Book ID: CBB569952258

Mother Is a Verb: An Unconventional History (2019)

unapi

Knott, Sarah (Author)


Sarah Crichton Books


Publication Date: 2019
Physical Details: 320
Language: English

Welcome to a work of history unlike any other.Mothering is as old as human existence. But how has this most essential experience changed over time and cultures? What is the history of maternity―the history of pregnancy, birth, the encounter with an infant? Can one capture the historical trail of mothers? How?In Mother Is a Verb, the historian Sarah Knott creates a genre all her own in order to craft a new kind of historical interpretation. Blending memoir and history and building from anecdote, her book brings the past and the present viscerally alive. It is at once intimate and expansive, lyrical and precise.As a history, Mother Is a Verb draws on the terrain of Britain and North America from the seventeenth century to the close of the twentieth. Knott searches among a range of past societies, from those of Cree and Ojibwe women to tenant farmers in Appalachia; from enslaved people on South Carolina rice plantations to tenement dwellers in New York City and London’s East End. She pores over diaries, letters, court records, medical manuals, items of clothing. And she explores and documents her own experiences.As a memoir, Mother Is a Verb becomes a method of asking new questions and probing lost pasts in order to historicize the smallest, even the most mundane of human experiences. Is there a history to interruption, to the sound of an infant’s cry, to sleeplessness? Knott finds answers not through the telling of grand narratives, but through the painstaking accumulation of a trellis of anecdotes. And all the while, we can feel the child on her hip.

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Reviewed By

Review Susan E. Klepp (2020) Review of "Mother Is a Verb: An Unconventional History". Bulletin of the History of Medicine (pp. 141-143). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB569952258/

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Authors & Contributors
Craven, Christa C.
Earner-Byrne, Lindsey
Glatzel, Mara
McIntosh, Tania
Richardson, Sarah S.
Stephens, Rhiannon
Journals
Social History of Medicine
Dynamis: Acta Hispanica ad Medicinae Scientiarumque Historiam Illustrandam
Feminist Studies
Past and Present
Psychoanalysis and History
Spontaneous Generations
Publishers
McGill-Queen's University Press
MIT Press
Routledge
Beacon Press
Bononia University Press
Publications de l'Université de Provence
Concepts
Mothers and children
Maternal health services
Motherhood
Women and health
Childbirth
Parents; parenting
People
Arendt, Hannah
Park, Clara Claiborne
Time Periods
20th century
18th century
19th century
21st century
20th century, early
20th century, late
Places
United States
Great Britain
Ireland
Europe
France
Italy
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