expresses that a writer’s rhetorocity is largely dependent upon how rationally he or she can communicate and (2) being labeled an “unreliable narrator,” a term coined by Wayne Clayson Booth which essentially refers to a writer who does not write in accordance with the norms of his or her work. Ansgar
Nünning further explains:
. . . to determine a narrator's unreliability one need not rely merely on intuitive
judgments. It is neither the reader's intuitions nor the implied author's norms and values
that provide the clue to a narrator's unreliability, but a broad range of definable signals.
These include both textual data and the reader's preexisting conceptual knowledge of the
world. In sum whether a narrator is called unreliable or not does not depend on the
distance between the norms and values of the narrator and those of the implied author 44
but between the distance that separates the narrator's view of the world from the reader's
world-model and standards of normality (21).
Similar to the ways in which depression sufferers Eagleton, Hinckley Jr., and Seegrist (all noted in the previous chapter), were approached by the general public with suspicion, I argue that the rhetorical participation of PPD sufferers can absolutely be hindered as well. If after his own admission to receiving psychiatric treatment for his depression, someone as successful and respected as Senator Eagleton ends up being branded by stigma and cast publically as an
“unreliable narrator,” thus dropping out of the race to become Vice President because of society’s perception about his lack thereof “soundness and stability,” should teenage mothers with PPD expect society’s perception of them to be any different? Of course, the answer is no, but Katie Guest Rose Pryal helps us to investigate why. In Life of the Mind Interrupted, Pryal discusses how commonly people forget to consider issues of ethos separate from considering competence or qualifications” (467). Adding to this, Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson reminds us, “If people think you are crazy (or have been in the past), they don’t listen to you” (57). If one’s readers does not deem him or her “reasonable,” nor “sound,” then one is not afforded complete rhetorical agency or participation. In 2009, Owens exemplified this through her study of women’s birthing plans—documents that stipulate a pregnant woman’s desirable outcomes should she undergo a complication that inhibits her from communicating “reasonably” (250).
Owens finds that the very existence of such a document is proof of an underlying societal belief that “an impaired mental state, or a power imbalance,” in this case, due to the pains of the birthing process, silence a person (251). Though effective as a literary device when employed to expose a fictional character’s internal struggle as Booth originally identified it for, the 45
“unreliable narrator” if applied to real-life PPD sufferers for whom depression is more than just an internal struggle would be misleading.
Jenell Johnson defines the rhetorical art of silencing as “a social force enacted through language and rooted in culturally and historically contingent values” (459). In short, Johnson’s viewpoint credits stigmatizing views of a person’s character with the manifestation of their being rhetorically silenced. In 2004, Catherine Prendergast’s research traced the ancient roots of stigma all the way back to the eighteenth century when human branding with a hot iron or sharp instrument was enforced on the bodies of those who were considered to have “bad character,” or
“those whose values were perceived to be a threat to communal values” (36). A common form of criminal discipline at that time, the branding was a public display of bad character that would otherwise be invisible to the eye and thus the body became a rhetorical message to others indicating how not to act. Likewise, to brand a writer’s ethos in this same way was a message to others that what he or she is writing is dispensable. Not giving a writer just credibility because of her depressive state is akin to saying a young man with blue hair cannot be trusted because well, he has blue hair.
Through her research presented in “The Genre of the Mood Memoir,” Pryal deepens our understanding of how mental disability—which she uses interchangeably with rhetorical disability—can be used to improve, rather than weaken, a rhetor’s ethos and end his or her rhetorical silence. Pryal upholds that a disabled rhetor’s ethos can be molded into a more reliable state thus ending a rhetor’s being silenced in the following two key ways: (1) by sharing first- person testimony from people who live out the disability at hand, thus knowing its affects well and (2) by demonstrating that s/he has a set structure within how s/he delivers her/his messages
(488). As I briefly outlined in chapter one, Pryal provides said “set structure” which, when 46 present in entirety, also classifies a text as a mood memoir: (1) apologia, (2) awakening, (3) doctor's criticism, and (4) auxesis/ laying claim. I will now demonstrate how this structure of rhetorical conventions collectively acts as a response to rhetorical silencing in each of my primary texts—Lee Campbell’s Stow Away, Sallie Foster’s One Girl in Ten: A Self Portrait of the Teen-age Mother, and Farrah Abraham’s My Teenage Dream Ended.
Convention 1: Apologia
The first convention Pryal identifies in texts qualifying as mood memoirs is the apologia,
“justif[ication] or defen[se] of their project” (111). Noreen Kruse extends this by defining the
apologia as “self-defense public discourse produced whenever a rhetor attempts to repair his
character” (13). Kruse explains that in delivering apologias, “rhetors respond to threats against
their 'moral nature, motives, or reputation' by adopting defensive postures of absolution,
vindication, explanation, or justification" (14). Beyond just responding to attacks of their
character or potential attacks of their writing, each of the authors whose memoirs I am analyzing
utilize the apologia as a way to demarcate their memoirs as self-sacrificial, in a sense, since it is
only due to their sincere desire to demolish stigma that they are breaking their silence and
exposing details of their lives and experiences that they would not normally voice. This
vulnerable exposure is not only advantageous for the formation of common ground and
connection between the depicted PPD sufferers and their non-PPD suffering audience, but it is
helpful for fellow sufferers of PPD to identify with as well. In her memoir’s preface fittingly
titled “Why I Wrote This Book,” Lee Campbell offers an exemplary apologia, generating
authority from her background in academia. In her apologia Campbell, retired college professor,
admits that she has reservations about exposing not only her secrets about her past teenage 47 pregnancy, but about the sadness that ensued as a result. Nonetheless she boldly works to justify her choice to no longer remain silent:
Allow me to take a big breath and exhale my deepest and once most well-guarded secrets
about an experience I had in the hush hush early 1960s. Some of my colleagues argue
that I “should” have continued to keep it private. I couldn’t agree. Keeping my Google-
able secrets wouldn’t have done others or me any good. Just the opposite. Outing myself
and my depression preemptively was consistent with my goal to be open and accessible
to those who need to hear my story. Airing this particular experience also has the
potential to model one way my readers can survive and thrive and help others along the
way (Campbell iv).
Here, Campbell admits she is taking a risk by challenging the norm. Other PPD sufferers and other professors before her may not have condoned unveiling such life-altering truth as she does.
In addressing both those who can identify with her struggles and those who identify with the field of academia, Campbell implores a dichotomy between her “well-guarded secrets,” that is, her emotional knowledge (pathos) and the opinions of her “colleagues,” that is, the academic knowledge she shares with them (logos). Campbell also notes her desire to demystify PPD when she mentions those who “need to hear her story” (iv). Moreover, Campbell feels certain she could not stay silent any longer even if she wished to, for she says, “my serendipity, my destiny, my fate, my fill-in-the-blank was retro. It pointed me back to my sadness in 1963” (iv).
Convention 2: Awakening
The second convention Pryal identifies in texts qualifying as mood memoirs is the awakening to the authenticity of the memoirist's illness. Elaborating further, Pryal states, “Mood memoirs often include an early denial of the illness and then an awakening, followed by the 48 confession of the illness to others and the seeking of treatment, and treatment failures followed by a final success” (116). As conveyed by Judith Segal, this particular convention bears resemblance to a similar occurrence in other memoir genres, such as the moment a writer finds the Lord in a spiritual narrative, the moment a former slave-turned writer gains political consciousness in a slave narrative, and the moment a breast cancer survivor-turned writer first notices a lump in a breast cancer narrative (4). Akin to a turning point, the moment of awakening is as crucial to the mood memoir as it is to this host of similar narrative genres.
During the awakening moment of Campbell’s memoir, she states, “While my son was in foster-care, it came to me. I realized I was suffering from some serious sadness, which nobody would attribute to the fact I was separated from my child” (49). This is the specific moment that
Campbell first realizes and acknowledges her PPD, though she—nor any other woman—had the linguistics at the time to know exactly how to describe her suffering. This is similar to “the problem that has no name” that Friedan uses to describe the unhappiness of women in the 1960s that likewise could not be explained, only felt. This moment is followed, as Pryal would predict, by a “swoop” back in time during which Campbell exposes all of the signs of PPD that she could only now recognize through hindsight.
Convention 3: Criticizing Doctors
As is stated in its name, the third convention Pryal identifies in texts qualifying as mood memoirs is criticism of doctors and other psychiatric care providers. As stated in chapter one,
Pryal finds that “nearly all mood memoirists write about interactions with doctors who ignore patient stories in favor of other forms of knowledge, such as observations and diagnostic criteria” (118). She continues, “When they criticize doctors, mood memoirists pass judgment on the failures of the medical system, relying upon their experiential knowledge to talk back to 49 traditional medical knowledge” (119). This is precisely the kind of discourse between PPD sufferers and the medical humanities that I seek to illuminate in this dissertation. It is also a vivid demonstration of how "talking back" gives further rhetorical advantage to the memoirists who ostensibly feel that medical professionals are blind to their first-hand insight of their conditions.
Segal explains much the same when she states “casting the psychiatric establishment as monolithic gives [memoirists’] position—[memoirists’] opposition—more power” (3). There is an important rhetorical power play here between pathos and logos. In short, through their criticism of doctors, mood memoirists utilize their tacit emotional and experiential knowledge
(pathos) shared by way of the narrative genre to “talk back” to the specialized training and education-based knowledge (logos) of medical professionals.
Campbell exemplifies the medical profession's failure when the state of New Hampshire provided her “counseling” services after the birth of her son and his immediate removal from her care and placement in foster care in 1963. When describing the court-appointed “counselor,”
Campbell confesses, “I was treated as a happy person who suddenly became depressed for some unknown reason” (51). This exchange had such a striking impact on Campbell that it actually inspired the title of her memoir—Stow Away: They told me to forget. And I did. Now my memory has mutiny in mind. The best psychiatric advice Campbell received was from the very same counselor who completely ignored where her sadness was coming from to begin with and during her final session with her, told Campbell, “After you go out that door, make a new life for yourself. Stow away all memories of the baby that has never been yours. Forget this happened.
Don’t tell anyone about it” (24). Of course, forgetting her own child was the last thing Campbell wanted to do, but what choice did she have? Her silence becomes blatantly obvious when she states, “Clearly, I was in the way. I had sensed it before. Now I was left with no more arguments. 50
Stressing the words she wanted me to absorb, her megaphone voice added an echo to redeem, release, and free. Her words covered my current of thought like an oil stick” (emphasis in original; 25). Here, Campbell suggests she was robbed of any proper emotional diagnoses or treatment by a medical professional who couldn’t see an inch past the stigma of Campbell’s teenage PPD. The counselor’s proposed “treatment” plan for Campbell to resolve her sadness by merely forgetting she ever bore a child is a complete failure. Implied in her word usage is that, even Campbell, an uneducated teenager, can see that her symptoms justify a diagnosis of PPD, thus making her even more credible than the expert in this instance, which is inarguably powerful.
Convention 4: Laying Claim
The fourth and final convention Pryal identifies in texts qualifying as mood memoirs is laying claim to other mental illness sufferers (specifically in my study, PPD sufferers), in order to generate rhetorical authority. Laying claim has deep rhetorical roots. It was actually first coined by Aristotle himself, who recommended that rhetors supply evidence that they are shedding light on something worthwhile—something that extends the work or findings of other noteworthy rhetors. He states, “it is a noble thing to surpass men who are themselves great"
(Mcconnell 49). Aristotle refers to practice of comparison as "amplification,” “auxesis” in
Greek. There are two ways mood memoirists can achieve this “auxesis” both which I have observed in my primary texts: name-dropping and statistics-dropping. Memoirists employ name- dropping and/or statistics-dropping in an attempt to normalize their conditions, which, for teenage mothers are invariably encouraged to sweep under the rug. Elucidating the exact meaning of these rhetorical conventions, Pryal states, “Memoirists can break this taboo by pointing out the large number of people who are also diagnosed with mental illness (statistics- 51
dropping) or by invoking famous persons with mental illness (name-dropping)” (121). Take for
example when, in Stow Away, Campbell explains the time during which she gave birth to her
son, Michael, known as the Baby Scoop Era was “a period in history starting after the end of
World War II and ending in the 1970s that was characterized by a high rate of newborn
adoptions—two million in the 1960s alone” (11). Campbell suggests here that the handling of
her birthing experience and consequential forced adoption was far from anomalous. Illuminating
further relevant statistics, she specified that in that period of the 1960s:
Illegitimacy was defined in terms of psychological deficits on the part of the mother. The
dominant psychological and social work view was that most unmarried mothers were
better off separated by adoption from their newborn babies. In most cases, adoption was
presented to the mothers as the only option and little or no effort was made to help the
mothers keep and raise the children, let alone address their emotional state once the
children were removed from their care (Campbell 13).
Here, Campbell’s words assert both that adoption was prevalently enforced upon countless
women during this time and that countless women likely suffered emotional consequences as
Campbell did that went unaddressed. Campbell seems confident that these women wore shoes
similar to her own when she writes, "I’m sure they share the same nagging inner voice that
wonders: how much of me is me, and how much of me is the PPD?" Accentuating the
experiences that Campbell likely shares with others lays claim to the experiences of said others
who have probably been silenced, alienated, and cast aside like Campbell.
Rhetorical Devices Employed to Depict an Extra-Verbal Experience of Disordered Reality
The second chapter of Stow Away opens with Campbell obsessively preoccupied by thoughts about “giving up” (58). One moment, she just “knew something was wrong,” as her 52 father hopped onto a phone call she was having with her new love interest, Dave. Campbell’s dad announces to her that her baby sister Donna (either nineteen or twenty years old; Campbell is not certain) is pregnant and they think she should surrender the baby to an adoption agency.
Campbell’s dad tells her, “Your life has turned out pretty good, Lee. Great husband. Kids.
House. Right?” (39) He adds, “We wondered if you would tell Donna that” (39). Her dad’s insensitivity and her own interpretation of her dad silencing her during that conversation became an instantaneous trigger and Campbell thus developed a “fascination with death” (58). Needless to say, she did not have a conversation with her sister. She could not go back to the raw emotions that were unleashed when her dad said, “Tell her that adoption was good for you. That you don’t even remember…it” (40). She writes, “I wasn’t steering anything, not even myself. I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding chaos)” (59). Again, employing the rhetorical device of metaphor, Campbell uses the figure of a tornado as a representation of the visceral qualities of feeling simultaneously depleted, yet completely calm. Her love and regard for her baby sister Donna fades into the far back of Campbell’s mind as she laments, “I just couldn’t get myself to react” (59). The inability to react is a theme that is threaded throughout all of the memoirs I am studying. Here, it is indicating the embodied and visceral qualities of disengaging with reality. Every day occurrences like this phone call, having a conversation, visiting a family member, etc. continue transpiring as they always would, but Campbell remains at a standstill and watches them as if from a sideline, yet she is physically right there in the thick of things. Her diminishing identity and loss of senses of her inner ability to engage in normative desires and behaviors endure throughout Campbell’s memoir and ultimately result in her climactic consideration of taking her own life. 53
Campbell uses the metaphor of “death” to exemplify the way her negative thoughts hold her back from normative communication with others. As her postpartum depression spreads beyond her control, Campbell recalls sitting by herself in her assigned bed at Flo Crit after declining an offer from the other unwed mothers to go to the beach in Cape Cod. Describing the visceral pokes of nagging isolation, she remembers, “I put my finger into the hole on the rotary dial telephone on top of my nightstand and just froze. The telephone looked dumb as death’s head” (62). The gloomy juxtaposition of a phone through which one can become normatively connected to the outside world and bones of a human skull symbolizing death through which one obviously loses touch with the outside world exposes how far removed Campbell is from reality in this instance, giving readers a figurative sense also of her waning mental status. Campbell adds, “Every time I reexamined the telephone, my mind glided off, like a plane, into a large empty field, and drifted there, inattentively” (64). Here, Campbell exemplifies the dwindling mental clarity characteristic of postpartum depression through her inclusion of the figure of an airplane going nowhere. Mentally, Campbell has severed her tie to senses of normative activity and vitality. Being metaphorically “absent” and “dead” is a vehicle through which Campbell’s lived-experience of postpartum depression becomes accessible to readers.
How Representations of Postpartum Depression Function Rhetorically
That Stow Away beholds a “perspective by incongruity” is what is “rhetorical” about this
memoir, especially since it highlights unconventional meanings of several normalized societal
practices of the 1960s. One must take into account, also, the rhetorical exigencies Campbell
brings forth in her text, namely anti-psychiatry and domesticity ideals of the time, the misplaced
blame of teenage postpartum depression as failed morality, and the stigmatization of PPD. Every
one of these exigencies is a normalizing element significant to its rhetorical situation, otherwise 54 worded as a “normal” practice Campbell’s memoir is directed toward. As such, Stow Away, joins said rhetorical situations “anti-environmentally,” meaning (1) that it contrasts the consensus view of the medical community and (2) that its metaphorical and figurative nature makes it an invaluable telescope which provides a clearer view of background practices that are regularly imperceptible (Gronbeck 12). Moreover, Campbell’s portrayal of living with reality-altering postpartum depression engenders a much-needed rhetorical presence within such background practices.
