A01=Nora Doyle
Author_Nora Doyle
Breastfeeding in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America
British and American
Category=JB
Category=JBSF1
Category=NHK
Childbirth in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
History of sexuality
History of the body
Jane Sharp
Maternal ambivalence
Maternal body
Maternal sexuality
Medical history of Great Britain and America
Medical literature
Midwifery in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America
Motherhood in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America
Motherhood in slavery
Prescriptive literature
Print culture in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America
Sensibility
Sentimental culture in nineteenth-century America
Sentimental motherhood
Sentimental poetry
Visual culture in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America
Wet nurses in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America
William Hunter
William Potts Dewees
William Smellie
Women's work in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America
Product details
- ISBN 9781469637181
- Weight: 575g
- Dimensions: 155 x 233mm
- Publication Date: 23 Apr 2018
- Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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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.
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.
Nora Doyle is assistant professor of history at Salem College.
