DescriptionThe contradictions associated with motherhood have recently received attention in both academic and popular literatures. My research combines exploratory qualitative analysis of recently published motherhood memoirs with a quantitative analysis of a large national random sample of new mothers from the Study on Early Child Care (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development) to explore the character and prevalence of the conflicted attitudes mothers may have about motherhood. To do so, I introduce the concept of maternal ambivalence: the coexistence of positive and negative feelings about a woman’s position as a mother and her relationship toward the institution of motherhood. I operationalize and measure ambivalence along four dimensions: being good at mothering, identity, attachment, and combining work and family, and compare ambivalence outcomes according to mothers’ social class and race. The findings demonstrate that ambivalence is a multidimensional phenomenon with distinct presentations and pathways associated within different social groups. Although mothers feel mostly positive about motherhood and their role as mothers, a significant proportion of mothers experience ambivalent feelings about motherhood. OLS regression analyses show that the most significant and consistent class and race differences occur along identity ambivalence, with white middle-class mothers experiencing the highest ambivalence. Mothers belonging to other social groups experience more maternal ambivalence along attachment and combining work and family ambivalence, when, respectively, black mothers and lower income mothers feel more ambivalent about their motherhood experiences than white and higher income mothers. I find no class and race differences among mothers in their ambivalence about being good at mothering. Other covariates of class and race, such as maternal employment, social support, quality of intimate relationships, and motherhood experience, are also significant predictors of maternal ambivalence. The direction of direct and intervening effects varies by ambivalence dimension studied. In this research I examine the concept of maternal ambivalence in early motherhood from the sociological perspective and provide new conceptual and methodological tools that allow us to simultaneously capture contradictions of the motherhood experience. The results demonstrate that women experience the transition to motherhood differently according to their position at the intersection of race and class.