As a playwright and iconic literary figure of the twentieth century, Tennessee Williams consistently garners academic attention. Yet scholarship exploring Williams’s work within melodrama-not to mention that genre’s frequently invoked subject matter, motherhood- remains scarce, with absences unavoidably affecting ways maternity is understood in Williams’s work. An early critical and commercial success, his autobiographical The Glass Menagerie gave audiences one of the most memorable, if unlikable constructions of motherhood to inhabit stage or screen. As with similar monster-mother constructs, Amanda Wingfield is marked by a domineering intrusiveness into her unhappy children’s lives. This maternity-coded-as-pathology was an increasingly common trope for mid-century audiences of melodrama who, as E. Ann Kaplan points out, were tiring of the selfsacrificing martyrs associated with maternal melodramas that preceded them.1 Although we might safely categorize Menagerie as a “Maternal Melodrama,” a tradition of fictional maternity consistent throughout prewar American film, the text does not meet the parameters of the more resistant form, a genre Kaplan identifies as the “Maternal Woman’s Film.”2 Unlike the less resistant films categorized as Maternal Melodramas (which usually focus on mother-son relationships, as does Menagerie) the Maternal Woman’s Film underscores mother-daughter relationships; questions or opposes dominant ideologies; and addresses specifically female spectators who might actually identify with the protagonist. In other words, this genre often transvalues patriarchally constructed spheres of public and private life and potentially reveals the Mother figure as strong/transgressive within a male public order that is corrupt or inadequate (Kaplan 126). While Menagerie’s Amanda easily exists as Williams’s most infamous mother, a monstrous archetype imitated and exploited in popular culture for decades to come, this paper interrogates a later but no less memorable maternal construct, one which I argue exists in the more transgressive form of the Maternal Woman’s Film.