There is a critical distance generated by Campbell’s recollection of being physically but not mentally present in her world as a teenage mother with postpartum depression. This distance is useful, for it uncovers normative practices of day-to-day existence that one might classify as ableist—illogical mindsets which posit all individuals with disabilities (physical or mental) as helpless. Stow Away unlocks a perhaps never before opened door for public deliberation regarding the patriarchic ideals embedded within psychiatry and domesticity during the 1960s.
Furthermore, honing in on the junction of when society’s scantily available rhetorical means are compared to extra-verbal realities births the rhetorical nature of Campbell’s text, enabling it to function as what Allan Horwitz terms an “act of critical interruption,” where the underappreciated practices of a given society’s daily lives are described as “the phenomenon of rhetorical interruption [that] juxtaposes the assumptions, norms, and practices of a people so as to prompt a reappraisal of where they are culturally, what they are doing, and where they are going” (Horwitz 259).
Through her utilization of the narrative form, Campbell charters new terrain in her engagement of various discourses. Many a scholar has deemed self-exposing narratives about depression as bequeathing a disruptive power to their readers. I want the same to be true for self- 55
exposing narratives about postpartum depression. Gavin Kendall explains that studying this sort
of narrative amplifies “one’s awareness of one’s mortality, threatening one’s sense of identity,
and disrupting the apparent plot of one’s life” (176). Einat Avrahami agrees with Kendall and
exemplifies how reading a mood memoir can overrun the normative lived-reality of the
memoir’s readers. Avrahami states:
…[R]eading self-disclosures of the lived-experience of illness at once implicates the
reader in her own mortality and aims to obliterate the distance between the writer, the
text, and the reader. Illness narratives, thus, insert themselves between the referential,
“extratextual” reality of the sick writers and the ideological and linguistic constructs of
their illness. They do so not because they manage to establish a simple and direct link
between text and the experience of suffering “out there” but because they create a sense
of imaginative identification so powerful that its effect is to point the reader outside the
text (7).
Considering postpartum depression’s disruptive nature for the teenage mothers who suffer with it, it is evident that Campbell’s mood memoir depicts the stories of a young woman who is well aware of the dialectical tensions amid limited societally available rhetorical means and her own first-hand “extra-verbal” realities. Campbell expresses these “extra-verbal” personal realties by penetrating through rhetorical and medical discourses, and in doing so, she invites readers to redefine what they consider to be “normal” about their own realities. Thomas
Goodnight determines:
An arguer can accept the sanctioned, widely used bundle of rules, claims, procedures and
evidence to wage a dispute. Or, the arguer can inveigh against any or all of these
“customs” in order to bring forth a new variety of understanding. In the first case, the 56
common grounds for arguing are accepted, and argument is used to establish knowledge
about a previously undetermined phenomenon. In the second, argument is employed as a
way of reshaping its own grounds (200).
Campbell not only bears presence to the distorted views of herself and her realities, but she bears presence to the unexplored premises of rhetorical and medical practices and discourses. Hence readers are equipped with a calculated viewpoint through which they may modify the basis of their own day-to-day practices and apperception of how they identify with those who have postpartum depression, and how they generally identify with their own place in the world.
It is the desire of Campbell’s heart to tear down the informal understandings that govern societally expected roles for women postpartum, so they can be freed to experience their world however they experience it. Toward the middle of her memoir, Campbell’s inability to react surfaces again, detaching her from societal expectations. This she portrays through figurative prose depicting her diminishing drive and desire to live. Her writing yields a radicalizing
“rhetorical interruption” to social mores and traditional myths she subscribes to as a teenager coming of age in the 1960s. Take for example when Campbell attends an appointment with her social worker, Carole, and is questioned about her progress in school:
“Doesn’t your schoolwork interest you, Lee?” “Oh it does, it does,” I said. “It interests
me very much.” I felt like yelling the words, as if that might make them more
convincing, but I controlled myself. “I’m very interested in everything.” The words fell
with a hollow flatness onto Carole’s desk, like so many wooden nickels (41).
Here, Campbell makes strategic rhetorical use of the wooden nickel adage to stress her attempt to deceive Carole, for she knew the days of her schoolwork drawing a normative emotional response from her were long gone. She is desperate to convince Carole and herself that 57 schoolwork is something in her life that she has not lost touch with, but her postpartum depression has completely silenced her. Even if she wants to, she cannot fake a normative societally expected mood toward valuing her education. Soon after this, Campbell expresses becoming entirely debilitated by her PPD:
When I got back to Flo Crit, I crawled my mannequin of a body into my bed and pulled
the sheet over my head. But even that didn’t shut out the light, so I buried my head
under the darkness of the pillow and pretended it was a night. I couldn’t see the point of
getting up again. I had nothing to look forward to (92).
By equating her body to that of a mannequin, still and lifeless, Campbell reflects the termination
of her visceral desires to emulate “normal” teenagers. While the light of day Campbell depicts
should be a symbol of alacrity and action, for her it is just another hindrance. Over time, many
parts of run-of-the-mill life morph into darkened contributors to Campbell’s demise. Everything
that serves a positive purpose now serves a negative purpose and everything that serves a
negative purpose now serves and positive purpose. With “nothing to look forward to,” the goals
or projects Campbell once had in mind no longer matter. She has no way of associating any
accomplishments from her past with her present.
Campbell’s sense of self and reality eventually evaporates into a black hole of PPD-
induced despair. As demonstrated in the quote that follows, Campbell does not experience a total
loss of accessibility to the world; contrarily, she experiences a muddled, non-normative sense of
accessibility to the world. Below is an example of the disordered balance Campbell finds
between the intended purpose of everyday objects and her PPD-prompted perception of the
purpose of those everyday objects. The temptation of suicide overwhelming her like a formless
ghost cloaked in deception, Campbell vividly remembers: 58
That morning I thought I could end my sadness once and for all by hanging myself. I had
taken the silk cord of my roommate’s yellow bathrobe as soon as she got in the shower,
and, in the amber shade of the bedroom, fashioned it into a knot that slipped up and down
on itself. It took me a long time to do this, because I was poor at knots and had no idea
how to make a proper one. Then I hunted around for a place to attach the rope. The
trouble was, the Flo-Crit house had the wrong kind of ceilings (Campbell 101).
Campbell is assigning more than a commonplace meaning to the everyday objects depicted here.
A house morphs into a crime scene, a bathrobe tie morphs into a rope for asphyxiation, a ceiling
morphs into an anchor-point for her suicide attempt. These descriptions clue readers into what
transpires in the mind of a teenager suffering from postpartum depression through which
everyday things are seen not as they actually “are;” rather, they are seen as they might be,
making the effects of a depressed mood more real than ever for the readers. Readers are also
prompted to consider what feelings they would undergo if they, like Campbell, decided to go
against the grain of what is societally expected of them, thus bridging a significant gap between
the outside world and Campbell’s inside world. Through thought-provoking figurative language,
Campbell establishes a radicalizing presence which responds to the many pressures imposed on
her by society.
Rhetorical Influence of Medical Discourses on Memoirist
Up to this point in her memoir, Campbell has repeatedly described her postpartum depression as her inability to react to life as she once knew it in a normative manner. The loss of the “normal” abilities she had prior to delivering her son is sewn into place with “death” being the metaphorical needle. At the same time, a deep-seated, existential ground for momentous critique forms from Campbell’s inability to react to routine occasions. At the foundation of the 59 critical work enabled by Campbell’s gradual withdraw from normative behavior and activity is
Campbell’s own explanation of what, why, and how she suffers from PPD. By exploring the what, why, and how, I unveil the influential role that medical discourse plays in Campbell’s understanding, or lack thereof, of her PPD as well as in her selection of solutions for assuaging the societal woes she identifies. Campbell depicts all of this long before mental distress following childbirth became a medically explained diagnosis, making her memoir my “control group” in that it is separated from the rest of the memoirs I research in which the independent variable being analyzed—medical discourses about mental illness—influences and manipulates the young women’s expression of being postnatally depressed. Campbell is not affected by such influence or manipulation.
The best illustration of the rhetorical dimensions of Campbell’s memoir is found near its close. Having overcome the state of New Hampshire stealing her newborn son, her resultant postpartum depression after delivering him, her own contemplation of suicide, her experiences of public alienation, and her fight against oppressive silencing, Campbell is able to reflect introspectively on the all of this and more with fresh insight granted by her victory over her distress:
My mother’s face once I delivered is one I can’t forget. A daughter in a home for unwed
mothers! “We’ll take up where we left off, Lee,” she had said. “We’ll act as if this were a
bad dream.” A bad dream. To the person forced to stow away memories, blank and
stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream. A bad dream. I remembered
everything. I remember holding my baby, kissing his soft cheeks, wrapping his fingers
around mine . . . these memories were a part of me. They were my landscape (Campbell
237). 60
What better exemplification than this of Campbell’s embracement of the aspects of her
postpartum depression which she cannot control being reflected through her unique rhetorical
style which suits both the time period and the societal discourse enveloping the rhetorical
situation her memoir engages. When analyzed rhetorically, the quotation above beholds “cases
of argument”4 as coined by Douglas Walton, that simultaneously engage 1960s anti-psychiatric
ideals and public domesticity ideals, and also seem to send Campbell a message that society is to
blame for her madness (23). The first “case of argument” is unleashed through Campbell’s
mother as a response to the stigmatization of teenage pregnancy in general, loss of societal
respect, and failed fulfillment of expected womanly conduct. Campbell’s mother clearly fears
facing others’ judgement of her daughter who broke every status quo by conceiving in the first
place, but now all the more so by losing control over her emotions. It is clear that the avenue
Campbell engages to bear presence to her view of society’s involvement in her madness enables
her to commemorate memories of her lived-experiences of postpartum depression and this sets
the stage for an affective rhetorical background which spearheads an important augmentative
case concerning the blending of societal and medical realms. It is also significant to note that
even though her memoir depicts the state of society sixty years ago during which postpartum
depression was not credited in the medical field as an amoral disorder, Campbell still builds a
case for medical discourse on PPD.
As Campbell’s inability to react deepens, so too does her loss of voice and agency, likely due to the lack of consistency between her desires and society’s desires for her. As she makes an affective case that societal pressures to develop into a prim and proper 1960s woman contribute to her PPD, Campbell detaches more and more from normative desires and behaviors, thus 61 generating an important rhetorical dimension to her memoir as demonstrated in her depiction of the other teenage mothers residing in Flo-Crit:
This house—the Hell—was for women only, and they were mostly girls my age with
wealthy parents who wanted to be sure their daughters would be living where men
couldn’t get at them and deceive them any more than they already had. These girls
looked awfully bored to me. None of us were here because we wanted to be. The life I
wanted had slipped through my fingers long ago (Campbell 53).
Ostensibly displeased with the home for unwed mothers, Campbell recalls her being there as the catalyst which drove her former life to metaphorically fall through her fingers. Once again, the theme of Campbell watching, but not participating in day-to-day normative activity surfaces, strengthening her reliability as a narrator and amplifying her critical perspective of societal norms held for 1960s women. The fact that Campbell finds her silenced and marginalized identity to be inconceivable permeates through all of the personal commentary in her memoir.
Through her deadly depictions of society’s expectations imposed upon women (i.e. with the words “dead babies,” “bad dreams,” and “the Hell”), Campbell articulates having no aspiration, upon leaving “the Hell,” to marry or obtain a normative job prescribed to 1960s women such as being a nurse, teacher, or beautician/cosmetologist.
The gendered norms of domesticity enforced by society in the 1960s are quite literally
driving part of Campbell’s depression. She effectively utilizes metaphorical, descriptive, and
figurative styles to share her perception which reflects an incompatibility of her “deadly”
existence as a former go-getting teenager who just gave birth in 1960s America and is now
depressed. I should note that not only is Campbell’s memoir depicting a time before PPD was
medically diagnosable, but it is also depicting a time before significant women studies 62
(remember this was the very year that The Feminine Mystique was published, and it was long before The Second Shift was published). Taking this into account makes it more likely that the intended purpose of Campbell’s arguments is to prompt readers to condemn society as the source of her madness. Deprived of the medical linguistics necessary give her PPD symptoms a name,
Campbell’s sense of self becomes dependent upon the public surrounding her. Campbell does a remarkable job of communicating what it is like to suffer from PPD as a mere teenager through her employment of sweeping metaphors premised solely upon her personal experiences, given that 1960s medical discourse was lacking. Meanwhile, the general public is rendered as a contributor of her PPD and the exacerbation her PPD’s subsequent pain. Whereas Foster and
Abraham have the opportunity to share both experiences of PPD by naming it an actual medical condition and the general public’s influence on said condition, Campbell must lump her interactions with society along with her bouts of depression as if they are not different from one another. Likewise, she must lump together her against the grain views of domesticity norms and society’s views of domesticity norms, not knowing how to communicate the true source of her opposition.
63
Chapter 3
ONE GIRL IN TEN IN CONTEXT
One Girl in Ten: A Self Portrait of the Teen-age Mother was originally published in 1988 but depicts multiple teenage pregnancies which occurred in 1981 and 1982. Known as "The
Decade of Excess,” the 1980s beheld the Women's Movement which fought for women’s reproductive rights, freedom from sexual harassment, and the "glass ceiling”— the unseen but nonetheless real barrier through which a step up on a woman’s career exists, but cannot be obtained though she is deserving and qualified (Cook and Cameron 243). Nevertheless, the idea
Campbell had in the 1960s that women are housewives who cannot function in a professional environment, if true, was waning in the 1980s, even though historian Sanders Korenman and her co-author Arline Geronimus recall that 1980s women were often depicted rhetorically as “a pretty face” or “a good set of legs” (“Socioeconomic Consequences of Teen Childbearing
Reconsidered” 1190). “Monica’s” experience as shared by Foster in One Girl in Ten: A Self
Portrait of the Teen-age Mother supports the recollection shared by Korenman and Geronimus.
“Monica” states, “At fourteen, all he had to do was tell me what a fine set of legs I had and I was smitten. I let him take advantage of me, like my body was his body” (66). This shows a teenager’s take on a woman’s place in the 1980s. Seemingly satisfied with a compliment she recognizes to be shallow only in hindsight, “Monica’s” memory here serves as evidence of female objectification. The concept of women being a "Mind Sticker"—being on a man’s mind even when not with him—was also widely advertised throughout the 1980s (“Socioeconomic
Consequences of Teen Childbearing Reconsidered” 1199). Koreman and Geronimus assert that this was a decade during which cosmetic ads were made with the intention of "Staying young and pretty looking for him" (“Socioeconomic Consequences of Teen Childbearing 64
Reconsidered” 1201). Although having a partner like the way a woman looks is liberating for women even today, it was an obvious sign in the 1980s that women were still objectified, as also noted above through “Monica’s” experience. This could not be better exemplified than with the
1980 ad released by the famous menstrual painkiller brand Midol which told women to "Be the you he likes” (fig. 5). This statement enforces the idea of always being a happy "yes girl" by making the reason to want to have relief from menstrual pain the fact that you want to keep your man happy and be pleasant for him to be around.
Figure 5. 1980s Midol Ad: Bayer Company. “Your Guy: Your No. 1 Reason for Midol.” Life &
Style, 8 June 1984, p. 14.
Essentially, this advertisement exhibits a calculated form of silencing that stems from
Neumann’s assertion that “individuals have a fear of isolation, which results from the idea that a
social group or the society in general might isolate, neglect, or exclude members due to the
members' opinions” (“Theory of Public Opinion” 50), as is clearly laid out in her spiral of
silence rhetorical theory. In the case of the 1980s woman, this fear of isolation drives her to
remain remaining silent instead of voicing her own thoughts or opinions. What better illustration 65 than this of the “media [being] an important factor that relates to both the dominant idea and people's perception of the dominant idea” (“Turbulences in the Climate of Opinion” 161). This advertisement pushes “being good” only to be well-pleasing to one’s guy, not to oneself. By this time, although feminist gains were made in the sense that it was completely normal for a wife and/or mother to have a job, Arlie Hochschild and Anne Machung argue that too many times they were still seen as only that: a wife and/or mother. Additionally, the 1980s saw the highest divorce rate in United States history at the time due, in large part, to couples marrying so young
(56). Hochschild and Machung describe many couples marrying directly out of high school.
There was no waiting. They find that many couples even stopped asking parents for permission to marry and bought into a popularized belief that in order to be "popular" you had to have the biggest and most extravagant wedding (61).
