Maternal Bodies

Nora Doyle

Description

In the second half of the eighteenth century, motherhood came to be viewed as women's most important social role, and the figure of the good mother was celebrated as a moral force in American society. Nora Doyle shows that depictions of motherhood in American culture began to define the ideal mother by her emotional and spiritual roles rather than by her physical work as a mother. As a result of this new vision, lower-class women and non-white women came to be excluded from the identity of the good mother because American culture defined them in terms of their physical labor.
However, Doyle also shows that childbearing women contradicted the ideal of the disembodied mother in their personal accounts and instead perceived motherhood as fundamentally defined by the work of their bodies. Enslaved women were keenly aware that their reproductive bodies carried a literal price, while middle-class and elite white women dwelled on the physical sensations of childbearing and childrearing. Thus motherhood in this period was marked by tension between the lived experience of the maternal body and the increasingly ethereal vision of the ideal mother that permeated American print culture.

Sujets

• Women's Studies
• Social Science
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Sentimental poetry
• Medical literature
• Sensibility

Informations

• Publié par: The University of North Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 19 mars 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781469637204
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

Maternal Bodies
 
Maternal Bodies
Redefining Motherhood in Early America

NORA DOYLE
The University of North Carolina Press   Chapel Hill
 
This book was published with the assistance of the Greensboro Women’s Fund of the University of North Carolina Press.
Founding Contributors: Linda Arnold Carlisle, Sally Schindel Cone, Anne Faircloth, Bonnie McElveen Hunter, Linda Bullard Jennings, Janice J. Kerley (in honor of Margaret Supplee Smith), Nancy Rouzer May, and Betty Hughes Nichols.
© 2018 The University of North Carolina Press
All rights reserved
Set in Charis and Lato by Westchester Publishing Services
Manufactured in the United States of America
The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Doyle, Nora, author.
Title: Maternal bodies : redefining motherhood in early America / Nora Doyle.
Description: Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017026941 | ISBN 9781469637181 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469637198 (pbk : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469637204 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH : Motherhood—Social aspects—United States—History. | Women—United States—History. | Human body—Social aspects—United States.
Classification: LCC HQ 759 . D 69 2018 | DDC 306.874/3—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017026941
Cover illustration: Portrait of unidentified woman breastfeeding a baby (ca. 1848). Courtesy of the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.
Portions of chapters 3 and 4 were previously published as “ ‘The Highest Pleasure of Which Woman’s Nature Is Capable’: Breast-Feeding and the Sentimental Maternal Ideal in America, 1750–1860,” Journal of American History 97:4 (2011): 958–973. Used here with permission.
 
For my grandparents
Ruth Peterson Doyle (1918–2012)
John Doyle (1918–2015)
 
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
In Search of the Maternal Body
1     The Tyrannical Womb and the Disappearing Mother
The Maternal Body in Medical Literature
2     Writing the Body
The Work of the Body in Women’s Childbearing Narratives
3     The Highest Pleasure of Which Woman’s Nature Is Capable
Breastfeeding and the Emergence of the Sentimental Mother
4     Good Mothers and Wet Nurses
Breastfeeding and the Fracturing of Sentimental Motherhood
5     The Fantasy of the Transcendent Mother
The Disembodiment of the Mother in Popular Feminine Print Culture
6     Imagining the Slave Mother
Sentimentalism and Embodiment in Antislavery Print Culture
Conclusion
In Search of the Maternal Body Past and Present
Notes
Bibliography
Index
 
Figures
1.1   From Jane Sharp, The Compleat Midwife’s Companion (1724),      27
1.2   From William Hunter, The Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus (1774),      30
4.1    Portrait of Unidentified Woman Breastfeeding a Baby (ca. 1848),      126
4.2    Portrait of Unidentified Woman Breastfeeding a Baby (ca. 1850),      127
4.3   “Wanted—A Dry Nurse,” Turner’s 1839 Comic Almanack ,      139
5.1    The Empty Cradle , in Godey’s Lady’s Book (1847),      154
5.2    Maternal Affection , in The American Juvenile Keepsake (1834),      155
5.3    Maternal Instruction , in Godey’s Magazine and Lady’s Book (1845),      158
5.4    The Unlooked for Return , in The Keepsake (1833),      159
6.1    Views of Slavery , New York (ca. 1836),      195
6.2   “Selling a Mother from Her Child,” in American Anti-slavery Almanac for 1840 ,      197
 
