‘‘The Revolt of ‘Mother’’’ first appeared in Harper’s Bazaar in 1890, and the following year was published with very little changes in Freeman’s second short story collection, A New England Nun and Other Stories. A reviewer in The Critic in 1891 wrote about this collection, ‘‘Here are twenty-four stories so complete in form, so exquisite in texture, so fine that to single out any one, such as ‘‘The New England Nun,’’ ‘‘Calla Lilies and Hannah,’’ or ‘‘The Revolt of ‘Mother’’’ for special praise means simply that there are times when the author has surpassed the even beauty of her literary style.’’

Reviewers have lauded the story subsequently. Charles Miner Thompson saw it as a comic tale, writing in the Atlantic Monthly that it was ‘‘the most distinctly humorous of [Freeman’s] stories.’’ Other reviewers looked at the story in a more serious light. In her 1903 essay concerning Freeman’s art, Julia R. Tutwiler wrote, that ‘‘The Revolt of ‘Mother’’’ ‘‘has the qualities of the classic.’’

In 1917 Freeman expressed in an essay that appeared in The Saturday Evening Post her own criticism of ‘‘The Revolt of ‘Mother’,’’ stating that it ‘‘was an evil day I wrote that tale.’’ Freeman condemned her own story primarily on the basis that ‘‘all fiction ought to be true’’; ‘‘The Revolt of ‘Mother’’’ was not only false, Freeman wrote, but she asserted that the actions taken by Sarah Penn were ‘‘impossible.’’ No New England farm wife, Freeman maintained, would have acted as Sarah Penn does in the story, and she regretted deviating from what she believed to be the truth about human nature for the sake of a piece of fiction. But that same year, when the Independent reprinted the story, Frederick Houk Law emphasized the literary appeal and pointed out some of these very truthful qualities of ‘‘The Revolt of ‘Mother’’’ in his introduction: ‘‘The plot is simple but powerful; the atmospheric effects are given with the least possible amounts of description; the characters stand out sharply, vividly, presented without sentimentality or over-emphasis; the conversation is quick and pointed; the appeal is universal—felt wherever selfishness and inconsiderateness exist.’’

Scholarly critics have generally assessed Freeman narrowly as a local-color writer. In 1915, the influential scholar Fred Lewis Pattee summed up Freeman as standing for ‘‘short stories of the grim and bare New England social system.’’ By the time of Freeman’s death, many of her accomplishments had been forgotten; Publishers Weekly, for instance, reported erroneously that her first book was a novel instead of a collection of short stories. Freeman came to be seen as a reporter of the society in which she lived, rather than a writer who creates a convincing world filled with individual characters.

‘‘The Revolt of ‘Mother’’’ never completely disappeared from the view of the American public since its first publication, but for a time after Freeman’s death in 1930, less attention was paid to it and Freeman’s other work. The first biography about Freeman, written by Edward Foster in 1956, helped to create a new interest in Freeman’s work. By the mid-1960s, a critical reassessment of Freeman’s work began, much of it from a feminist perspective. Feminist critics tend to see certain of her female characters, particularly Sarah Penn, as heroic rebels. Some find in this story a woman’s struggle to redefine a system of language that has not allowed her to speak, and they see Sarah Penn as a sort of premodern feminist heroine whose experiences raise issues important to all women.