Book ID: CBB542736813

Maternal Bodies: Redefining Motherhood in Early America (2018)

unapi

Doyle, Nora (Author)


University of North Carolina Press


Publication Date: 2018
Physical Details: 286
Language: English

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.

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Reviewed By

Review Carolyn J. Lawes (2019) Review of "Maternal Bodies: Redefining Motherhood in Early America". Journal of American History (pp. 754-755). unapi

Review Elaine G. Breslaw (2019) Review of "Maternal Bodies: Redefining Motherhood in Early America". Journal of Interdisciplinary History (pp. 677-678). unapi

Review Sarah Knott (2019) Review of "Maternal Bodies: Redefining Motherhood in Early America". Bulletin of the History of Medicine (pp. 119-120). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB542736813/

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Authors & Contributors
Healey, Jenna Caitlin
Sarah Fox
Kalpana Hiralal
Marta Amelia Timmons
Michelle Millar Fisher
Remus, Emily
Concepts
Women
Gender
Motherhood
Human body
Medicine and society
Mothers and children
Time Periods
19th century
18th century
20th century
21st century
20th century, late
20th century, early
Places
United States
England
Germany
South Korea
Southern states (U.S.)
Atlantic Ocean
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