Cindy Sheehan and the Rhetoric of Motherhood: A Textual Analysis

Abstract

Through her peace work, Cindy Sheehan helped bolster the U.S. antiwar movement. Relying on her identity as the mother of a soldier who was slain during active duty in Iraq, Sheehan captured the media spotlight through increasingly outspoken and public ways that include the sit‐ins she staged outside of President George W. Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas, and the “Open Letter to George Bush” she published in November 2004. In this essay, I examine the rhetoric surrounding Sheehan's peace activism and attend to the ways in which the rhetoric hinges on conflicting views about war, motherhood, and activism. Maternal activism is certainly not a new phenomenon. However, media coverage of Sheehan provides ample evidence of the constantly shifting nature of definitions of “good” and “bad” mothering in early twenty‐first‐century America. Through an examination of Sheehan's own book, Peace Mom, and a book written to counter it, American Mourning by Catherine Moy and Melanie Morgan, I demonstrate the central role that discourses of motherhood play in Sheehan's ability to craft a maternal politics of peace.