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Before I came to BlogHer, the term mommyblogger meant nothing to me, even though I'm a mother and I blog. I was shocked that there was so much vitriol directed at women for whom motherhood was a focus for writing. It's perfectly logical that mommybloggers would be a political force, just as they are a marketing force. This weekend Jenn Satterwhite marked the mommybloggers’ political coming of age. On her personal blog, BlogHer CE Erin Kotecki Vest, a former television journalist, summed up what this moment means for the mainstream media:
I’m not sure if you’ve been paying attention lately, but traditional media seems to be a few steps behind social media.
They can’t break news as fast as Twitter. They can’t seem to get hot topics discussed as fast as blogs. And they can’t seem to get a hold of the one demo kicking their asses in politics-
The Moms.
I’m capitalizing that now. The Moms.
One day, we may look back at this time as a watershed in the efforts of women to lift their own megaphones in the marketplace of ideas. Women have been making media for a long time, but for most of our history, media representations of women that were created or controlled by men were dominant.
That realization made me think about how far we have come. Since this is the beginning of Women’s History Month, I thought it fitting to take a look at a few pioneers.
At the time we now call the Enlightenment, when the foundational ideas of Western democracy were forming, Mary Wollstonecraft published an essay, Vindication of the Rights of Women, promoting education and full citizenship for women. She was ridiculed and parodied . Eventually, she died giving birth to a daughter, Mary, who would go on to marry romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and pen Frankenstein.
The concept of the stay-at-home-mother is an artifact of Victorian domesticity, tied to industrial capitalism. Before that, free families functioned as small businesses -- everybody worked on the farm, or in the shop, or they hired themselves out to someone else's farm or business. Slave and indentured families, of course, are another matter. But the industrial revolution created a need for a professional and managerial class -- men who worked in an office while their wives (or servants, or concubines) remained stayed in a separate, domestic space.
Think about two of the popular images of women during that time: the Hottentot Venus and the Victorian mother. The woman known as the Hottentot Venus,Saartje Bartmann was taken from her home in South Africa and 
paraded naked through the salons of Paris and London in the early 1800s. When the men who had lured her to Europe were finished with her, they abandoned her, leaving her to die at just 27 years old. Then the scientist Georges Cuvier made a cast of her body, and took measurements of her brain and pelvis to support his theory that her race made her small of brain and big of libido. Her body was only returned to her people in South Africa in 2002.
In her pioneering 1990 book Black Feminist Thought sociologist Patricia Hill Collins theorizes that popular representations of Bartmann, such as this magazine illustration, might have be the beginnings of the modern porn industry. In Hill-Collins’ view, this objectification of one African woman created a paradigm for the objectification of women of all races.
The second iconic image, from Godey's Lady's Book, shows the ideal (white) Victorian mother – a woman whose greatest joy is found in having children clamber all over her. Godey’s was founded by a man in the early 1830s, but reached the height of its popularity under the editorship of Sarah Josepha Hale. Godey’s promoted the values of true womanhood: piety, submissiveness, purity and domesticity.
However, even back then, women continued to speak out on public issues, despite dismissal and ridicule. In the early 1830s, just a few years after Saartje Bartman died, Mrs. Maria Stewart, a free black woman, began writing and speaking against slavery and for women’s rights before “promiscuous” audiences. (That means that both men and women were present. They were racially mixed too.) Stewart, a widow who began writing for newspapers to earn money after being swindled out of her husband’s estate, railed
