Melinda Henneberger wrote (about mothers and mothering):
"Here's what puzzles me, though, and I'd really love to hear back on this: When did guilt become de rigueur?... Was the bar always so high?"

Based on a very little reading I did, long ago, you might look into what social historians say about the mid-1800s. A quote from the Introduction in Kathryn Kish Sklar's book, Catherine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (1973)

"Much of the ideology of domesticity is still with us. Perhaps the most powerful tenet...is the principle of female self-sacrifice. Women have always been praised for their readiness to put the needs of others before their own, but not until Catherine Beecher's lifetime were they led to accept self-sacrifice...as the female equivalent to self-fulfillment." (page xiv)