Regardless of the increased divorce rate, Anne Daguerre and Corinne Nativel avow that the stigma against divorce rose and rose. She says if a married man and woman could not get along any longer, the root of the problem was often placed on the woman’s shoulders (10). This is yet another example of silencing. Common accusations against 1980s women according to
Daguerre and Nativel involved being irritating, letting themselves go appearance-wise, and especially not keeping their man happy. Should a couple divorce, Daguerre and Nativel find it was not uncommon for cash benefits to go towards the ex-husband (11).
Historical Context of Foster’s Memoir through the lens of The Second Shift
The number of women in high ranks of companies remained very low in the 1980s. The percentage of North American women who were founders or CEOs was an unbelievable one percent (Daguerre and Nativel 12). Was this because women were too lazy or not smart enough for these positions? Usually not. Daguerre and Nativel explain that the reason was more likely 66 because it was just seen as something women do not pursue, or because even though women were now in the workforce, they partook only in specific roles that would not remove them from their responsibilities at home, further silencing and smothering the dreams they might have for themselves. Enter Arlie Hochschild and Anne Machung with a Zeitgeist text of the 1980s, The
Second Shift, which helps to further historicize One Girl in Ten: A Self Portrait of the Teen-age
Mother. Hochschild’s and Machung’s incredibly popularized term “The Second Shift” (still recognized to this day) refers to the unpaid housework and responsibility that comes with motherhood. Because so many of the young women whose stories are depicted in Foster’s text identify with working a “second shift,” Hochschild’s and Machung’s book is a touchstone text that aligns nicely with this dissertation research.
Hochschild and Machung conducted a study in the 1970s and 80s which revealed that working women averaged fifteen hours more work per week than men. After they work one shift at the office, women work a “second shift” at home. Additionally, Hochschild and Machung found that most women who do not have children still spend significantly more time on house work than men do, and women with children dedicate more of their time to both childcare and housework than men do. Akin to the wage gap identified by Friedan in the previous chapter, they found there to be a “leisure gap” between man and woman at home. Put simply, the second shift is the women's double day. According to their studies, Hochschild and Machung claim that women work an extra month out of every year when compared to men. Their studies further show that women who work outside the home do have a higher self-esteem than housewives, but they are more fatigued and get sick more often than men. She finds that working mothers are also more likely to suffer from anxiety than any other group (92). 67
It is a win for feminists of Freidan’s time that 1980s women are now working but
Hochschild’s and Machung’s findings suggest many women’s roles at home remain the same as do their silenced voices and gender division is still evident. Catriona Macleod states, “In school, girls took home economics whereas boys took shop” (87). This suggests roles are still assigned to females and males without consideration of their individual choices. Hochschild and Machung note, though, that the gender strategies adopted by men and women to make sense of inconsistent role exigencies are also emerging at this time. Hochschild and Machung refer to these strategies as the three ideal types of gender ideologies. The traditional gender ideology is the belief that Campbell so detested whereby the woman is to cook, clean, and tend to the children, while the husband works outside of the home and is the sole breadwinner. Next is the
Egalitarian gender ideology—the belief that the husband and wife are equals across the board
(i.e. in terms of work, family, house chores, etc.). They share the load and the power. Third, the transitional ideology is the belief that the husband is the chief breadwinner, but is supportive of his wife working if she so desires so long as she still takes care of her homemaking and motherly responsibilities. The latter was the most prevalent gender ideology of this decade according to
Hochschild and Machung (99).
Thanks in no small part to adolescent women, by the close of the 1980s, Arline
Geronimus, Sanders Korenman, and Marianne Hillemeier describe the decade becoming dubbed the “Me Decade.” They state it was also known for the increasing prevalence of sex among high school students (though still kept secret) during which the American stigma against teenage pregnancy started to wane, leading the number of teen births to continue to rise across the country (“Population and Development Review” 609). Given the perspectives shared by the young women whose stories are depicted in Foster’s book, however, stigma against PPD still 68
lingered, so it is worthwhile for me to shed light on how I am defining stigma for my study
moving forward. As Hochschild and Machung aptly observe, “stigma occurs when there is a
discrepancy between virtual social identity, such as stereotypes and expectations we bring to
everyday encounters, and the actual social identity a person has” (29). Glen McClish and
Jaqueline Bacon adds to this that stigmatization, in and of itself, is a rhetorical process enacted
through language “rooted in culturally and historically contingent values” (37). Why is this
significant to the silenced teenage mother with postpartum depression? McClish and Bacon
answer this very question when they assert that “Stigma is the social process wherein an
individual with some disability has their lines of expressive action and possibilities limited by
social sanction and are thus deemed as living less than fully human lives” (49). Henceforth, a
look into the historical background of the influential role public stigmatization plays amongst
society by way of the revelations shared in The Second Shift, the rhetorical context surrounding
One Girl in Ten: A Self Portrait of the Teen-age Mother will be clarified.
Prior to the publication of her book in 1988, Sallie Foster worked with hundreds of school-age mothers in her role as a social worker. Inspired by this work, One Girl in Ten: A Self
Portrait of the Teen-age Mother became the only explicitly biographical research Foster has conducted. However, Foster notes multiple times that she much prefers calling her research a story rather than a study. Foster explains that through the teaching of special classes for pregnant girls offered in various school districts under a special state program in California, she was able to find many young mothers who wanted very much to participate in sharing their stories, and over a twelve-month period between 1981 and 1982, Foster recorded 126 interviews on tape.
From there, she compiled these shared recollections which she terms as memoirs into a collection of narratives through which she weaves in her own thoughts and responses to the teen 69 mothers’ lived experiences. Although this means the excerpts Foster shares from these young women are shorter in length than the narratives shared by Campbell and Abraham, they are nonetheless effective in accomplishing the use of writing as a vehicle for releasing significant memories. As previously stated, Foster did not create this story only to tell young women’s experiences of PPD, but for the purposes of this dissertation, I am focusing on said experiences of the young women’s unanimous fall into silenced depression that was either self- or medically- diagnosed and their eventual recoveries. I, nor Foster, accept responsibility for diagnosing PPD in these young women; for the purposes of this dissertation, I only relay what said young women describe and analyze it for meaning and relevance.
The exigencies of silenced PPD that calls for stories is fundamentally different in Foster’s work from that which I presented in relation to Stow Away. In One Girl in Ten: A Self Portrait of the Teen-age Mother, the depicted teenage mothers’ personal exigencies of PPD elicits a new rhetorical situation, this time involving groundbreaking changes in diagnostic approaches in psychiatry that still continue well into the 1980s as well as increased public stigmatization of
PPD. While medical explanations of PPD did not yet exist amid the historical context surrounding Campbell’s memoir, the historical context of Foster’s One Girl in Ten: A Self
Portrait of the Teen-age Mother organizes the now existing medical discourses to demonstrate the ways they influence the stigmatizing perceptions of the silenced teenage mother who suffers from PPD.
Let me start by supplying the biographical context of the 1980s time period during which many of the teenage women Foster portrays in One Girl in Ten: A Self Portrait of the Teen-age
Mother describe dealing with PPD without acceptance or support. While some of the girls who share their stories in this text “had always been depressed,” and even used alcohol as a way of 70 self-medicating, they express, to some extent, hesitation to share such information because they do not want to publically chronicle their mental illness. As it is, they are making a bold move to publically chronicle their adolescent, out of wedlock pregnancies. Though most of the PPD- suffering teenagers contend their hesitancy was rooted in nothing more than their wish for some privacy, the likelihood of negative societal input regarding depression during the 1980s contributing to their hesitance to break their silence cannot be ignored. In fact, some of the girls depicted in Foster’s book even describe their own psychiatrists advising them against hospitalization in 1981 and 1982 because of concerns about public stigma (Foster 161). This stigma was arguably even more prevalent than falling pregnant as an unwed teenager in the first place.
A national bestseller, One Girl in Ten: A Self Portrait of the Teen-age Mother, tells the full story of 126 girls aged fifteen to twenty four (at the time they were interviewed) whose first- born children ranged from six weeks to six years. The girls only shared two things in common: they all had a child while they were still of school age and they all reported fighting bouts of postpartum depression—a depression that is far too often swept under the rug. Again, even though Foster did not write this memoir so it could be a part of the genre of mental illness memoirs, as I will soon prove, it does fit the bill, and I find it surprising that it has yet to be acknowledged for its rhetorical significance in sharing with the world a rich account of what
PPD feels like as well as what it looks like to be inside a teenage mother’s “depressed world.”
One may wonder how a text’s rhetorical power to invite readers into an alternate world can be measured; the letters readers sent to Foster after One Girl in Ten: A Self Portrait of the Teen-age
Mother was first published is a great starting point. In a 1989 interview with the New York
Times, Foster described these letters as “raw outpourings of PPD’s many victims…” (13). 71
Grateful for Foster’s inclusion of this rarely discussed side to teenage motherhood, many families thanked Foster for making PPD real for those who have not experienced it at all or as a teen, and for those dismiss PPD’s existence entirely. Whether it was her initial intent or not, in sharing young women’s stories, Foster sparks awareness to both the misery of being postnatally depressed and to the anguish that stigmatizing judgements of PPD sufferers can initiate, especially toward the already silenced teenage mother.
I will now highlight two historical contexts that coincide with One Girl in Ten: A Self
Portrait of the Teen-age Mother: the aforementioned emergent medical explanation of PPD placed on the table in the 1980s and society’s moral denouncement of teenage PPD in the 1980s as perceived by the teenage women whose experiences are detailed in Foster’s book. In order to read Foster’s text within the pocket of rhetorical situations implying a strand of moral purposes at work in Foster’s self-portrait of the teenage mother with PPD, it is important for me to take into account the history of how postpartum depression was stigmatized in popular culture during the time of Foster’s study as well as the medical response.
Less than ten years before Foster began hearing young women’s stories for her book,
Senator George McGovern—the demonocratic presidential candidate running against Richard
Nixon—ran for president alongside Thomas Eagleton. Shortly after they began campaigning,
Eagleton announced to the American public that he had received psychiatric treatment in the
1970s for bouts of depression, and this announcement unearthed public discourses shaping what
the New York Times would later recount as “stigmatizing views of depression” (34). Soon after
receiving the nod to run as Vice President, Eagleton was questioned by reporters about “any
closeted skeletons” he kept hidden. Eagleton honestly and authentically denied such, explaining
that he did not “consider the fact that [he] had had some hospitalization for a health problem to 72
be a skeleton” (“Eagleton Quits” 34). Keeping with the times, McGovern and Eagleton
recognized depression as a medical disorder just as the young women Foster interviews
recognize it, no different from a flu or a cold, but “for the American public, depression still was
not recognized as an illness; rather, much of society deemed it as an indication of a flawed
personality” (New York Times 33). Eagleton was questioned regarding his “fitness” to serve,
especially with Cold War nuclear anxieties still lingering near. A leader in Eagleton’s own
Democratic party, Matthew J. Troy, avowed that the nation could not afford “to have a man who
had a breakdown under a nervous pressure or tension have the right to control that nuclear
button” (“Eagleton Tells of Shock Therapy” 1). Troy says, “The vast majority of the population
was not prepared to trust the capabilities of a depressed person,” and Eagleton ultimately
withdraws his vice president nomination, his voice pinched quiet like that of small flame on a
match, practically never to be heard from again.
In 1981, the very year that Foster began interviewing teenage mothers for her book, John
Hinckley Jr. resumed depression’s place as a common household topic when he attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan. Just days before the assassination attempt, Hinckley’s older brother, sister, and his sister’s husband begged psychiatrists to institutionalize him, for he was “depressed,” and “behaving erratically like he was totally out of control” but their complaints were silenced by a legal system that didn’t believe in their gravity (Siegler 71). After shooting President Reagan, a jury found Hinckley not guilty by reason of insanity and Judge
Vincent Fuller summoned him to St. Elizabeth’s Psychiatric Hospital in Washington, D.C. until he was just recently released to the care of his mother in September of 2016. Had he been given the help he needed as many of the young women featured in Foster’s memoir have been helped, the whole incident probably would never have occurred. 73
Of course, males are not the only ones to bring depression and how it is oppressively silenced to the popular culture limelight in a way that is helpful for my research into how postpartum depression is represented in teenage mothers. In the mid 1980s, then twenty-five- year-old Sylvia Wynanda Seegrist, wearing camouflage clothing and armed with a gun, entered a
Springfield, Pennsylvania shopping mall, dressed in army fatigues and carrying a .22 caliber semiautomatic gun. Upon opening fire, Seegrist murdered two-year-old Recife Cosmen, sixty- seven-year-old Dr. Ernest Trout, and sixty-four-year-old Augusto Ferrara. Seegrist, too, suffered from depression and her mother believed she also had schizophrenia. Consequently, prior to this day, Seegrist had been through her share of mental institutions over the course of at least a decade (Smith 138). Depressively paranoid, Seegrist said that the fear of her mother sending her to a mental institution again was actually what drove her to shoot up the mall. She declared that she would "rather die or go to prison than go to a mental hospital" (Smith 138). Even still, in the days leading up to the shooting spree, Seegrist made several unanswered calls to a “crisis” center in search of help managing an intensifying feeling of anger and rage that she was unable to get past. She, too, was systemically silenced and not offered the help she really needed. If she had been offered help like some of the young women in Foster’s One Girl in Ten: A Self Portrait of the Teen-age, it is likely no one would have been murdered.
Both Hinckley’s and Seegrist’s depression-induced violent acts elicited debate across the country about how a need for the reformation of medical care provided to the depressed. By advocating for changes in state mental health legislation Ruth Seegrist—Sylvia Seegrist’s mother—eventually played a huge role in making and passing laws that allow states to self- contain individuals diagnosed with mental illness before more bloodshed could occur. In a letter to the Pennsylvania State Legislature, Ruth Seegrist expressed that it was “unjust” and “socially 74 irresponsible” to allow the severely ill to fend for themselves and then hold them “criminally responsible” when they lose control. Moreover, she said that legislators have given the mentally ill “every right except the most basic one: the right to get well” (Newman 69). Teenage mothers with postpartum depression are likewise denied this right every time they are unable either forcibly or willingly to speak up on their own behalf, and ultimately, highly publicized events like these set the stage for the stigmatizing public views of depression that the young women whose stories are shared in Foster’s book would later identify as only growing more prominent as the 1980s progressed.
Stories about women with PPD “losing control” and turning violent are just as easy to come by, though the young women in Foster’s memoir claim that 1980s society rejected PPD as a possible, legitimate cause of insanity. Still, the 1980s saw its share of women with PPD go over the edge, their pleas for help having fallen on deaf ears. In 1980, Ann Green smothered her firstborn, Patricia, when she was five days old in 1980 and her second baby, Jamie, two years later, when he was three weeks old, but the deaths were not considered suspicious until she tried to kill her third child, Larry Jr. in 1985. Green's case was one of more than a dozen around the nation in the 1980s to employ a defense of postpartum illness. As stated, though, whether they met legal standards of insanity was not always clear. What is puzzling, for court officials and medical professionals alike, is that so many of these women seem stable and eager for children before giving birth. After the birth, many women keep their sadness under wraps because this wasn’t the way things were supposed to be (Newman 72). Karen Kleiman explains, "Having grown up expecting motherhood to be one of the best times of life, many women suffer alone, feeling miserable but unaware that [unlike the problems we discussed by way of The Feminine 75
Mystique postpartum mood disorders have a name" (71). In other words, these women are unaware that they can break their silence and not fear isolation.
In 1985, Debra Lynn Gindorf was sentenced to life in prison in Illinois for murdering her three-month-old son Jason and her twenty three-month-old daughter Christina. Gindorf crushed sleeping pills and mixed them up with her children's food before feeding the poisoned meal to them. They both died shortly after ingesting the overdose of pills and then Gindorf attempted to take her own life by ingesting the same concoction. Gindorf, too, was suffering from postpartum depression without help.
After delivering her firstborn, Gindorf experienced depression but like “Kim” in One Girl in Ten: A Self Portrait of the Teen-age Mother, she thought it was event-induced because her ex- husband severely abused her. Gindorf and her husband divorced before the delivery of their second child, but still she experienced incessant crying spells once the baby arrived. A mere 20 years young, she also says she began hearing a voice like “Katrina” who describes hearing a voice tell her to do harm in Foster’s text. The voice Gindorf heard scared her into wanting to kill herself and she would have to bring her kids with her in order to protect them. "She saw death as a mode of transportation to heaven. They would all be together in heaven" Kleiman explains. "In a weird, warped way, this was something she thought she was doing for her children" (81).
