Understanding Stepmothers: Women Share Their Struggles, Successes, and Insights

Elaine Porter is an associate professor of sociology at Laurentian
University.

Extended interviews with 104 stepmothers (the majority with live-in
stepchildren) form the basis of this book. The author, a
psychotherapist, professor, and stepmother, grabs the reader’s
attention with her engaging writing style as she writes about the
stepmothers’ experiences. Then the stepmothers in their own words talk
about their expectations, realities, failures, and solutions in
developing a relationship with their stepchildren. The reader can feel
the pain of one stepmother, who tried hard to be a “mother” to her
stepchildren but whose efforts were repulsed. Even more poignant is the
experience of a stepmother who developed a good relationship with her
stepson only to have it later scuttled by his biological mother’s
negative portrayal of her.

The core of the book is a description of the five models that the
author found to capture the roles that stepmothers play. Since they
cover much of the same ground as the first chapters of the book, are not
mutually exclusive, do not uniformly address all role relationships, and
do not represent a process of adjustment, they are useful largely as
sensitizing devices. What the models are meant to emphasize is the
importance of the stepmother’s ideals that so often are naive and
grounded in the unattainable general cultural ideal of the
self-sacrificing mother.

The author cautions stepmothers not to compete with the biological
parent. Some stepmothers were found to develop a friendship with the
biological mother, and fathers sometimes helped in caretaking. The usual
scenario, however, was not harmonious and it is not surprising for the
book to end with simple, straightforward advice to stepmothers who need
support. Snippets of information about the process of entering into the
relationship, age differences between spouses, differences in social
class, and so forth are occasionally presented in the course of
illustrating another point. The author is interested not in explaining
the different routes to stepmother problems but in getting readers to
analyze themselves.