Maternal Bodies: Redefining Motherhood in Early America

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Description

In the second one half of the eighteenth century, motherhood came to be viewed as women’s most important social role, and the figure of the good mother used to be celebrated as a moral force in American society. Nora Doyle shows that depictions of motherhood in American culture started to define the ideal mother by her emotional and non secular roles relatively than by her physical work as a mother. Because 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 the case of their physical labor.

However, Doyle also shows that childbearing women contradicted the ideal of the disembodied mother in their personal accounts and as a substitute perceived motherhood as fundamentally defined by the work of their bodies. Enslaved women were keenly aware that their reproductive bodies carried a literal price, whilst middle-class and elite white women dwelled on the physical sensations of childbearing and childrearing. Thus motherhood in this period used to be marked by tension between the lived experience of the maternal body and the more and more ethereal vision of the ideal mother that permeated American print culture.

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