Though insightful, Kleiman finds disordered explanations of behavior from women who suffered from PPD did not make much headway among 1980s society (82). What did make headway was the declining number of adoptions in the U.S. during this decade. Arthur Kleinman states, “Non-relative adoptions decreased drastically from a peak of 89,200 in 1970 to a record low of 22,000 in 1980” (114). Kleinman credits a new law, first implemented in Mobile,
Alabama after a string of infanticides, with shifting the adoption narrative in America. Unlike 76 forced adoption, under the “Safe Haven Law,” (known in some states as the “Baby Moses” law), a parent can choose to drop off their unharmed, less than sixty days old baby at a fire station, police department, or any hospital. Moreover, a parent can also change their minds up to 30 days after the drop off to get their infant back from the state. This reflects a great amount of authority being given back to women especially unlike the experiences described by Campbell in which she had no say in the matter.
While the safe haven law was certainly a step in a fairer direction, new mothers with PPD were largely unsupported by the stance President Ronald Reagan’s wife Nancy Reagan took when she dubbed individuals who pursue psychiatric treatment for PPD as being “faddish,” for she felt that women may just use postpartum depression “as a crutch” and consequently, she felt that women pursuing psychiatric treatment for PPD were “not really trying” (whatever that means) to get hold of themselves. She even went as far as saying that women with PPD who receive psychiatric treatment were just “sloughing off [their] responsibilities” (Emmons 7). This meant PPD-suffering mothers of the time had yet another reason to remain silent.
By 1986, over 60% of the public sided with the first lady and “did not believe that postpartum depression exist[ed];” insisting still that postpartum depression stemmed from
“character flaw” (Hipwell et al. 5). From a rhetorical standpoint, the missing piece in public discourses on PPD was the deletion of moralistic views of PPD, but as fundamental changes in psychiatric diagnostic practices began taking shape as early as 1980, an amoral discourse on PPD would finally make its debut. With the umbilical cord attaching PPD diagnoses with one’s immoral decision to “slough off her responsibilities” cut, PPD sufferers could live simply with a medical condition rather than attempting to succumb to negative, misguided rhetoric that labeled them as “neurotic” or “crazy.” Medical views of PPD freed women from imprisoning silencing 77 and thoughts that they were “morally weak” and enabled them to begin to identify more simply as “sick.”
Now in the 1980s decade, the psychosocial approach to PPD—under which PPD was diagnosed under a medical professional’s careful consideration of a woman’s social influences and personal history—became more predominantly accepted than the Sigmund Freud-inspired psychodynamic approach you should recall my mentioning as the dominant model followed in the 1960s. Taking a psychosocial approach to diagnosing PPD was more akin to an art than a science and required extensive, highly specialized training. William Arney and Bernard Bergen disclose where this approach failed was its inability “to produce empirical advancement in the scientific understanding of the causes of mental illness” (19). This, along with the known fact that these methods of reaching diagnoses were difficult to replicate, resulted in health insurance companies pulling the reins on covering psychiatric services for pregnant and parenting women by 1983 (Herrick 1992). The uncertainties inhibiting psychiatry from mirroring the rest of medicine were evident in the third edition of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders (DSMIII) which was released in 1980. Unlike DSM-II which aligned with the
Sigmund Freud-inspired psychodynamic approach to PPD diagnoses that was prevalent in the
1960s, the DSM-III introduced the more artful and symptom-based/ social influences and personal history-considerate approach that I explained earlier. According to DSM-III, diagnosing
PPD was now based strictly on observational practices rather than interpretive practices—a win for psychiatry since it was starting to become accepted as a medical science as a result. Yet on the downside, this approach required much less, if any, presupposed knowledge of the definitive causes of a PPD which meant that any random person off the street could diagnose PPD.
Described by lead developer Robert Leopold Spitzer as “a defense of the medical model as 78 applied to PPD,” the DSM-III intended to resolve the contests fronting PPD diagnoses by ensuring the manual highlighted identification of easily observable symptoms, though with scarce mention of causes.
The DSM-III changes in relation to PPD in 1980 also rode the curtails of some dynamite advances in psychopharmaceutical research. Drugs such as Prozac and Paxil were proven to assuage the symptoms of PPD, so they were now being prescribed as readily and easily as amoxicillin or penicllian were prescribed for an infection, that is, if you were 18 or over. Scant research into what kind of pharmaceuticals, if any, were offered to teenage mothers with PPD exists but with that said, the irrefutable impact that this medical approach had on women in general was it made PPD considered separately from the suffering person (so as a condition, rather than a personality trait). Therefore, as Kristen Luker finds, “there should be no more embarrassment about PPD than there is about diabetes” (97). Should is the key word here, especially in regard to teenage mothers, for they had a double whammy of stigmatization stacked against them for suffering the consequences of teenage pregnancy and PPD simultaneously.
Read in light of this rich historical context, the silenced tales of PPD shared in Foster’s
One Girl in Ten: A Self Portrait of the Teen-age Mother paint a scene in which the sadness and pain of PPD is in some cases, so profound that some of the young moms consider self-blame to be a viable solution to their suffering. Take “Chrissie’s” (remember Foster changed girls’ actual names to protect their privacy) experience, for example. In her interview, “Chrissie” tells Foster:
It’s 1981 and there is still such a stigma about becoming pregnant out of wedlock. I think
the pendulum has swung a full 180 degrees since the years when pregnant teens were
ostracized and outcast, but I also still think this stigma about what “everyone will think”
is what pressured me into hiding my sadness once my daughter Kelly was born. As it 79
was, I felt like I had to atone for my sins and right my wrongs. If anything, I figured all
of my crying spells were consequences I now had to face because no one brought this on
me but me” (110).
Ultimately, Foster reflects on what “Chrissie” shares here and notes that “time is the real healer” of postnatal distress. This reaction establishes the stylistic tone and prototype to be used for the shapes rhetorical devices and appeals take as Foster implants throughout her book (more to come on that later). Not only does this effective text shed incredible light on the suffering of PPD, it even encloses details about the sources of PPD that the DSM-III cannot provide. Foster herself writes, “When a young woman becomes inundated with symptoms of PPD, it is her brain that becomes ill, not dissimilar to any other organ that becomes ill” (142). Foster explains that the cause of PPD is “a basic chemical disturbance in the woman’s brain sparked by the many hormones circulating within her post-delivery” (144). Foster’s explanations here insert One Girl in Ten: A Self Portrait of the Teen-age Mother into the research pocket of the new amoral medical view of PPD that scientists adopted in the 1980s. To this day, Foster’s work offers extraordinary insight into societal discourse regarding the source and implications of PPD and also the previously silenced experiences of sadness a great many of teenage mothers experience.
Pryal’s 4 Rhetorical Conventions of Mood Memoirs
Convention 1: Apologia
Coming from a different vantage point than Campbell in that she is sharing the stories of
other young women as opposed to telling her own story, in “Chapter One: The Story behind the
Statistics,” Foster nonetheless defends her decision to use her text to break down stigma
surrounding teenage pregnancy and postpartum depression by stating, “The purpose of this book
is to share a story, rather than a study—their story. It will afford [teenage mothers] the 80 opportunity to come out from the cloak of secrecy that surrounds them when their emotions after delivery are different than expected” (1). Foster uses the words “coming out,” as in coming out of the closet, as a metaphor for the self-disclosure of the depicted teenagers’ struggles after becoming mothers. She also attempts to humanize the young women featured in her book by making it clear that her book “is not about teen-age pregnancy as a ‘national problem’ or a
‘social phenomenon’” (2). Rather, Foster wrote her book to be about people—people who have had the experience of becoming pregnant, bearing children, and facing the aftermath of doing so, while they were very young. Additionally, there are several forms of apologia sprinkled throughout this chapter from the teenage mothers themselves. “Marilyn” says, “I am sorry if what I say comes across as futile” (22). Likewise, “Hannah” states, “I want to start out by apologizing if I offend anyone with my life choices. There is a lot that I know goes against the status quo” (23). Here, both “Marilyn” and “Hannah” take a leap of faith in admitting they are deviating from whatever they perceive to be the norm in life experiences. Yet they choose to press on, no longer accepting silence as viable.
Convention 2: Awakening
The best illustration of the moment of awakening in Foster’s One Girl in Ten: A Self
Portrait of the Teen-age Mother is given by “Wilma,” a sixteen year old new mom whose early denial of her PPD caused her to self-silence rather than reach out for help. Expressing her awakening, followed by what should have been a confession of her illness to the father of her child, “Wilma” states:
When I had to take care of the baby for six weeks by myself, there were a lot of times I
was going crazy. I would cry, cry again, and then I would cry some more. One day I 81
decided I’d had it. I was going to tell Kurt the truth: I was depressed. Instead, I told him I
thought I was tired of taking care of the baby (Foster 142).
Through what appears to be thorough introspection, the young mother depicted here as “Wilma” proves that her PPD does not in any way impede on her self-awareness. To be depressed and self-aware simultaneously seems oxymoronic, but it is rhetorically advantageous, for such clear insight into the speaker’s moment of awakening establishes her reliability as a narrator and invites readers to trust her narration of events. Wilma knows she needs to speak up about her depression, but she remains silent, even to her own dismay. This may also be tied to Wilma thinking she needs to associate her sadness with her second shift work as a mother (meaning it is to be expected), rather than associating her sadness with a medical condition in need of treatment.
Convention 3: Criticizing Doctors
Foster uses her narrative as a breeding ground for the stories of multiple teenage mothers who criticize medical professionals outright for their ignorance toward their emotional appeals for help. This is so prevalent in Foster’s self-portrait of the teenage mother that there is an entire chapter devoted to it titled “Attitudes toward Doctors.” In this chapter, “Margot” tells her obstrician/gynocologist (OB/GYN) that she can’t seem to stop crying post-delivery. Here is her description of her doctor’s response or lack thereof:
My OB seemed totally bothered by me telling her about my baby blues. She could have
prescribed me something, but she didn’t. All she did was suggest a lot of other things I
could do like giving the baby up for adoption or turning the baby over to an adult in my
family legally (63). 82
Instead of being offered theraptic or medical support as a new adult mother would, “Margot” is being shamed by her own physician. Her doctor’s reaction is indicative of her failure to see PPD as an amoral disease, at least when it presents itself in her young patient, “Margot.”
Similarly, “Dora” recalls going to her OBGYN to report a cloud of gloom she was stuck under and her doctor told her, “If you are holding onto this baby just to have him [the baby’s father], you should consider placing the baby [for adoption]. It’s never going to work out with him [the baby’s father]. “Dora” describes this unsolicited “advice” as “no different than what [she] had already heard from everyone else” (65). Obviously, “Dora” went to her doctor for help resolving her declining emotions, not to add more cause for said emotions. In an important and memorable way, “Margot” and “Dora” are both insinuating that the role of a medical professional should be to rise above the chains of stigma that trap the thoughts of so much of society. They suggest that their doctors should be different from “everyone else” and certainly should offer them more of a solution for their illnesses than judgment. Judgment only further silences them.
Convention 4: Laying Claim
In the first chapter of One Girl in Ten: A Self Portrait of the Teen-age Mother, Foster answers why she conducted her study: "Everyone I interviewed share two things in common: they all had a child while they were still of school age and they all reported fighting bouts of postpartum depression. Out of more than five thousand pages of tape transcripts of these individuals’ experiences came the material for this book” (3). Providing evidence of the many, many young women (126 to be exact), Foster interviewed for her book lays claim to the experiences of other PPD sufferers and attempts to break down stigma and resultant silencing attached to teenage pregnancy and postnatal sadness. 83
Essentially, Foster generates rhetorical authority by revealing how common it is for a
new mother, let alone a new teenage mother, to undergo postpartum depression. In fact, by
coupling PPD in the same sentence with mothers of school-age, she presents the experience of
teenage motherhood and teenage PPD as one and the same. Furthermore, by noting the more
than five thousand pages of tape transcripts Foster assembled for her book, she is proving that
adolescent mothers’ voices are worth sharing in order to empower more women in similar
circumstances to do the same.
Rhetorical Devices Employed to Depict an Extra-Verbal Experience of Disordered Reality
The theme of an “inability to react” that I identified in Campbell’s text is woven into
Foster’s as well and is expressed metaphorically and figuratively throughout the stories told by multiple young women who suffered bouts of depression which she shares. I should also note that it sits nicely in the cultural pocket created by Arlie Russell Hochschild’s and Anne
Machung’s The Second Shift since newly working 1980s women struggle with how to respond to their newly gained freedom “without instinctively feeling like their normal home, parental, and marital duties are just that, duties” (19). Foster recalls “Abbie” sharing a recent visit to a public park she endears, for here she has “spent a part of each year since the 1970s.” Right here at this beloved park is where “Abbie” determines she is “in the grip of the beginning of a mood disorder” (76). She states, “It was alarming at first, since the change was subtle. My surroundings took on a different tone. The shadows of nightfall seemed gloomy. My mornings were less cheerful. My walks pushing the baby in the stroller through the park were less zestful. I realized that it should be plain to me that I was already in the grip of a mood disorder” (79).
Neumann’s spiral of silence rhetorical theory naturally lends itself to the reasoning “Abbie” had likely been following prior to this moment when she acknowledges her mental distress. 84
Assuming the fear of isolation and the searing gaze of public opinion, “Abbie” undoubtedly did not want to expose herself to social pressure, sanction, and punishment, nor did she want to deviate from the societal norms imposed upon new moms.
Morphing PPD into a sort of demonizing character by personifying “it” as having the human capability to “grip” and hold onto its sufferer bolsters “Abbie’s” portrayal of her darkening worldview. Before her interview with Foster leaves this topic, “Abbie” figuratively exemplifies her lived reality of having PPD as comparable to “being engulfed by a toxic and unnamable tide that ruined any and everything that I would normally enjoy” (76). Unlike in
Campbell’s memoir, through “Abbie,” readers are able to observe PPD being experienced as authentically visceral, meaning it is innate, and it would not be any easier to stop it from swarming one’s mind than it would be to stop a tsunami from flooding one’s home. Readers can also observe through “Abbie” that her perception of what is and is not “normal” is deteriorating.
“Abbie” references this rapid deterioration when she directly states, “Some days it was even hard for me to look at my baby. I felt a kind of numbness. I wanted to die” (78). Again, differing from
Campbell whose portrayal of her “inability to react” is specifically shared in terms of her emotions, “Abbie” portrays her “inability to react” is expressed in terms of her bodily sensations.
This shift is significant to note because it reflects an added layer of authenticity to PPD that was not detectable in the 1960s, but is ever so present now in the 1980s. It also reflects “Abbie” adapting to her “second shift” responsibilities as a mother, for she never once reaches out and asks her baby’s father for help.
“Abbie’s” accounts of PPD do not differ from Campbell’s, however, in her utilization of
“death” as a figurative entity that “entered [her] thoughts daily,” she expresses it was “death” that “made [her] think [she] might one day take [her] own life” (79). Depicting death in this way 85 makes “Abbie’s” PPD take on a tangible nature for readers; her once invisible feelings are now visible, even to non-depressed audiences. Also similar to Campbell, “Abbie’s” felt-experiences of postpartum depression are characterized by her waning ability to react with normative desires and behaviors. Thus continuing to fit in an ableist world becomes almost impossible, for “Abbie” can no longer identify herself as a “living” part of the world. She places herself viscerally in reality, but she is not a participant of reality. Her doing so challenges the vexatious misconstruction of postpartum depression being all in one’s head, since she exposes PPD to be lively with her body; it is invariably linked with embodied experience, and “death,” ironically, is the metaphor that holds upholds it. Moreover, due to the fact that sufferers like “Abbie” live at such a critical distance from daily realities, their “inability to react” to said realities actually gives them drastic, existential cause to critique the normative world.
How Representations of Postpartum Depression Function Rhetorically
Like Campbell’s, Sallie Foster’s writing sheds light on the ways metaphors and figures can exhibit shifting moods altering one’s perceived reality. The young women whose stories
Foster depicts desire to establish a platform for future PPD-suffering teens that supportively integrates them into the world without morally condemning and silencing them. Take for example Foster’s inclusion of “Dolly,” whose figurative loss of lucidity coupled with her
“inability to react” positions her outside of her “normal” being, thus critically interrupting the normative assumption that a PPD-sufferer can just, get a hold of herself:
I remember when I started to lose myself. It was when I started to lose my voice. It
underwent a strange transformation, becoming at times quite faint, wheezy, and
spasmodic. And food? I could feed my daughter, barely, but I found myself eating only
for subsistence (Foster 132). 86
Here, “Dolly” makes even the everyday activity of speaking seem like a dreaded chore, indicating that her disorder in and of itself is a silencer. Furthermore, bringing presence to her speaking as though it requires such work is a rhetorical move that invites readers to imagine the exhaustion—beyond mere mental exhaustion—of a teenage mother with PPD. In “Dolly’s” case, there is a breakdown of communicative function that almost costs “Dolly” her fulfillment of what she sees as societal decencies, yet she accepts this breakdown as a part of her second shift.
