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3. Modeling Maternal Behavior Relations between the Dames Visiteuses and the Pauvres Mères Indigentes In 1811, Madame Chastan, wife of a Parisian charbonnier (collier), gave birth to triplets. Still caring for a little girl of twenty-eight months, the mother was determined to breast-feed all three babies herself. Her patrons at the Society for Maternal Charity suggested that Madame Chastan place at least one of the three babies with a wet nurse. “‘Eh, which would I give up?’ she responded. ‘No, no, I can nurse all three of them.’”1 With this story, the Paris society demonstrated in a compelling fashion the success of its organization and approach. Through timely assistance to a struggling mother and the encouragement of maternal breast feeding, they had strengthened the natural bonds that exist between mother and child—so much so that Madame Chastan refused to send any of her babies to a wet nurse. The goal was to duplicate this success through practical and moral assistance to other mothers in need. Since their inception, maternal societies had promoted two goals: the preservation of children, and the encouragement of women’s maternal role. Madame Fougeret, founder of the Society for Maternal Charity, and the charitable women who subsequently staffed the administrative councils saw these two goals as closely intertwined. Napoleon’s appreciation for their approach had precipitated his decision to place the society under the authority of the empress and to essentially turn it into an arm of the state. After Napoleon’s fall, the decision of the king and his ministers to continue to subsidize maternal societies demonstrated that the values promoted by the organizations crossed political boundaries and enjoyed near-universal support.2 The 1820s and 1830s were years of political, and even violent, conflict in France, but politicians and policy makers agreed on one point: mothers were the key to 84 chapter 3 orderly family and social life—the moral linchpins of the family.3 This conception of woman primarily as mother and confined to the domestic sphere, although debated vigorously during the eighteenth century in the salons and the literature of the Enlightenment, was enshrined by Napoleon in the Code civil in 1804 and widely accepted as an ideal (although far from reality) throughout the nineteenth century, as well.4 The fundamental importance of mothers to families, and thus to society at large, justified assistance targeted to help poor women become caring mothers. This perspective helped to firmly establish the Society for Maternal Charity as the doyenne of women’s charitable associations. Historians have focused on the early nineteenth century as a crucial period in the articulation of women’s maternal and domestic responsibilities. Jennifer Popiel’s recent book demonstrates that while Rousseau’s popular prescriptions on education, motherhood, and family life were not implemented in the political and legislative sphere in the eighteenth century, his ideas came to shape modern ideas about family life; by the early nineteenth century, the nurturing mother had replaced the patriarchal father as the key parent in training children and in unifying the family.5 Denise Z. Davidson’s work indicates that class and gender norms were in a process of transformation in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century across social classes. While working-class women were unable to devote their time to purely domestic pursuits as middle-class and elite women could, Davidson asserts that the ideology of domesticity shaped workers’ gender norms, as well.6 In general, she finds that prescribed gender roles, especially with regard to access to public spaces, were more settled by the 1820s after a period of some ambiguity under Napoleon and the early years of the Restoration government. These norms would come under challenge in the 1830s as utopian socialists and others more politically radical began to contest “traditional” gender constraints ; but, as Davidson notes, “the first body of texts arguing for women’s ‘domestic’ existence needed to be created and internalized before subversive discourses could come into existence in opposition to it.”7 A variety of individuals and institutions framed a gendered social vision that emphasized the nurturing role of the mother at various levels. Bonnie G. Smith identifies elite women as key in both shaping notions of feminine and maternal duties and communicating these ideas not only to their own daughters, but to women of other social classes, a process that we can see at work in the functioning of maternal societies.8 Rachel G. Fuchs’s work highlights the efforts of...

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