165 NOTES Introduction 1. There have been a number of important and informative studies on the maternal ideal in domestic ideology. See Nina Baym, Woman’s Fiction; Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs; Ruth Bloch, “American Feminine Ideals in Transition”; Elizabeth Ammons, “Stowe’s Dream of the Mother Savior”; Mary P. Ryan, Womanhood in America; Lora Romero, Home Fronts; and Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic. Several scholars have coined terms to characterize a particular aspect of the mother’s role, similar to Ryan’s “mothers of civilization.” See, for example, Kathryn Kish Sklar’s “qualitative mothering,” Bloch’s “moral mother,” Ammons’s “mother savior,” and Kerber’s “republican motherhood .” 2. “The promotion of motherhood as a full-time occupation for women conveniently emerged at just the time that a fundamental change in the traditional pattern of female dependence might have occurred” (Ammons, “Stowe’s Dream of the Mother Savior” 159). 3. American poet William Ross Wallace (1819–1881) expressed this sentiment in his 1865 poem: “For the hand that rocks the cradle/is the hand that rules the world” (7–8). The ongoing currency of this well-known phrase—serving as the source of the title for the 1992 thriller, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, directed by Curtis Hanson—indicates the tenacity of aspects of domestic ideology. 4. Women also used this empowering domestic role to take their influence beyond the bounds of the nation and to join the project of American imperialism. See Amy Kaplan’s “Manifest Domesticity” and Vincent L. Rafael’s “Colonial Domesticity.” 5. Ammons discusses the presence of the “mother savior” in work by women writers into the 1920s. 6. Carolyn Dever observes this pattern in Victorian-era British novels in Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud, but little work has been done on this phenomenon in American literature. 7. I refer here to the following novels: Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Susan Warner, The Wide Wide World; Maria Susanna Cummins, The Lamplighter; E. D. E. N. Southworth, The Hidden Hand; or, Capitola the Madcap; Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, The Story of Avis; Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth. 166 Notes to Pages 7–10 8. Romero asserts that one nineteenth-century African American writer “found Anglo-American domestic ideology appealing because it provided a model for writing women into the leadership of nationalist movements” (63). See Romero, Home Fronts, her chapter entitled “Black Nationalist Housekeeping: Maria W. Stewart.” 9. Kerber describes this phenomenon in her chapter, “Republican Motherhood,” in Women of the Republic. 10. See Nell Irvin Painter for the biography of Sojourner Truth. For discussions of the stereotypes of black women during and after slavery, see Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?; Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought; Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925. 11. I refer here to Claudia Tate’s Domestic Allegories of Political Desire, Ammons’s Conflicting Stories, Hazel V. Carby’s Reconstructing Womanhood, and Deborah McDowell’s “The Changing Same.” The tenets of True Womanhood were outlined by Barbara Welter in Dimity Convictions (1985). 12. In her excellent analysis of Hopkins’s critique of True Womanhood ideology, Gloria T. Randle argues that Hopkins “couches her generally more progressive views within conventional forms and language, attempting a delicate balance between palatable, acceptable content and perspectives that, at the same time, critique the very status quo she presents” (204). 13. Allison Berg’s Mothering the Race, Eileen Boris’s “The Power of Motherhood,” and Geoffrey Sanborn’s “Mother’s Milk” represent notable exceptions in this scholarship, making important contributions to the study of motherhood in African American women writers. 14. Stuart Hall identifies two separate but related conceptions of “cultural identity”: the first based on a shared culture and ancestry, as Wilson Jeremiah Moses describes here, and the second based not on similarities but on differences resulting from history’s impact since the period of shared heritage. Although I will discuss the interplay between these two types of cultural identity later in this chapter, it is important to note here that race activists of Hopkins’s era—such as those active in the Pan-African project and black nationalism—focused primarily on a conception of identity based on “oneness,” or common heritage, and it is within this context that I locate Hopkins’s work. 15. See, for example, Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925; White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?; Blassingame, The Slave Community...