9781469637198-1469637197-Maternal Bodies: Redefining Motherhood in Early America

Maternal Bodies: Redefining Motherhood in Early America

ISBN-13: 9781469637198
ISBN-10: 1469637197
Edition: Illustrated
Author: Nora Doyle
Publication date: 2018
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Format: Paperback 286 pages
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Book details

ISBN-13: 9781469637198
ISBN-10: 1469637197
Edition: Illustrated
Author: Nora Doyle
Publication date: 2018
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Format: Paperback 286 pages

Summary

Maternal Bodies: Redefining Motherhood in Early America (ISBN-13: 9781469637198 and ISBN-10: 1469637197), written by authors Nora Doyle, was published by The University of North Carolina Press in 2018. With an overall rating of 4.0 stars, it's a notable title among other Colonial Period (United States History, Women in History, World History, Motherhood, Women's Studies, Americas History) books. You can easily purchase or rent Maternal Bodies: Redefining Motherhood in Early America (Paperback) from BooksRun, along with many other new and used Colonial Period books and textbooks. And, if you're looking to sell your copy, our current buyback offer is $4.81.

Description

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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