Acknowledgments
However solitary it may feel at times, the process of research and writing is in truth a collective endeavor, and my intellectual debts are numerous. I treasure the knowledge that every page of this book has been shaped by the collective insight and creativity of a group of extraordinary people. I am especially grateful to Jacquelyn Hall and Kathleen DuVal for their unwavering support and enthusiasm and for their unerring ability to tell me what it was I was really trying to say. Kathleen Brown, Crystal Feimster, John Kasson, Joy Kasson, and Heather Williams were generous with their time and knowledge, and their comments pushed me to clarify and expand my ideas. I am also grateful to the readers and editors at the University of North Carolina Press who helped push me through the final stages of this project.
This book would surely never have been completed without the insights of many friends and fellow historians who read chapter drafts, debated the intricacies of historical methodology, and in some cases picked apart my prose word by word. I am especially grateful to Rike Br ü h ö fener, Mary Beth Chopas, Jennifer Donnally, Joey Fink, Aaron Hale-Dorrell, Jonathan Hancock, Rachel Hynson, Anna Krome-Lukens, Kim Kutz, Liz Lundeen, Zsolt Nagy, Rebecca Rosen, Jessie Wilkerson, and David Williard. I also gained invaluable feedback on numerous occasions from the members of the Triangle Working Group in Feminism and History and the Triangle Early American History Seminar.
I have been fortunate to receive support from many institutions that allowed me to expand the scope of my research. I am especially grateful to the American Association of University Women, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the Massachusetts Historical Society for the generous funding that made it possible for me to pursue this research.
As it turns out, it takes a village to raise a historian. I owe a great deal to the historians of Grinnell College for first setting me on this path. Until I took their courses as an undergraduate, it never occurred to me that I could be a historian. I am particularly grateful to Sarah Purcell, Victoria Brown, George Drake, and Dan Kaiser, who amazed and inspired me with their teaching and scholarship, who taught me to think and to write, and who have been unstinting in their support and encouragement.
Too many friends and family to name—both near and far—have fed and housed me so that I could complete my research, given me their love and support, and patiently endured my elation and despair throughout the various stages of research and writing. In particular, I owe special thanks to Hannah Fuhr for the many laughs we have shared and for inadvertently starting me on this project many years ago with an offhand comment about breastfeeding.
In this as in everything, my deepest gratitude goes to my family. My parents, Mary Doyle and Steve Ostrem, have encouraged me in every endeavor, and their home has always been a place for me to recharge and return to the work of research and writing with renewed enthusiasm. My sister, Eve Doyle, inspires me to laugh and take myself less seriously. I am fortunate to have such a friend. My grandparents, John and Ruth Doyle and Fred and Helen Ostrem, instilled in me a love of books and history as a child and have always inspired me with their example of lives well lived.
My special love and gratitude go to David Winski, a true friend and companion who graciously tolerates my many historical tangents and reminds me of the things that are most important in life.
 
Maternal Bodies
 
Introduction
In Search of the Maternal Body
 
In 1798 Gertrude Meredith reported to her husband that she was “better than I have been this summer, but extremely thin notwithstanding. Mama tells me this is owing to my suckling my Child—she is very anxious that I should wean her, but this I cannot think of doing.” 1 Meredith’s brief update highlighted the toll that childrearing could take on a mother’s health, but also emphasized her dedication to what she saw as her duty to nourish her daughter from her own body. A year later, an American women’s magazine printed an article on breastfeeding in which the author argued that by nursing her child, a “woman undergoes a kind of happy metamorphosis, which almost renders her difficult to be known. Her skin becomes fine, soft, and fair; her features are refined into an uncommon degrees of sweetness, under the influence of this new regimen. The too-ardent carnation of her cheeks, tempered by the milky revolution, assumes a milder teint.” 2 This portrait of the refined and beautiful nursing mother exposed a gulf between the lived experiences of women such as Gertrude Meredith and the cultural representations of motherhood that increasingly permeated American society. Although these two perspectives exposed a disconnect between the maternal body as it was lived and as it was imagined, perceptions of the body were integral to each writer’s vision of motherhood. In this respect both writers were representative of their time, for ideas about the bod