ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst

Susan Smith, the "Mommy Myth," and Maternal Crimes at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century

Susan Smith garnered national media attention when she reported her two sons kidnapped by an African American man in 1994. The tone of the intensive media coverage implicitly rested upon age-old racist fears. When Smith confessed to double homicide nine days later, some observers questioned why American viewers had been so receptive to Smith’s story. An unidentified local man made these racial concerns explicit on The Oprah Winfrey Show: “Now if it had been two black children and a black man kidnapped them…the news media wouldn’t have been here.”    Although he voiced an unpopular opinion, it is one that is supported by the media coverage of other kidnapping cases. Moreover, in the maternal discourse of the Smith case, ideas about “good” and “bad” mothers featured other familiar racial categories: during those first nine days of coverage, the media depicted Smith as a middle-class, married, stay-at-home mother.  To image-literate media consumers, this ideal clearly contrasted with the nightly news parade of “Bad Mothers”: single, working, and/or on welfare. Thus, Susan Smith irrevocably became an implicit part of the national conversation about motherhood, sexuality, and race at the end of the twentieth century, as a comparison of her case and the public responses to a host of other maternal “crimes” reveals.