Nora Doyle. Maternal Bodies: Redefining Motherhood in Early America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. xii + 272 pp. $32.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1-4696-3719-8.
Reviewed by Erica Hayden (Trevecca Nazarene University)
Published on H-Early-America (March, 2020)
Commissioned by Joshua J. Jeffers (California State University-Dominguez Hills)
Maternal Bodies: Redefining Motherhood in Early America by Nora Doyle is a stunningly researched, well-argued study on the experiences of motherhood in British colonial America and the early United States. Looking at the period from 1750 to 1850, Doyle examines the break between the lived and imagined experiences of motherhood, creating a series of paired chapters on pregnancy and childbirth, breastfeeding, and the portrayal of maternal bodies in popular culture. Read in the context of current debates over motherhood and maternal and infant health, the book offers a particularly timely lesson on historical continuity.
Doyle argues that feminine ideology shifted drastically during this century, moving from a focus on the reproductive capacity of women to a deep cultural importance of motherhood, placing it “at the center of American notions of virtuous womanhood” (pp. 3-4). Furthermore, Doyle centers her study on the “role the body played in defining motherhood” and the tensions between the ways women themselves talked about their experiences with pregnancy, childbirth, and breastfeeding, and “cultural prescriptions for how the maternal body was supposed to look, act, and feel” through print culture (p. 5). Doyle lays out three major issues that her study explores: the role of historical continuity through the century, the changing portrayals of motherhood tied to the changing role of women’s work, and the strong linkages between the rise of sentimental motherhood and the definitions of race and class. She deftly weaves these issues into her narrative and analysis while using a vast array of correspondence, personal papers, and published literature to highlight the tensions between lived and imagined experiences.
By focusing on prescriptive literature from the growing print culture of the era and the lived experiences of women throughout the phases of motherhood, Maternal Bodies offers an effective methodology for managing the vast body of source. Doyle argues that the chapters focusing on print culture “depict the gradual emergence of the … sentimental mother” while the others focus on lived experiences to show the “underlying continuity in women’s descriptions of the physical experiences of motherhood” (p. 9).
In the first two chapters, Doyle examines the early stages of motherhood: pregnancy and childbirth. Chapter 1 focuses on medical treatises, and Doyle argues that the “reproductive work of white middle-class and elite women was gradually written out of medical texts” as the practitioners focused on the womb itself and their role in the childbirth experience (p. 17). By reducing the importance of the work of women in this experience, the women were effectively disembodied. She describes how the womb became central to medical texts. Ascribed power and agency, the womb came to be seen as “imperious and dangerous,” displacing the woman herself as the focus of women’s reproduction (pp. 35-38). It must be noted that this disembodiment only applied to “respectable” white women. In one jarring example, Doyle notes that a surgeon would cover a white woman during a procedure, and yet would subject an enslaved woman to a much more public exam, without affording her even a modicum of modesty (pp. 42-43).
Contrary to the medical texts discussed in chapter 1, the women in the following chapter “placed the work of their bodies at the center of their vision of motherhood” (p. 52). As expected, the lived experiences of these women during pregnancy and childbirth have a more realistic portrayal in their own writings, which demonstrate the vicissitudes of a nearly constant cycle of pregnancy, childbirth, and breastfeeding over many years. The sources in this chapter are largely limited to middle-class and elite white women who left behind correspondence and written records. Enslaved women, however, also make up an important element of this chapter, enabling the author to provide a more comprehensive analysis by showing how reproduction was viewed in the larger context of enslavement: “their bodies were defined as commodities to be bought, sold, and forcibly bred” (p. 54). For enslaved women, “fertility represented a literal form of accounting” as proof of good fertility fetched higher prices at auction and brought wealth to slave owners (p. 58).
Perhaps the most compelling topic appears in chapters 3 and 4: breastfeeding. This is an intriguing topic in no small measure because of the modern debates about breastfeeding. Chapter 3 focuses on the idea that the prescriptive authors “created an ideological realm in which the maternal body and maternal virtue merged around the act of breastfeeding” (p. 86). Thus, being a good mother was tied to the act of breastfeeding. The advice literature of the day noted that not only was breastfeeding good for maternal health and that of infants, but that it could also bring a “physically and emotionally pleasurable experience for women” (p. 87). Over time, the act of breastfeeding went from being a duty performed by responsible mothers to a symbol of the sentimental mother. The act of breastfeeding became a marker by which women and their maternal nature were judged: some elite women were vilified for choosing a wet nurse over feeding their own children to protect their lifestyle, as were those working-class women who sold their milk to make ends meet, seemingly neglecting their own infant's health (p. 94).
