Article: From Stella Dallas to Lila Lipscomb: reading real motherhood through reel motherhood *.

This essay traces a history of motherhood in American narrative cinema, but I want to start with an image that falls outside those parameters, since it is documentary. Michael Moore's latest film, Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) introduces us to forty-nine-year-old Lila Lipscomb. Lipscomb is from Moore's hometown of Flint, Michigan, which, as another interviewee points out, looks, in places, not unlike Baghdad. A former welfare mother, Lipscomb now counsels women on public assistance. Early in the film, she describes her family's commitment to the Armed Services, a commitment that, to her, involves a better future for her children. She caresses a rainbow cross she wears, ...

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