As she recollects below, “Dolly” completely forgets an invitation from her school principal asking that she attend a special award ceremony for making the ‘AB’ honor roll:
My principal . . . was understandably incredulous at first, and then enraged, when after
the honor roll ceremony I told her that I could not join her for the dinner she specially
invited me to afterward. My refusal was both forceful and naïve. Of course this decision
on my part was outrageous. I immediately regretted what I had done (Foster 122).
Here, the dysfunctional role of having informal understandings which govern acceptable societal behavior (as repeatedly appears in line with Neumann’s spiral of silence) in the back of one’s normative mind overwhelms “Dolly’s” non-normative mind. Her speech that once effortlessly rolled off her tongue, now is figuratively depicted as “spasmodic” and “wheezy,” meaning
“Dolly’s” speech is no longer rationally acceptable or deserving of being heard. Furthermore, rigidities amid normative governing of one’s thoughts or speech verses non-normative governing of one’s thoughts or speech are illuminated through the severed connection between visceral and vocal language and the ways this severed connection communicates, at surface level, a lack of interest and societal aptitude.
Corresponding with Campbell’s depiction of her own contemplation of suicide, the
moods portrayed by “Louise” in Foster’s memoir take on a deadly nature, and a mortal tone is 87
employed to describe ordinary day-to-day items. After being asked by her school counselor if
she possessed suicidal thoughts, “Louise” avoids telling her that indeed ordinary objects have
morphed into instruments which can aid in her demise:
I did not tell [the counselor] that in truth many of the artifacts of my house had become
potential devices for my own destruction: the attic rafters (and an outside maple or two) I
thought I could use to hang myself, the garage where I could inhale carbon monoxide,
the bathtub where I could drown myself (119).
“Louise’s” avoidance of this question from her school counselor is another way in which her experience of PPD is silenced and can be connected to her engrained belief that her suffering came along with her second shift responsibilities as a mother and she just needed to hide them.
Moreover, commonplace features of “Louise’s” daily life being figuratively assigned different functions brings presence to out of touch perceptions of said features becoming a means for self- harm. Because of how “Louise” figuratively and metaphorically shapes everyday items into visceral truths, readers plunge deep into a rhetorical middle ground between one’s extra-verbal view of the world and the realistic view of the world which has limited rhetorical resources.
Readers are also offered a newfound understanding of how a depressed mood can dictate one’s sense of self, and one’s reality. Non-PPD-affected readers may be prompted to engage parts of
Foster’s text such as this as a chance to think through moments that they may recall having a similar (as similar as normative can be) mood such as feeling lazy or not wanting to eat. Doing so glues two vastly different world views together so they may reach unprecedented mutual understanding.
88
Rhetorical Influence of Medical Discourses on Memoirists
By reading from Foster in light of reading from Campbell, readers achieve invaluable insight into the ways medical dialogues inform rhetorical discovery especially since reading from
Foster unveils a depiction of the start of the biomedical revolution during which there was an explosion of knowledge about postpartum depression and how it works. In Foster’s case, many of the teenage mothers she interviews are depicted as experiencing their dwindling ability to react normatively due to their brain chemicals, rather than their inner desires. Foster writes:
“Angela” and “Celeste” expressed on many occasions that they believed that PPD is
madness. The madness they refer to results from an aberrant biochemical process with
much upheaval in the brain tissues…it is no wonder the mind begins to feel aggrieved,
stricken, and muddied thought processes register the distress of an organ in convulsion.
“Angela” and “Celeste” agreed that a disturbed mind will turn to violent thoughts. With
their minds agonizingly inward, people with PPD are dangerous only to themselves (47).
Foster’s take on PPD remains consistent with what she says here throughout her memoir. Her memoir depends on the findings of the biomedical revolution as to what causes PPD and how it functions. The quotation above illustrates as clearly as possible the disorderly blending of these teenage mothers’ biological computers—their brains—and their social computers—their minds—as Foster uses a “Angela” and “Celeste” to communicate dissociatively the ways PPD performs a job on the biological computer to interrupt what was previously a lucid social computer. According to Christine De Vinne, “Employing a dissociative style works to turn mental illness into an entity that is foreign to the natural body” (75). Foster does not interpret
PPD as being natural, an incongruity that Campbell would have no say on, for her lived experience of PPD occurred too soon for medical interpretation. Foster adds from “Lavonne” 89 that “Postpartum depression is like a vacuum that gradually saps and drains [her] body of its juices” (120). PPD is represented as an entity that interrupts what De Vinne calls the “chemical foundation” of Lavonne’s mind and body, both which are prompted to work together to viscerally display day to day existence. Put simply, Campbell’s problem didn’t have a name.
“Lavonne’s” does. Whereas Campbell thought her PPD was inflicted entirely by domesticity norms and societal pressure, “Lavonne” better understands the legitimacy and roots of her PPD, though, as seen in Hochschild’s and Machung’s The Second Shift, the expectation for young women like “Lavonne” to be blissful, attentive wives and mothers still lingers, so if a case of
PPD affects a mom’s ability to fulfill expectations held for her by society, she is still misleadingly silenced by way of encouragement to press on as if the harder she works, the more likely she’ll forget about her PPD.
In Foster’s memoir, “Kay” makes noticeable use of incipient medical discourses to optimally identify her innerworkings for readers. Below, one can see how she details her disorderly mood shifts which inevitably influences the ways in which she interacts with the world:
I keep thinking what is going on in my head is correctable—not that my precious and
irreplaceable mind is going haywire. My psych has explained to me that my depression is
chemically induced amid the neurotransmitters of my brain, as a result of my postpartum
stress (Foster 47).
“Kay’s” dissociation with her PPD manifests in her sole focus being on justifying her PPD within a medical framework, rather than relaying any of her felt experiences as Campbell did. In a way, this seems to indicate that with increased medical knowledge comes increased emotional detachment. As John Schilb explains, “The sine qua non of the medical model is the body of a 90 very lifeless type and not of the actively social, embodied, desiring, or ‘real life’ type” (205). In other words, as soon as “Kay” became a patient, her body was no longer her own; it now belongs to psychiatrists whose knowledge seems to detach it from reality. Like the majority of women at this time were still subordinate to their heads-of-the-household husbands, now one with PPD is subordinate to medical professionals. Communicated with a submissive tone, “Kay’s” description of her own body is akin to the way one might describe the function of a motor mount in an automobile. Schlib further states that viewing “the human body as an assemblage of bodily parts and processes is to deprive the patient of every moral as well as every social dimension”
(54). Foster’s interviewees are “the medical patients” Schlib is describing here. They are more like inert objects than people in a rapidly changing environment. The textual evidence I have supplied from Foster’s text reengage PPD as “an entity” and this undoubtedly impacts how silenced PPD-suffering teenage mothers like “Kay,” comprehend their depressive dispositions, especially with relevant rhetorical resources backed by evolving medical discourses now at their fingertips. Given Campbell’s inaccessibility of rhetorical resources, there is really no wonder why Campbell blames her PPD on different causes than the teenagers depicted in Foster’s text do.
Whereas Campbell pins the blame of her suffering on the social context she was growing
up in, the teens depicted in Foster’s memoir dissociatively pin blame for their suffering on the
fact that they are suffering. They still needed medical linguistics to clarify this in a way that the
non-suffering and the suffering alike could understand. In an attempt to point out the need for
more words to describe the effects of PPD more precisely, Foster herself says:
This leads me to touch again on the elusive nature of postpartum depression. That the
word ‘indescribable’ should present itself is not fortuitous, since it has to be emphasized 91
that if the pain were readily describable most of the countless sufferers from this ancient
affliction would have been able to confidently depict for their friends and loved ones
(even their physicians) some of the actual dimensions of their torment, and perhaps elicit
a comprehension that has been lacking due not to a failure of sympathy but to the basic
inability of healthy people to imagine a form of torment so alien to everyday experience
(17).
Here, through her use of the words “indescribable,” “elusive,” and “mysterious,” Foster connects
PPD straight to an implicit viewpoint of day-to-day considerations and correspondence. She also employs alliteration to depict the long history of postnatal sadness’s misunderstood existence when she says it is an “ancient affliction.” Moreover, Foster utilizes a dissociative angle from which she illuminates this misunderstanding of the lived-realities of PPD-sufferers which is not equivalent to day-to-day normative realities. Pooja Makhijani describes said “suffering is an
‘ontical’ suffering, or what might be referred to when public and technical discourses exacerbate the ontological pain of a given mental illness”—in this case, PPD (60). Hence, Foster places the blame for the causes of teenage mother PPD on a need for more all-encompassing language which can correctly articulate the agony of PPD, particularly for readers who have not undergone the unvoiced struggle of PPD.
A final example of dissociation from one’s PPD surfaces from “Jane’s” avoidance of the label “postpartum depression,” for fear that this encourages an “insider vs. outsider” account of the disorder—insiders being those with PPD and outsiders being those without PPD (36).
Missing the words to express her own agony, “Jane” says she was “laid low by the disease;” she instantly “felt the need” to “register a strong protest against the word PPD” (36). Following suit,
Foster dubs PPD to be a “wimp of a word,” particularly when associated “with the actualities of 92 the lived-experience of PPD” (71). Foster thinks the earlier term for sadness, “melancholia,” is more suitable, however, Foster explains that her research into the term revealed that melancholia has been:
. . . usurped by a noun with a bland tonality and lacking any magisterial presence, used
indifferently to describe an economic decline or a rut in the ground. The word has
slithered innocuously through the language like a slug, leaving little trace of its intrinsic
malevolence and preventing, by its very insipidity, a general awareness of the horrible
intensity of the disease. (37)
Such an awareness is both timely and necessary, for according to Foster’s suggestion, the source
of a PPD-sufferer’s ontical agony is that “the uninformed layman” tends not to be able to exhibit
compassion for said agony. Alternatively, the PPD-sufferer’s agony is approached with “the
standard reaction that ‘PPD’ evokes, something akin to “So what? . . . We all have bad days” as
opposed to “Let me help you get the help you need” (Foster 38).
Foster’s unique style of employing medically backed dissociation when expressing
teenagers’ experiences with PPD births a rhetorical method akin to scapegoating, in which the
PPD of the young women she depicts is “perfected,” rhetorically speaking, into a being that
blame can be placed upon. This suggests “PPD” is a sort of “entity” responsible for one’s
ontological misery and depressive behaviors. Whereas Campbell identifies societal attitudes as
the source of her loosening grip on reality, Foster finds that there is some discord in one’s brain
that is the source of PPD-sufferers’ loss of touch with reality. Still, both do not break their
silence until their memoirs afford them the opportunity to. Foster relies rhetorically upon medical
discourses as opposed to societal discourses, making her grounds of appeal arguably more solid,
since medical discourses permit Foster to engage in a dissociation of understanding PPD to 93 separate her view of the young girls’ anguish into ontological—biological—types and ontical— social—types. Something wired improperly in one’s brain may drive them to be depressed, however it is the public’s vacant sympathy—due to the challenge of not having the exact words one needs to express one’s PPD—that drives ones to suffer in silence.
94
Chapter 4
MY TEENAGE DREAM ENDED IN CONTEXT
Before publishing My Teenage Dream in 2014, Farrah Abraham was catapulted into the limelight by sharing her story on MTV’s 16 and Pregnant and its spin-off series Teen Mom. 16 and Pregnant premiered on June 11, 2009. Produced by Dia Savage and Morgan Freeman, this docuseries follows the lives of sixteen-year-old teenagers (sometimes slightly younger or older) while they are with child up to shortly after they deliver. 16 and Pregnant is the most watched show in MTV’s 37 year long history. Every season features episodes that focus on four pregnant teenagers at a pivotal time as they prepare for their early entrance into parenthood. From depicting their personal tussles, to their attempts to find balance amongst all of their relationships, to their nerves regarding their impending deliveries, the show depicts a myriad of milestones and setbacks that the girls experience over the span of six-eight months but interestingly, even though many of the depicted teenage mothers confess to struggling with PPD after being on the show, such confessions or depressive episodes have never been aired.
16 & Pregnant was such a hit that MTV produced a spinoff documentary series, Teen
Mom, in December of 2009, drawing in 3.65 million viewers (Thielman 1548). Narrated similarly to 16 & Pregnant, in Teen Mom, producers feature four of the girls from 16 and
Pregnant who have their good, bad, and ugly experiences of motherhood—again, except for their later admitted bouts of PPD—documented over a longer period of time. In 16 and Pregnant each depicted teen is given one episode to share her story. However, in Teen Mom, the teens’ lives are filmed over longer stretches of time, enabling more of their lives to be shared.
Farrah Abraham was one of the four girls selected to be on Teen Mom. Originally from
Council Bluffs, Iowa, Abraham delivers her daughter, Sophia Laurent, at the age of seventeen, 95 just two months after Sophia’s father, Derek Underwood, unexpectedly dies in a tragic car accident. Aside from their unwillingness to acknowledge Abraham’s grief over the loss of her ex-boyfriend (and her PPD, although that, of course, is not aired), Abraham receives a considerable amount of support from her mom and dad, but she receives little support from
Derek’s family. Abraham’s entrance to motherhood is depicted differently than that of the other teen mothers due, in large part, to the unique and ill-fated circumstances neighboring the death of
Derek and Abraham’s perhaps related experience of PPD.
Historically, fewer babies were born to teenage mothers in 2010 than any prior year since the mid-1940s, a fact that Furstenberg does not find coincidental considering this was also when
MTV began airing its many depictions of the aftermath of teenage pregnancies (127). Whether related or not cannot be determined, but from 1990 to 2008, the rate of teenage pregnancy lessened by forty two percent: “from 117 to 68 pregnancies per 1,000 teen girls” (Luker 99). As this rate continues to decline, women’s roles within their homes, careers, and society at-large are continuing to reach new heights. William Arney and Bernard Bergen proclaim that women are hungrier now more than ever for full equality between men and women “though that has not yet been fully realized” (17). As Hillary Clinton aptly observed when running for president in 2016,
"Just look at Lithuania today—it has not only conducted a very successful chairmanship of the
Community of Democracies but it is setting a high standard to the rest of us—a female president, a female speaker of parliament, a female finance minister and a female defense minister”
(Southard 130).
As Gary Greenberg details in his historical preface to Manufacturing Depression: The
Secret History of a Modern Disease, until Barack Obama came into office in 2009, very little action had been taken since the 1960s and the 1980s to increase women's rights, let along 96 mentally ill women’s rights, other than court rulings in their favor. President Obama recognized that the world needs all of its population, so females need to be equal. With the help and influence of females, the world will have twice as many people trying to make Earth a better place. Enter the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act on January 29, 2009. This act was a result of the
Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company court case. It helped to increase worker protection against discrimination in the workplace. Female dominated jobs can’t pay less than male dominated jobs of equal value. It also increased the time limit on when one must show an unfair paycheck to be considered in court. Following this, on September 21, 2011, President
Obama announced that the U.S. signed a Declaration on Women's Participation to help demolish political, as well as economic, barriers that stand in females' way. Then on June 5, 2012, the
Paycheck Fairness Act, supported by Obama, failed to pass through the Senate. It was meant to strengthen The Equal Pay Act of 1963. It disallowed punishing employees who shared their salaries with other employees, put sexism at the same level as racism in the workplace, and clarified that comparisons among wages can be made among offices in the same county. Adding to this setback, as of 2017, current President Donald J. Trump and his administration completely stopped an Obama-era rule requiring large companies to submit to greater pay transparency by keeping record of precisely how much they pay workers by race and gender—the latter being necessitated by many mindful Americans who are cognizant that although the gender-pay gap is not what it once was, as seen in fig. 6 on the page that follows, it is still far more significant than many would expect in current times. 97
Figure 6. 2016 Earnings by Gender: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. “From Teens to Retirement,
Women Make Less.” NBC News, 31 August 2017, p. 2.
Also significant, the National Organization for Women, or NOW, that was founded in
1966 shortly after The Feminine Mystique to focus on all aspects of a woman's life, is still in existence today in 2018. (Many of the early priorities focused on working women and the organization enforced as best it could the equal treatment of women in the workplace, though it was not strictly enforced by the government.) Today, NOW focuses on lesbian rights, the right to have an abortion, equal pay and job opportunities, equal education, and abuse are at the forefront of political thought.
Historical Context of Abraham’s Memoir through the Lens of Lean In
NOW supporter Sheryl Kara Sandberg’s Lean In (originally published in 2013) is the
Zeitgeist text of today and it aids in my historicization of the present day era during which
Abraham’s memoir was published because much of Abraham’s successes mirror that of
Sandberg and both Abraham’s memoir and Sandberg’s biography are highly popular. So since
The Feminine Mystique, women got their deserved access to the workforce, though as seen 98 through The Second Shift, were still expected to be homemakers and caregivers off of the work clock. Today, plenty of progress has been made, but women are being challenged with a new question that is rarely asked of a man: “How do you do it all?” This question suggests that as they begin to flourish with their careers, women must be neglecting some other aspect of their lives such as their relationships, their children, their home, etc.
