In her book “Scarlett’s Sisters,” the historian Anya Jabour describes the private ambivalence Rogers felt toward her son, the “hard” feelings because he was so colicky. She also describes Rogers’s disappointment in her absent husband, whom she expected to be more helpful. Ms. Jabour quotes another woman, Laura Wirt Randall, who is overwhelmed by the demands of her nursing baby. “I declare if I tho’t I was to be thus occupied for the rest of my life,” Randall wrote in 1828, “I would — I was going to say — lie down & die.”

Over time, the Victorian child-rearing manuals, describing the ideal mother whose “voice is always gentle” and “face is always kind,” morphed into the highly efficient mother of the 1920s and ’30s, who was not only responsible for the moral development of her children but also on the hook for their psychological and physical health. Parenting recommendations became aggressively scientific — babies were to be fed at strict intervals and weighed by pediatricians, which caused many mothers anxiety. Ms. Vandenberg-Daves quotes a woman who was so anxious about the quality of her breast milk that she was “tormented” by visions of her child getting rickets and “reduced to a state of melancholia.”

At the same time, Freudian theory warned that it was dangerous for children to get too close to their mothers and that it was wrong for mothers to expect veneration. So women lost the reverence they had previously received from both their children and society, Ms. Coontz said. By the 1950s, we got the smiling and never-tired Donna Reeds and June Cleavers of black-and-white television: “a fly on the wall, but with the hands to stir coffee,” as Ms. Coontz described them.

While Donna and June were beaming, toothy and unwrinkled, from television screens, maternal ambivalence was jumping from diaries and letters to published memoirs and magazine articles. By 1960, Ms. Coontz wrote in “The Way We Never Were,” “almost every major news journal was using the word ‘trapped’ to describe the feelings of the American housewife.” Redbook ’s editors put out a call for responses from young mothers about why they felt trapped. They received 24,000 replies.

Today’s Donna Reed is the momfluencer on Instagram with the beachy waves, Mont Blanc marble counter tops and diaphanous earth-toned wardrobe. Her cultural power still threatens to overwhelm all of the realistic, funny writing and performance of Ms. Wong, Angela Garbes, Nefertiti Austin and Amy Schumer, who are expanding our narrow and confining definition of the “ideal mother.”

Which is not to say that nothing has changed since the 19th century — there is much more of a dialogue about fathers doing their fair share of child care, different and unconventional family structures are a part of the cultural conversation, and concepts like emotional labor are going mainstream.

But it’s possible the idealized version of motherhood will always exist in some form, because you can’t fully accept what it’s like to care for an infant until you have one squalling in your arms in the middle of the night. Since becoming a parent is now more of an active choice for many women than it had been previously, the pressure to find it delightful remains a norm. And the nuclear family is still supposed to be able to raise kids without any outside help.