In chapter 4, Doyle explores the realities of breastfeeding. While some themes continue from the previous chapter, this chapter highlights the pain, stress, and tribulations associated with breastfeeding—a “privilege” that could take its toll. Being able to breastfeed your child was seen as one facet of being “true mothers” (pp. 115, 116). What follows, then, is an important discussion of who was excluded from this category, namely women who hired wet nurses or were employed as wet nurses. For some women, the pain associated with breastfeeding proved to be too much for their own health and they were forced to give it up. In these cases, Doyle notes, they expressed little guilt over the decision, having tried everything before stopping. Although wet nurses provided a valuable service to some mothers, Doyle observes that “if the definition of a good mother was one whose body provided life and nourishment for her children, the very function of a wet nurse was antithetical to good mothering” (p. 128). Hired wet nurses, like enslaved women, were examples of how the maternal body became commodified, sometimes at the expense of their own infants’ health due to lack of nutrients from their enslavement or selling services to others out of necessity. A key argument is that women's views of wet nursing changed from the 1750s to the 1850s. In the earlier period, women viewed wet nurses as “part of their community of friends and acquaintances” yet later “women were more likely to define their wet nurses as troublesome laboring bodies, exposing the race and class biases that played an increasingly important role in the way women defined themselves as mothers and how they viewed other women” (p. 135).
The final pairing of chapters looks at the role of motherhood as portrayed and visualized in the burgeoning print culture of the era. Fiction, poetry, essays, and images portrayed the sentimental mother. These examples in print culture served to “deemphasize the physicality of the mother and to celebrate her emotional and spiritual attributes” in what Doyle argues is the “transcendent mother” (p. 148). Doyle then explores four main types of mothers found in these sources: “the mourning mother, the fond mother, the Madonna, and the rustic mother” (p. 152). Through these publications, the idea of the transcendent mother was solidified and “demonstrated that white middle-class culture was rooted in Christian piety and genteel values” (p. 173). The final chapter then turns to the image of the slave mother, utilizing antislavery literature to explore the sentimentalism and embodiment used to portray this group of mothers. Doyle argues that this genre of literature appealed to the sympathies and emotion of the white northern population, particularly emphasizing “the bonds of womanhood and motherhood” creating a “universal vision of humanity” (p. 176). Whereas white women’s maternity became transcendent, enslaved women’s maternity was bound to their corporeality through the violence and forced labor associated with enslavement. The enslaved women were “not allowed to perform the sacred work of motherhood, for their emotional power as mothers was deemed … to be less useful than the power of their working bodies” (pp. 188-89). There was no transcendence, effectively barring this group of women from the “power and influence attributed to the white mother” (p. 201).
As Doyle concludes, she notes again the shift from the practical nature of motherhood to the ethereal. Yet the story of motherhood obviously did not end in the 1850s. She notes the continuity of some issues, such as breastfeeding, that persist to the present day, and a broader question of which bodies are suited for motherhood. Other issues worth mentioning are the continuing problems of maternal mortality and access to healthcare, especially among populations of color in the United States, yet Doyle’s book certainly points to the foundations of some of these issues as she explores the experiences of enslaved women. Maternal Bodies is an important and worthwhile read not only for the historical context of motherhood but also the lessons to be learned for the present day.
Although this might be extremely difficult, I would have liked to see more examples from immigrant women to round out the already robust research in this book. Aside from this small quibble, Maternal Bodies is an important study for women’s studies as well as the history of the colonial era through the antebellum decades. I will certainly be incorporating Doyle’s work into my American Women’s History course in the future.
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Citation:
Erica Hayden. Review of Doyle, Nora, Maternal Bodies: Redefining Motherhood in Early America.
H-Early-America, H-Net Reviews.
March, 2020.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=54419
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