Sandberg is the COO of Facebook, Director of Walt Disney Company, and the creator of her non-profit "Lean In." She was previously the Vice President of Global Sales and Operations for Google and the United States Treasury Department Chief of Staff. Hence, Sandberg is known as one of the most powerful women in the world and has had to overcome a number of stereotypes and silencing to get where she is now, making her increasingly relevant to my research. Today, Sandberg aims to increase the number of women who hold leadership positions.
She has devoted her life to investigating why women are afraid of ambition and to proposing a way to end discrimination. Her book Lean In is aimed toward women in the workplace who experience discrimination—women who want to achieve positions of leadership or need motivation to stay positive. She seeks to encourage women to be ambitious, driven, and likeable colleagues so that one day, 50% of women are leaders, and 50% of men are caretakers.
As shared by Sandberg, in the present day and age, “21 of the Fortune 500 CEOs are
women, 14% of executive officer positions are held by women, and 16% of board positions are
held by women” (11). In chapter 2, I noted that in the 1960s, women made 59¢ for every dollar
made by a man. I now note that according to Sandberg’s findings, in 2018, women make 77¢ for
every dollar made by a man. Potential gets men promoted, whereas achievements get women
promoted. Women have to prove themselves; men are given a chance. Thus females
underestimate themselves and engage in either self-inflicted or society-inflicted silence. As a 99
result, more males wish to hold leadership positions than females. Out of more than fifteen
studies Sandberg references for their exemplification of the challenges women face today, by far
the most convincing is the Howard/Heidi study. Though 10 years old, this study still rings true
today. Here is how Sandberg describes it:
Two professors wrote up a case study about a real-life entrepreneur named Heidi Roizen,
describing how she became a successful venture capitalist by relying on her outgoing
personality and huge personal and professional network. The professors had a group of
students read Roizen’s story with her real name attached and another group read the story
with the name changed to “Howard.” Then the students rated Howard and Heidi on their
accomplishments and on how appealing they seemed as colleagues. While the students
rated them equally in terms of success, they thought Howard was likeable while Heidi
seemed selfish and not “the type of person you would want to hire or work for” (41).
Sandberg unpacks this as an indication that when a man reaches success, he is commended. On the other hand, when a woman does well, people perceive her as self-seeking, almost silencing her on paper the same way they silence her in the flesh. As depicted in fig. 7 below, gender roles, though they, too, have come a long way, still reflect many of the restrictions of the eras I discussed in Chapter 2 and Chapter 3. Women are still “lesser than” men. 100
Figure 7. 2000s Milk Ad: Goodby Silverstein & Partners. “Milk Can Reduce the Symptoms of
PMS.” Entertainment Weekly, 18 July 2015, p. 23.
Under the guise of premenstrual syndrome experienced only by women, not men, this advertisement suggests the mental instability of a woman that a man is unfortunate to have to navigate. The words “I’m sorry I listened to what you said-and not-what you meant” indicates a sort of unreliability on women’s behalf resultant in men having to walk on eggshells around them—a scenario undesirable in any rite but in the workplace undoubtedly so.
Sandberg discusses the following theories in her book: the leadership ambition gap, the theory that women are raised to be gentle, nurturing caretakers while men are expected to become powerful leaders ("Pretty like Mommy" vs "Smart like Daddy"), stereotypes are holding 101 women back, men describe themselves as ambitious and prioritize leadership positions, the
Imposter Syndrome, women are polite, rule-followers, "If you are offered a seat on a rocket ship, don't ask what seat, just get on!", negative perception of ambitious women vs positive perception of ambitious men, and careers being jungle gyms not ladders. Overall, Sandberg brings an important context to the memoir written by Farrah Abraham—who has long been scrutinized for her career choices especially her starring in adult films—because Sandberg does not think women should have to sacrifice their careers for personal life. Sandberg’s career ambitions did not limit her personal life, and she wants the same for all women. Moreover, as a mother of two, she first hand experienced discrimination, making this very passionate. A notable recollection she includes in her book is when she gained over seventy pounds during her first pregnancy, only to be told by an insensitive engineer that she was the namesake of “Project Whale” (9).
Ultimately, if Sandberg's ideas were implemented: men would be more open-minded and respectful, women would become more driven and optimistic, workplaces would be balanced and peaceful, and communication, teamwork, and overall success would increase. If Sandberg's ideas continue to be ignored: females will continue to be discriminated against, women will hide their ambition and deprive the world of their potential accomplishments, businesses will not have diverse thinking, and unequal treatment will lead to lack of trust, which will lead to failed businesses.
Today, we are far removed from the days when women hid their pregnancies out of fear
of how it would affect them in the workplace, but we have not covered much ground in terms of
minimizing the public stigmatization of postpartum depression and the effects of sweeping this
mental illness under the rug can be absolutely devastating. On June 20, 2001, the American
society was horrified to learn of another mom who failed to get the treatment she needed for PPD 102 and as a result, she systematically drowned all of her children—Mary, six months; Luke two;
Paul, three; John, five; and Noah, seven—in nine inches of bath water. After her husband left that morning for work, Andrea Yates served her children breakfast and then one by one, she drowned each of them as the others continued eating. “Her firstborn, a seven-year-old named
Noah, tried to run away when he realized he was the last to die. His mother told police how she chased him and drowned him face down in the cold water in her bathroom tub as his baby sister’s body floated next to him,” TIME reported (3). Yates’ lawyers alleged that the murders were the result of psychotic delusions which were “exacerbated by repeated episodes of postpartum depression” (4). This case shook all mothers at their core and prompted many adult women to consider why this condition is so seldom discussed.
In an interview for the “Dr. Oz Show” in September of 2017, President Donald Trump’s eldest daughter Ivanka Trump, confessed that she suffered from PPD after the births of each of her children, Theodore, one; Joseph, three; and Arabella, six. Trump, thirty five, said "With each of my three children, I had a level of postpartum depression.” She added, “It was a very challenging emotional time for me because I felt like I was not living up to my potential as a parent or as an entrepreneur and executive. Plus I had had such easy pregnancies that in some way, the juxtaposition hit me even harder” (Morse 154). Ivanka exemplifies the importance of talking about one’s PPD and seeking treatment for it, but that can be difficult, especially because, while mental illness in general is stigmatized, when you combine it with parenthood and society’s expectations of what a sound mother should be, the taboo gets worse. Arthur Kleiman adds, “We don’t like talking about moms who don’t feel like being moms,” (129). This rings all the more true for teenage mothers with PPD. Said young women are woefully underserved by society, mental health professionals, and social services for a myriad of reasons. In My Teenage 103
Dream Ended, Farrah Abraham describes the ways she was silenced in no uncertain terms when
she states that she was “dismissed, rebuffed, and had [her] mental health concerns during the
postnatal period downplayed by [her] doctor, pediatrician, pastor, social workers, and family”
(33).
Abraham suffered from postpartum depression after giving birth to Sophia at the age of
seventeen and eventually was diagnosed with bi-polar disorder. Termed as manic-depression in
DSM III, DSM IV officially called this condition “Bi-polar disorder” and distinguishes it “by
wavering moods of shifting highs (mania) and lows (depression)” (National Institute of Mental
Health 1). Abraham copes with the help of psychopharmaceuticals—drugs intended to have
normalizing effects on moods, thoughts, sensations, and behavior—and is able to maintain her
livelihood as a hard working mother, entrepreneur, author, adult film star, and television
personality. My Teenage Dream Ended traverses the timeline from Abraham’s first PPD
symptoms at age 17 through her pursuit of her bachelor’s degree in culinary management from
the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale in Florida. The span of time covered in Abraham’s memoir
make it feel more “autobiographical” like Lee Campbell’s Stow Away than Sallie Foster’s The
One Girl in Ten: a Self Portrait of the Teen-Age Mother with its depiction of multiple teenage
mothers’ stories. Abraham’s memoir offers insightful, captivating accounts of what it was like to
be in the silenced mind of a high school senior battling PPD in the days following her daughter’s
birth.
As I did with Campbell and Foster, I want to now explore the biographical context surrounding Abraham’s PPD and bi-polar disorder—grouped together only because Abraham herself groups them this way in her writing—as well as the rhetorical context of the beginning of the twenty-first century during which My Teenage Dream Ended was published. Again, I do not 104 group Abraham’s dual diagnoses together to suggest they are the same. They are not. However, because Abraham groups them together this way in her writing, I follow suit in my analysis of her writing.
In the days immediately following the birth of Abraham’s daughter Sophia Laurent on
February 23, 2009, she identifies her sadness as “a part of [her] that [she] expected and accepted”
(195). Considering the hormonal shifting emotional tones everyone experiences during adolescence coupled with the tragic premature death of her daughter’s father before delivery, it is perhaps understandable how Abraham initially embraces her manias not as disorder but as a part of life. Plus, Abraham remembers not all moments were bad. In fact, she recalls being so productive on some days that her mother would tell her it was okay to slow down. On other days, however, inevitably, Abraham recalls her mood swinging back down to a more depressed state under which she contemplates suicide. She writes, "All I could think about was killing myself," and she even devised a plan for her demise further stating, "I figured I would drown myself in the bathtub. That seemed like the easiest way to go” (139). In My Teenage Dream
Ended Abraham takes readers with her on a journey through her PPD and bi-polar experiences, but those experiences are not fully representative of the story she tells. She also invites readers to share in her professional and personal struggles, gains, and everything in between. The memoir was well received by the general public for being “bluntly honest,” and for “hold[ing] nothing back (Makhijani 17).
Interestingly, unlike Campbell and Foster whose narratives function as written responses to rhetorical and medical discourses of the times they depict, Abraham’s narrative is intertwined with professional knowledge and ethos, for she has very openly shared for years about the important role therapy plays in her life. First seen attending therapy sessions at the still tender 105 age of 18 on the 16 & Pregnant spin-off show Teen Mom, although she does not get to publically announce her diagnoses, Abraham allows MTV to film her most intimate confessions of her extreme highs and lows despite potentially stigmatizing views of her family, co-stars, and society at large. That said, the exigencies of Abraham’s PPD and bi-polar disorder are channeled into a uniquely critical perspective, since she is well-educated on therapeutic approaches to her diagnoses and unlike Campbell and Foster, she knows what should be offered to a woman in her state in terms of treatment and what shouldn’t. Thus My Teenage Dream Ended can be viewed as a counter to a rhetorical situation both as a depiction of what it is like to battle PPD and bi-polar disorder as a mere teenager and as a statement about the biological basis of said diagnoses and their pharmacological treatment. I only wish Abraham’s memoir could also be viewed as a progressive reflection of where public stigmatization and silencing of PPD, in particular, stands today, but frankly, said stigmatization and silencing has remained the same across the 1960s,
1980s, and now. Demonstrating such, in the opening chapter of her memoir, Abraham vulnerably shares that when she reports her emotional struggles to her parents after Sophia’s birth, her mother tells her, “I told you actions have consequences. It’s time to face the music, kid!” (25).
With Abraham’s memoir being published over two decades after the biomedical revolution which, during the time of Foster’s study, finally recognized PPD as an amoral disease, one would not expect Abraham to report that she still was held responsible for her suffering, but this commentary from her mother certainly exhibits otherwise.
Following suit of former President George H. W. Bush, former President Barack Obama dubbed the early 2000s “The Decade of the Brain” (McConnell 43) since many new and exciting research initiatives into our understanding of the brain were transpiring at this time. Most significant to my study is the emerging research tracing PPD to brain function since this research 106 refutes stigmatizing views of depression as a character flaw or as a form of moral weakness in need of taming/silencing as it was in the 1980s.
Today, as Abraham seems aware of in her introspective dialogue with her therapist, mothers are cautioned not to emphasize the biological origins of PPD or else they will likely consider themselves as “defective” (Price 140). Contrarily, current social psychologists encourage viewing those with PPD as diseased persons since doing so makes them biologically distinct, “biochemical aberrations” (Tarasoff 785). In short, we are shifting toward a view of
PPD sufferers as “broken humans” rather than “weak personalities” (Price 144).
My Teenage Dream Ended counters such viewpoints by augmenting the “humanity” of existing with PPD and bi-polar disorder. Whether she intended to or not, Abraham’s conscious use of autobiographical narrative employs this emerging reductive medical view. Take, for example, at the beginning of the chapter titled “The Breaking Point,” when Abraham acknowledges the presence of tensions between several medical views of mental illness by stating:
I have found it challenging to find a common ground between my past experience with
therapy and my present emotional experiences that require more than therapy. I
remember when I only had therapy, I used to get kicked out of class because I would be
crying, but once my doctor put me on emotional medication because I was kind of losing
it at times, I started to make progress. Let me also say this: I am not oblivious. I know
admitting all of this will bring judgment my way but I would rather have that than
continuing to be voiceless (196). 107
Fully embodying Neumann’s spiral of silence rhetorical theory in her admitted resistance of public sanction, pressure, and punishment, Abraham overcomes being silenced by letting go of her fear of ostracism and isolation due to her deviation from the social consensus.
In the quote above, Abraham’s mention of the “emotional medication,” though not specific, is likely to be Prozac—still the most frequently prescribed antidepressant medication to this day, though I should note that this medication has not been approved by the U.S. Food and
Drug Administration for the treatment of PPD in pediatric patients up to 18 years old. Even more importantly, here Abraham demonstrates that in deciding to enact awareness, she is depicting how to live with—as opposed to just suffer from—mental illness. This too, is an important shift in how PPD, in particular, is publicly perceived in current times. While it can’t be said that
PPD’s attached stigma has been entirely demolished, Abraham’s experiences of PPD and bi- polar disorder start to challenge the assumptions that still remain by breaking silence through an establishment of an essence of discernment to the ethos of those affected by PPD. My Teenage
Dream Ended can, then, be seen as taking a rhetorical stand against dehumanizing and assumption-based discourses because even now, long after biomedical revolution, public perception of mental illness has roots in morality or rather one’s pathetic inability to put up with life. As such, My Teenage Dream Ended arises in an environment of a prolific rhetorical situation surrounding early twenty-first century discourses that run counter to medicine’s predominant “reductionist tendencies”5 which stigmatize and do not take seriously enough the intimate perceptions of the mentally ill. The rhetorical dimensions of Abraham’s memoir as revealed by way of her unique utilization of a narrative about mentally ill identity as lenses for critique, in part justify why I find her book so significant. Approximately four years after its original publication, I believe now more than ever that Abraham’s memoir, if used in this sphere, 108
can make significant contributions to societal debates and understandings of what it really means
to be postnatally depressed.
Like that of Campbell and Foster, Abraham’s memoir answers the exigencies of individually experienced PPD (in today’s day and age) but in order to read Abraham’s memoir as a rhetorical text as I was able to read Campbell’s and Foster’s memoirs, it was necessary that I include the aforementioned historical background that likely played an influential role in driving
Abraham to expose her experiences with mental illness. Since Chapter One, to justify my identification of relevant rhetorical situations, I have relied upon Lloyd Bitzer’s belief that
“rhetorical discourse comes into existence as a response to a situation that involves an exigence, or an imperfection marked by urgency” (426). Informed still by Bitzer, I now bear in mind that
“such exigencies are not objective but require the conjoining of factual conditions with human interest” (427). With that said, in the remainder of this chapter, I hope to show once again that through careful consideration of the moral purposes behind a memoirist’s autobiographical act, I can also illuminate a work respective to its rhetorical contexts. As I demonstrate moving forward, Abraham’s memoir brings forth rhetorical appeals that in the words of Bitzer
“discursively engage demands emanating beyond themselves, taking the exigencies of a
[disordered mood] that calls for a story and channeling that story to discursively engaged specific rhetorical situations” (428). Akin to any human’s innately felt calling to lead a life of purpose, I argue that Abraham’s memoir is derived from a felt calling to expose a story—Farrah’s story. I also urge readers to consider the ways Abraham’s memoir mobilizes what is atypical about her life so to provide innovative implications about identity and postpartum depression. Finally, I urge readers to observe how My Teenage Dream Ended yields an opportunity for new societal discussions about the biological stigmatization of PPD-sufferers that still persists today, in 2018. 109
In order to live her fullest life, Abraham wishes to participate in a world in which her diagnoses of PPD and bi-polar disorder are accepted as they are, disordered realities and all.
Soon I take a magnifying glass to the rhetorical function of the emotional exigencies stemming from Abraham’s bouts of depression that morph simple momentary blues into day-to- day blues. Additionally, like Campbell and Foster, Abraham gives a picture of her experiences of living with PPD and bi-polar disorder in the context of day-to-day demands and expectations upheld for her by her school, her employers, her family, her friends, and society in general.
Abraham enables able-minded audiences to weigh her depressive accounts of reality against her normalized accounts of reality. Readers come across what Bitzer describes as “a perspective on the social, embodied, symbolic, and temporal conditions of identity” (428), offered only through
Abraham’s depiction of building her life as a PPD and bi-polar disorder sufferer.
Pryal’s 4 Rhetorical Conventions of Mood Memoirs
Convention 1: Apologia
Abraham explains in her apologia that she chose to write her memoir partly because of
the reactions her supporters had to a blog she created (http://farrahabraham.me/), on which she
posted her reactions to the trials she faced as a teenage mother coping with depression and bi-
polar disorder, grieving the loss of her daughter’s father, and adjusting to single parenthood. In
the prologue of her memoir, Abraham explains that on her blog “she read a ton of posts from
[her] fans encouraging [her] to write a memoir because it would help others with similar
problems see they are not alone” (9). Thus it was the feedback from other sufferers that Abraham
credits with creating the exigency that compelled her to hit the “unmute” button on the telling of
her life experiences and write her memoir. She portrays herself as self-sacrificial for the sake of 110 resonating with others, her rhetorical authority gained through her good will/desire to help other sufferers overcome silencing their experiences of postpartum depression.
Convention 2: Awakening
In her memoir, Abraham gives her readers an invitation to trust her narration of events when she begins describing a suicide letter she planned to pen for her daughter, Sophia, when her moods were particularly low and she could not escape feeling she was not going to be or do enough for Sophia on her own. Abraham’s expressed saddened state is followed by this description with her own moment of awakening:
I pictured telling [Sophia] that I missed her daddy, and that I felt overwhelmed by the
changes in my life, and that she deserved the best and should be surrounded by
happiness. Then something clicked in my head. I realized my depression was talking. I
realized I was being selfish. The most important thing is making sure that [Sophia’s] well
taken care of—how am I going to do that if I’m dead?
Here is when Abraham awoke to the reality of her mental state and its impact on her life. Her pinpointing this precise instance of mental clarity strengthens her reliability as a narrator in the same way it did for “Wilma” in Foster’s memoir. Ultimately, through “Wilma,” Abraham, and
Campbell, we see that although Pryal coined the mood memoir as a story of mental illness, the convention of a moment of awakening suggests that one’s mental illness, or in the case of this dissertation, one’s PPD, does not hinder one’s ability to tell their story. In Abraham’s case, her
PPD and bi-polar disorder actually amplify her storytelling and invite readers to imagine being in a similar emotional state.
111
Convention 3: Criticizing Doctors
In her memoir, Abraham describes the immense frustration she experienced when anti- depressants were no longer enough to treat both her highs and lows. In an attempt to help steer her doctor in the right diagnostical direction, she explains:
I felt so certain I was bi-polar that I told my psychiatrist but he told me to quit believing
everything I read on the internet. He even drilled me about how many hours a day I spend
on my computer or using data on my phone. He said I was rushing to self-diagnose and
that wasn’t my job. (199)
It seems fitting to say Abraham’s psychiatrist’s reaction to her belief that she suffered from bi- polar disorder was trivializing. One might aptly guess that an adult with a diagnosis hypothesis would be better received than Abraham was here. Abraham likely felt as though she was not given her place as a patient playing an active role in her own healthcare as an adult woman would.
In her first year postpartum, Abraham recounts being “far from the world’s best mom” as she tried to “numb the pain with out-of-control partying, drinking and drugs like cocaine and marijuana” (200). Of course, the numbing effects of drugs and alcohol were only temporary and
Abraham would be right back in the throes of her dramatic and sometimes life-threatening mood swings. It would be another year before a psychiatrist properly diagnosed her with bi-polar disorder in addition to her PPD, once again giving more ethos to the non-expert than to the expert. Abraham’s communication of these events suggests that because her diagnosis was so obviously bi-polar disorder that even she suspected it; thus the medical specialists who worked with her failed in their treatment. Ultimately, in some way or another, all of the young women 112 whose criticisms of doctors I have examined up to now, have received failed treatment from medical professionals.
Convention 4: Laying Claim
In her memoir, Abraham demonstrates that “name-dropping” is a form laying claim can take in one’s writing. Just like it sounds, “name-dropping” is when a rhetor provides names of other people associated with him or herself, or something he or she has done, in order to gain credibility and engage in a social hierarchy. Abraham utilizes this powerful rhetorical tool when she shares”
Hayden Panettiere recently entered rehab for postpartum depression and Drew Barrymore
also spoke out about battling the mental illness. These actresses aren't the first to be open
about their experiences, and my therapist says that the more prominent women that speak
up, the better. (203)
By laying claim to Panettiere and Barrymore, Abraham borrows from their rhetorical authority to regain her own. The public already respects both of these actresses not only for their willingness to share their struggles, but for their openness about deciding to seek further professional treatment so if Abraham is merely following suit, it normalizes her. Abraham’s experiences with mental illness are eventually mentioned, though not depicted, in Teen Mom—the spin-off of 16
& Pregnant—not in as great detail as in her memoir, but still one more step in the process of normalization nonetheless. As was the case for Campbell and Foster, Abraham’s outing, if you will, of her struggles with mental illness as a teenage mother is proof that the “narrative nature of the texts mood memoirists produce are ideally suited for their rhetorical purposes of removing taboo from mood disorders, of talking back to the medical profession, and of generating a stronger ethos for the psychiatrically disabled” (Pryal 116). 113
Rhetorical Devices Employed to Depict an Extra-Verbal Experience of Disordered Reality
By now it is clear that Campbell, Foster, and Abraham each overcome rhetorical silence
by my demonstration of how each of these authors employ a set structure of rhetorical
conventions within how they deliver their messages. It is also clear that Campbell, Foster, and
Abraham have effectively constructed gripping memoirs that bond them with their audiences by
way of their narratives depicting collapses in the interconnectedness of their experiences as
mothers with PPD. Similar to Campbell and Foster, Abraham renders a construction of a
“broken self and world” through her use of metaphorical and figurative phrasings to make a
statement about her extra-verbal senses and associations of participating in reality. Shima Carter
contends that the metaphors employed in memoirs to express the extra-verbal suffering of a
given illness, “…no longer [function] a[s] trope, in the sense of a twisting of language. Instead,
reality is what is twisted, and language is a straightening out process” (93). Likewise, William
Arney’s and Bernard Bergen’s concept of rhetorical presence typifies the process depicted above
as “when a rhetor makes present by verbal magic something that is absent to an audience” (117).
Utilizing figurative images, analogies, phrases, and metaphors is an extensively studied way of
transforming something ‘absent’ or invisible into something ‘present’ or visible for an audience.
Abraham has written a thorough explanation of what it is like to undergo wandering changes in
one’s ability-turned inability to react to life as one once knew it as well as one’s overall sense of
self as a PPD-suffering mother seeking to lead a purposeful life.
Abraham’s narrative depiction of her suffering is unique in that she experiences the felt- pain of both bi-polar disorder and PPD. When Abraham’s moods are heightened, she experiences a euphoric state of being; when her moods are down, she experiences a deadening state of being. In light of these radical mood swings, Abraham’s depictions of her ever-changing 114 perception of reality is a sort of rhetorical whistleblower that exposes how exactly the “disorder” of mood disorders manifests. Abraham describes her first “attack” of bi-polar disorder as instantly feeling like a “crazy person” speeding through the world, “enjoying too many plans and enthusiasms to keep track of” (87). She continues, “Everything seemed so easy…The world was filled with pleasure and promise; I felt great. Not just great, I felt really great, like I could do anything” (88). This type of mania demonstrates one of Abraham’s heightened moods. To depict the way her chaotic reality compulsively jumps from experience to experience, she employs the metaphor of a “crazy person”. Abraham also notes the ways her heightened moods, although pleasant for her, overwhelm the people in her inner circle. Her feelings of being a part of a world that is so very exhilarating encapsulates a visceral feature of her physical body throughout such a heightened mood. Her closest loved ones would become drained by her fervor and liveliness.
“You’re talking too fast, Farrah.” They would say. “Slow down, Farrah,” her friends would tell her in fatigue (90).
Slow down she would, eventually. Abraham’s moods would gradually plummet as she moved into a depressive state. She expresses that the “bottom began to fall out of [her] life and mind” (91). Here, her metaphorical jargon “bottom falling out,” produces the visceral feelings of the retreating vigor of her mind and body’s participation in reality. She goes on to say, “My thinking, far from being clearer than crystal, was tortuous. I would read the same passage over and over again only to realize that I had no memory at all for what I had just read. Nothing made sense. I was totally exhausted. I dreaded having to talk to people. My heart and brain were dead”
(91).
As was evident with Campbell and Foster, Abraham’s depression, as depicted here, enforced upon her an “inability to react” normatively amid the fast moving world that surrounds 115 her. When her mood is heightened, everything seems manageable; her mind is clear, she understands what she reads, and when she converses with others, her words flow out easily. She can hold her own in a fast-paced reality that can respond and act in a meaningful world that mandates her normative behaviors. When Abraham’s mood is deadening, her mind turns black, reading becomes a challenge, and conversations “a dreaded chore” (92). Abraham’s viscerally clear mind, represented by the figure of “clear crystal,” obscures. Furthermore, she notes that
“every morning [she] would awake deeply tired and feeling bored and indifferent to life” (93).
Abraham’s darkened mind and the lethargic eminence of an “exhausted” physical body that feels incapable of engaging in normative energizing behaviors are communicated under the umbrella of “death” as a metaphor for Abraham’s state. She recalls not being able to think about anything except “death, dying, decaying, that everything was born but to die” (93). Now immune to the positive activity and the calls of action that formerly drew her into a purposeful reality,
Abraham’s depressed reality is painted as “deadening” of her life experiences. Just like with
Campbell and Foster, “Death” is a metaphor for the lived-reality of PPD.
Abraham’s vivid remembrance of both her heighten mood experiences and her depressed mood experiences illustrate that she lives in what Gary Browning et al. would classify as “a liminal space” (20). In older words, she caught in between; she “is in the world, but not of the world, not at home in [her] world” (21). Abraham’s “inability to react” to reality normatively in the course of her manias is extraordinarily analogous to the ways Campbell and Foster describe the “deadening” of their respective realities.
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How Representations of Postpartum Depression Function Rhetorically
Like Campbell and Foster, Abraham begets presence to how mental illness loosens a woman’s touch with reality by way of the employment of metaphors and figures. As previously noted, Abraham wishes to exist in a world where individuals suffering from PPD or bi-polar disorder like she is are accepted as they are instead of silenced. However, this is all but forgotten when Abraham is in the throes of her turbulent mood swings. Her non-normative desires and behaviors position her at a critical distance from mundane, day-to-day living in a way that is dissimilar to the experiences of Campbell and Foster. Whereas Campbell and Foster’s depictions employ figurative language to bring down moods to life, Abraham brings her up and down moods to life through figurative interpretations of exceptionally rapturous and visceral ways of existing in reality. In doing so, Abraham creates a serious disruption of underappreciated normative day-to-day living that begets presence to the routinely insensitive nature of everyday existence.
Abraham, like Campbell and Foster, begets presence to how mental illness disturbs one’s interpretation of the real world through the utilization of well-planned metaphors and figures, but unlike the stories depicted by Campbell or Foster, Abraham’s euphoric highs, in contrast of her deadening lows, afford her a unique “appreciation” of the sumptuous nature of her existence that
“would not otherwise occur for [her]” (183). Even Abraham’s meeker manias are represented as blissful and stimulating. However, as soon as Abraham’s moods become controlled by drugs, she remembers,
There are still occasional sirens to this past, and I still have a desire to recreate the
excitement of earlier times. I look back over my shoulder and feel the presence of an
intense young girl and then a volatile and disturbed young woman, both with high 117
dreams and restless, romantic aspirations: How I long to recapture that intensity or re-
experience the glorious moods of dancing all night and into the morning. (Abraham 154)
Abraham’s visceral eagerness for inspiration and creativity felt during her heightened moods centers on a figurative image of a siren. Abraham additionally forefronts her embodied senses of independence and agility through the metaphorical images of “dancing all night long”.
Nonetheless, in writing in a way that suggests she craves these thrilling moments, Abraham’s figurative pieces like this work to make the numbing character of “controlled moods” its focal point. Whereas Campbell thought unwritten societal ideals pressured her into losing touch with reality, Abraham does not feel void of a sense of normalcy. No longer silenced, she is free to say being “normal like everyone else” means nothing to her. Contrarily, she makes a case that her varying realities are more of a social advantage than a biological disadvantage. There is a layer to her disordered identity that able-minded readers cannot fathom.
The way Abraham figuratively mounts her muddled realities begets presence to “the ways moods operate absently in the background of an audience’s reality” (Liapunov 90).
Abraham pens, “Yet however genuinely dreadful these moods and memories have been, they have always been offset by the elation and vitality of others” (214). Abraham’s behaviors are depicted as dreadfully low and gratifyingly high. Using metaphors as rhetorical devices that make sense of her shifting realities, Abraham begets presence to the virtual inevitability and constancy of normative behaviors that can “slide into numb and bored everyday life” (213).
Abraham’s highs and lows are depicted as accessible to grasping her identity and her reality in ways beyond the mundane. Moreover, her moods are delineated as ways of acquiring access to unseen facets of day-to-day reality—unseen due to the ‘normal’ mood hiding from itself the affiliation between one’s sense of reality and one’s moods. Day-to-day reality is figuratively 118 centered upon Abraham begetting presence to aberrant senses of objects and things as accessible and relevant to self-awareness. Like Campbell and Foster, this plunges readers mind-first into a significant blending of extra-verbal realities and societally available rhetorical resources. A potential result of this is an abundant presence is produced on the undervalued ways in which moods govern an audience’s very own sense of reality and speech.
Non-mentally ill readers soaking in the pieces of text I reference above are extended an excogitative moment wherein they may envision times in their own lives that they have felt mundanely bored and use these recollections as a way of bridging the division between two experiences of existing in the world. Unlike Campbell or Foster, whose figurative language begets presence to disorderly worldviews as a way of conveying presence to challenging normative forms of world existence, Abraham’s writing begets presence to her own muddled reality as a way of signifying that “normal” ways of being in the world are problematic themselves. While reading Abraham’s more figurative passages in real-time, a pretty drastic presence to the ways PPD and bi-polar disorder are experienced as an evocative part of a sufferer’s identity is conceived. At the same time, non-depressed readers are summoned to reassess the humdrum nature of their own states of being.
Rhetorical Influence of Medical Discourses on Memoirist
As stated, Abraham’s memoir functions as a sort of rhetorical whistleblower for outing a deeper understanding of Campbell and Foster, though Campbell and Foster are also experientially considered when reading from Abraham. Campbell is certain her suffering in slience is the result of her opposition to rigid gender roles of the 1960s. For Campbell, it is vital to the narrative case she builds that she exposes the way it feels to be imprisoned by domesticity ideals. Foster is certain that the ontological suffering of the young women whose stories she 119 shares is due to some sort of imbalance in the brain, and thus they lack the linguistic ability to break their silence and garner compassionate responses from others. For Foster, PPD is labeled as a medical condition, as opposed to Campbell who could not label PPD as anything other than a woman needing to get over herself. Her mental health toolkit fully stocked with experience from her years of therapy sessions, Abraham noticeably has medical knowledge at her fingertips.
In fact, she explicitly explains that her psychiatrist regards her biological/“ontological”—the being of a particular being—suffering as being “caused by chemicals” and her social/“ontical”— what a particular being can or does do—suffering as being caused by her “exposure to medical discourses” (that support rhetorics of dehumanizing and desensitizing biological determinism).
It is crucial to Abraham’s case differing from Campbell’s and Foster’s that she depict precisely how PPD and bi-polar disorder are illnesses that may feel psychological in her experience of them, but they are actually biological in their origins. As such, Abraham’s memoir is a melting pot of Campbell’s emphasis on feelings and Foster’s emphasis on medical discourse-premised dissociation; yet she also adds her own distinctive style as she uses her memoir to respond to a different moment long after the biomedical revolution.
Abraham attributes losing present agency in her reality and her disorderly blissful senses of agency in her reality, to offset brain chemicals so in this sense her view is aligned with that of
Foster, however, unlike Foster, Abraham deems her social/“ontical” suffering to be a result of the dehumanizing opinions and judgments imposed upon her by a society too eager to adhere to medical explanations of her existence. Instead of following suit of Foster by ascribing this lack of understanding to a lack of linguistic ability to express PPD’s pain, Abraham tests Foster’s perspective that stigmatizing suffering can really be caused by limited linguistics: 120
But the question is whether mental illnesses can be destigmatized through the prettier
words we now have to depict them or, instead, through aggressive public education
effort. (Abraham 183)
While Abraham acknowledges that there is “a need for freedom, diversity, wit, and directness of language,” she implies that blaming language-based limitations for stigmatizing suffering is inappropriate. Charles Costello dubs the “issue of context and emphasis [that occurs when] the highly precise language needs of science get mixed together with the fears and misunderstandings of the public” as Abraham points out here, to be what he calls a “divine confusion” (123). Writing thirty years after the biomedical revolution started making its presence felt in medical practices and societal discourse, the difficulty for Abraham is not that she cannot express her suffering of PPD and bi-polar disorder; rather, it is the frequent domination of medical discourses in terms of how the articulations of disordered moods and of sufferers in general are apprehended that clouds her voice. For Abraham, when medical understandings become too consuming, this leads to the silencing of the positive role of “wit and irony” as what Costello terms “positive go-between[s] of self-notion and social change” (124).
Whereas the teenage mothers depicted in Foster’s memoir would likely want to underscore medical linguistics as what a “go-between of self-notion and social change,” Abraham contrarily is attributing her social/”ontical” suffering to a lack of what Burke terms “comedic corrective” to the “one size fits all” approaches of medical discourses (202). Comic correctives are defined as
“rhetorical attitudes” which validate a “maximum consciousness of self and world that transforms ‘foibles’ into ‘assets’” (Burke 171). In other words, the rhetorical function of a comic corrective is to act as a sort of key that opens up monological discourses to permit the opening of dialogical and novel discourses as well. Abraham’s social/ “ontical” suffering is 121 rooted in medical discourses’ non-all-encompassing ways of talking about PPD and bi-polar disorder and these discourses’ exclusion of sufferers’ own “self-notions,” or non-totalizing ways of discussing mood disorders. In this vein, Abraham’s memoir is a solid demonstration of how a deliberate juxtaposition of humanizing figures, images, themes, and allusions can come to a head through her employment of a comedic style. The “freedom” and “wit” that Abraham noted earlier as desirable for communication about atypical mental states is demonstrated through her narrative’s form and its content. Abraham’s social/ “ontical” suffering is rendered as “foibles”— minor weaknesses in her character—that her narrative, ultimately, transforms stylistically into great advantages. The “foibles” are what Lean In author Sheryl Sandberg would consider
Abraham’s inflection points—“that point on a curve where the sign of the curvature—the concavity—changes” (32). Abraham’s precise turning point finally brings forth a difference between her and the PPD-suffering teenage mothers before her. Having now been a mental illness sufferer for nine years—as long as she has been a mother—Abraham portrays herself to be a “long-term student of moods” since “it has been the only way [she] know[s] to understand and accept, [her] illnesses…” (125). Differing from Campbell and Foster, Abraham’s case for breaking silence is made by depicting how she has grown and nurtured acceptance of her diagnoses. As an example, Abraham observes:
Bi-polar disorder is a disease that both kills and gives life. Fire, by its nature, both
creates and destroys. Mania is a strange driving force, a destroyer, a fire in the blood.
My therapist says having fire in the blood is not without its benefits in the world of
academic medicine, especially in the pursuit of tenure. (123)
Here, mania is juxtaposed with “the world of academic medicine” and the “pursuit of tenure” by way of Abraham’s comedic allusion. Likewise, Abraham’s comparison of mania to “fire, by its 122 nature,” is exercised to indicate the gravity of her suffering while at the same time enacting a sort of comedic amplification of other explanations of her suffering. Abraham adds, “The disease that has, on several occasions, nearly killed me does kill tens of thousands of people every year: most are young, most incur death unnecessarily, and many are among the most imaginative and gifted we as a society have” (95). Embracing her PPD and bi-polar disorder and suffering in silence no longer starts with perceiving her pain as an advantage; only then can a rhetorical performance such as that observed in the quote above be enacted through the juxtaposition of the significance of the “imaginative” and “gifted” with the facticity of “death.”
Abraham furthers her tactical utilization of juxtaposition when she states:
The Chinese believe that before you can conquer a beast you first must make it
Beautiful. I have tried to do that with my bi-polar disorder. It has been a fascinating,
albeit deadly, enemy and companion—a distillation both of what is finest in my nature,
and of what is most dangerous. (Abraham 97)
Here, Abraham alludes to Chinese dialogical beliefs and employs her unique style of juxtaposition in order to magnify two facets of her suffering: its transformation into an advantageous part of her evolving identity and its irrefutability as a disorder. In contrast of
Foster’s use of dissociation that establishes an either/or dual between reality and appearance, the above quotation is indicative of Abraham’s comedic style that marries reality with appearance and enables her to push against aforementioned totalizing medical outlooks. Thus, Abraham’s writing signifies a willingness on her part to embrace her PPD and bi-polar disorder in a way that
Campbell and Foster couldn’t. Campbell couldn’t because she lacked the wherewithall and medical terminology to support her doing so pre-biomedical revolution, and Foster couldn’t 123 because the teenage mothers whose stories she depicts in her memoir take on an “I am not my illness” mantra in the midst of the biomedical revolution.
To recapitulate, Abraham’s social/ “ontic” suffering is ascribed to a deficiency of comedic correctives for society, other sufferers, medical professionals, etc. to rely on instead of cut and dry medical discourses and her biological/ “ontological” suffering is ascribed directly to neurological chemical imbalances. Abraham’s comedic style backs her rhetorical decision to illuminate “freedom” and “wit” as tools in what I call her acceptance toolkit, aiding in her ability to identify her mental illness as a part of her, not separate. Differing from Foster and Campbell,
Abraham does not have to overcome society silencing or belittling her; rather, she thrives through her suffering with her humorous take on it as a part of life. This does not mean that
Abraham denies the existence of her PPD and bi-polar disorder as medical diagnoses; it just means that through her comedic style she is able to distinguish between her lived experience of these disorders and medical knowledge’s perceived experience of these disorders. How incredibly significant this is. As a longtime supporter and participant in therapy, this juxtaposition extends a way for Abraham to convey what is problematic about interlacing the scientific knowledge she has acquired through her involvement with therapy with the more convincing realities of her lived emotional experiences that cannot be corrected by therapy. Like
Campbell, Abraham’s memoir habitually accentuates and gives a never before heard voice to her personal experiences and feelings of PPD and bi-polar disorder beside her therapeutic understanding of these conditions. As both a self-proclaimed “therapy junkie” who frequently discusses the sources and manifestations of PPD and bi-polar disorder and as a sufferer of these disorders that discernably need more than just therapy, the medical and societal discourses are in 124 tension in Abraham’s memoir in a very different way that is not present in Campbell’s or
Foster’s memoirs.
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Chapter 5
CONCLUSION
In this dissertation I sought to answer questions about the under-studied rhetorical presence of postpartum depression in the lived experiences of previously silenced teenage women. The following question guided my research:
1. How have popular, mainstream memoirs represented postpartum depression in
teenage mothers across three particularly dramatic moments in women’s
history—the 1960s, the 1980s, and today?
In Chapter One of this dissertation, I laid out my feminist theoretical framework, defining key terms, and introducing the historical, rhetorical, and medical discourses that I used in Chapters
Two through Four. Chapter Two of this dissertation consisted of an examination of Lee
Campbell’s Stow Away wherein I honed in on silenced teenage pregnancy and PPD in the 1960s
“baby scoop” era—a time when PPD was a “problem that had no name” as was women’s inexpressible desire to exist in roles beyond housewifery as seen in The Feminine Mystique. In
Chapter Three, I drew upon The Second Shift and the biomedical revolution to reveal shifting societal and medical views of the problem that now, in the 1980s, has a name: PPD and women’s changing roles through a rhetorical analysis of Sallie Foster’s One Girl in Ten: A Self Portrait of the Teen-age Mother. In Chapter Four, through a rhetorical analysis of Farrah Abraham’s My
Teenage Dream Ended, I demonstrated how today’s understanding of what causes PPD as well as what it looks like is made clear through strengthened medical research and women who Lean
In–no longer afraid to seek answers.
I was able to set the stage for examining the ways these memoirs engage historical, rhetorical, and medical discourse. My primary texts took on a new rhetorical function to 126 demonstrate how these discourses intersect in complementary, oppositional, as well as overlapping ways throughout three eras in women’s history. Through the lens of Neumann’s spiral of silence rhetorical theory I have demonstrated how PPD suffering teenage mothers have been ignored—until they broke their silence through their memoirs—by society’s predominant opinions at the time of their pregnancies. When their opinions did not reflect the same as society at large, these memoirists’ only choice was to either assimilate or face oppressive silence. Over my selected time periods, I have studied the ways the DSM has traced drastically different causes and outcomes of PPD diagnoses. In the 1960s, PPD was cast aside as nonexistent; in the 1980s, it was noted as a type of brain disorder though the language to describe it in more depth was still lacking. Today, PPD has a clearer source and manifestation, but it continues to be a diagnosis women do not freely discuss for fear of public judgment. My research shows there is freedom of expression for the women depicted in the memoirs I have studied but beyond their experiences, my research has proven teenage PPD to be consistently silenced in each of my selected time periods.
Implications
I have argued that teenage mothers with PPD are silenced by the stigma of their circumstances but through their writing, they are able to, as Pryal says, “reclaim reliable social ethos for the mentally ill” (480). Through the genre of the mood memoir, I have contended that authors normalize teenage postpartum depression in a context where it is typically pathologized or altogether ignored. I have also independently argued that the mood memoir genre is motivated by the rhetorical spiral of silencing as it effects the societally marginalized such as the teenage mother with PPD who is told her sadness is her own fault so she should just deal with it. In doing so, I argued that my primary texts, which I am terming mood memoirs, establish an 127 authoritative and reliable ethos for the young women whose lives they depict and for others who suffer the consequences of teenage PPD.
Moreover, by drawing a broad historical background on each of my primary texts, I was able to demonstrate that the rhetorical power of these memoirs stems from their collective creation of a rhetorical intersection of medical, rhetorical, and personal discourses on conflicting representations of living with teenage PPD. I have also argued that the rhetorical participation of
PPD sufferers can absolutely be hindered. Finally, I have used this dissertation to spearhead a close look at the rhetoric of teenage PPD through my close reading of how young women suffering with PPD express and make sense of their daily PPD realities along with the ways their stories develop into rhetorical arguments in response to two of their most significant silencers: society and the medical field.
Furthermore, I have resolved how the memoirs I am studying vindicate the experiences of other sufferers of silencing in an attempt to make teenage parenthood over three different, albeit deeply related eras, more accessible. My study has contributed to the work conducted by the following scholars: Katie Guest Rose Pryal (mental disability equates to rhetorical disability),
Catherine Prendergast (a rhetorical analysis of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders), Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson (privileging of symbolic language), and John Schilb
(significance of the physical, material body in a world of virtual reality). Furthermore, like each of these scholars, my study has subscribed to the growing body of scholarship that draws attention to the memoired or first-person accounts in their examination of psychiatric matters.
However, since relatively little is known about the mood disorders experienced by historically marginalized populations like teenage mothers, I have shined a spotlight on the rhetorical constructions of teenage postpartum depression which, up to now, has received scant, if any, 128 attention in our field. My feminist rhetorical analysis of the ways PPD is represented within mood memoirs across three vastly different periods of time is imperative since ambiguity seems to smother the spectacle of PPD. Clarity was desperately needed.
Reflections
Lloyd Frank Bitzer, who coined “rhetorical situation,” once penned that “rhetorical discourse comes into existence as a response to a situation that involves an exigence or an imperfection” (426). In other words, through the generation of a rhetorical situation, a rhetor is able to modify the perspective of others who are ill-informed on a topic that he or she can shed new light on. Through the process of writing this dissertation, I was afforded the opportunity to venture into a rhetorical situation I could never have anticipated and it has taken this dissertation in directions I had not imagined possible. Initially, I aimed to rhetorically analyze the constructions solely of teenage motherhood; but upon closer analysis of the primary texts, a pervading theme of PPD emerged. I dug deeper into how the representations of postpartum depression in my primary texts, whether intentionally or unintentionally, work as grounds for critique of medical discourses of the respective time periods that they depict and through a close reading of each of my primary texts which I have identified as mood memoirs. Because I read
Campbell’s, Foster’s, and Abraham’s memoirs as rhetorical texts, my identification of the rhetorical situations which foreground these authors’ moral purposes for writing coupled with my identification of the most relevant historical contexts that likely motivated them to share their personal stories and paved an important foundation for this dissertation in which I explored how teenage women with postpartum depression communicate despite rhetorical barriers typically observed in memoirs depicting mental illness.
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Future Research
This research, which identified a gap in the literature pertaining to the representation of
PPD in teenage mothers, resulted in numerous future research possibilities. For example, when reading Abraham’s My Teenage Dream Ended, I was tempted to compare the tales shared with her memoir to those on the television screen in light of Friedan’s, Foucault’s, and Burke’s theories of authenticity. It is fascinating to consider the amount of editing that took place in each format and how much of that editing was Abraham’s choice. It would be impossible, however, to qualify that particular research interest without conducting interviews with the author. In that same vein, it would also be impactful to conduct interviews of teenage mothers regarding their experiences with the silencing effects of societal pressures to fit a certain image and role.
Additionally, while these are among the most popular, the three memoirs I selected are not a definitive list of memoirs depicting teenage motherhood. Each additional text would certainly further support the findings in this dissertation as well as complicate and expand them.
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NOTES
1. In Unspoken: A Rhetoric of Silence, Cheryl Glenn identifies silence as a
“significant rhetorical art by articulating the ways in which tactical silence can be as expressive and strategic an instrument of human communication as speech itself” (1). Glenn muses that it
“may well be the most undervalued and under-understood traditionally feminine site and concomitant rhetorical art” (1). Specifically, she defines silence as not simply the void of speech, but the “skill of exercising restraint in its use either by one’s own enforcement or by society’s enforcement” (2).
2. The term rhetorical situation was first used by Lloyd Bitzer (1968) in The
Rhetorical Situation, to refer to “all the features of audience, purpose, and exigence that serve to create a moment suitable for a rhetorical response” (424). The concept itself, however, Bitzer explains is a very ancient one and appears in some form in many earlier treatises, including
Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Cicero’s De Oratore. Generally speaking, Bitzer find that “the rhetorical situation can be understood as the circumstances under which the rhetor writes or speaks, including: the nature and disposition of the audience, the exigence that impels the writer to enter the conversation, the writer’s goal or purpose, whatever else has already been said on the subject, and the general state of the world outside the more specific context of the issue at hand. All of these elements work together to determine what kinds of arguments will be effective (or, in
Aristotle’s term, to define ‘the available means of persuasion’) in the given case” (425).
3. Self-actualization is “the realization or fulfillment of one's talents and potentialities, especially considered as a drive or need present in everyone” as explained by
Herder and Forster (188). 131
4. As coined by Douglas Walton, a rhetorical case of argument is “a form of argument against philosophical skepticism found in contemporary analytic rhetoric” (24).
5. Reductionist tendencies refer to a common approach to modern medicine that can be described as one of “divide and conquer” (PloS Med 1). It is “rooted in the assumption that complex problems are solvable by dividing them into smaller, simpler, and thus more tractable units. Because the processes are ‘reduced’ into more basic units, this approach has been termed
‘reductionism’ and has been the predominant paradigm of science over the past two centuries.
Reductionism pervades the medical sciences and affects the way we diagnose, treat, and prevent disorders” (PloS Med 2).
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Amanda Kay Cruz is the daughter of two Air Force enlistees whose careers afforded her many traveling opportunities before ultimately settling in the lone star state as an adult. She received her Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of the Incarnate Word in San
Antonio, Texas and began teaching English I to ninth grade students at Sidney Lanier High
School at the age of nineteen, her son (mentioned in acknowledgements section), age three. After four years of teaching high school English, Amanda Kay received her Master of Arts in
Educational Leadership from the University of Texas- Rio Grande Valley in Edinburg, Texas at the age of 23. In addition to her teaching career, while working on her degrees, Amanda Kay worked as a Writing Center Tutor, Advancement Via Individual Determination Program
Facilitator, and online instructor for Southern Arkansas University-Tech, teaching Composition
I, Composition II, and Writing Workshop to college students. In May of 2016, Amanda Kay began work on her PhD in Written Discourse. Amanda Kay has presented on the topic of How
Representations of Teenage Postpartum Depression Function Rhetorically as well as the
Rhetorical Influence of Medical Discourses on Memoirists in multiple venues. Amanda Kay successfully defended her dissertation in June of 2018, receiving her PhD with an emphasis in
Rhetoric and Composition in August of 2018.
Permanent address: 1201 W. University Drive, Edinburg, TX
Email: [email protected]