Maternal Bodies: Redefining Motherhood in Early America by Nora Doyle (review)

A new generation of scholars, including Leah Astbury, Nora Doyle, and R. J. Knight, is returning to the subject of maternity with bodily experience at the fore-front of their concerns. In Maternal Bodies, Doyle provides us with an archivally rich and detailed account of pregnancy, birth, and breastfeeding in North America between 1750 and 1850.

Doyle’s account is built on substantial research in white women’s letters and diaries; midwifery materials; physicians’ treatises; and the print cultures of literary magazines, evangelicalism, and abolition. She aims to chart both continuity and change. The continuities are most marked in experiences of the maternal body: Doyle’s sources emphasize the demands, the fear, and the pain that attended frequent childbearing. Even though white women’s fertility rates declined across the period, adult women’s lives remained dominated by conception and carrying, birthing and nursing.

Across these continuities, sharp contrasts differentiated those who suffered or who benefitted from the institution of slavery. Enslaved mothers, Doyle highlights, were sources of infants and of breast milk as much as of domestic and field labor. The commodification of their bodies by slaveholders shaped every dimension of their motherhood. White mothers experienced no such commodification. On plantations, perhaps one in five slave mistresses benefitted from the work of a black wet nurse.

Change, meanwhile, was most visible in the emergence of a sentimental ideal of motherhood. The physical demands of mothering were downplayed, and eventually even effaced, by an ideology of pure, virtuous, ethereal maternity. Depictions of reproduction and birth shifted from a three-dimensional laboring woman to the actions of a disembodied uterus and an attending man-midwife. Breastfeeding came to be seen not as a demanding and valuable form of female labor but as a delightful, gently sensual, daytime activity.

Across time, these changes only ramified existing disparities of race and class. As later scholars of “bad mothers” might agree, sentimental motherhood worked to exclude black and lower-class women from “true” maternity. A wet nurse who left her child behind to nurture the infant of a privileged white woman was no longer just unfortunate, or useful, she was of necessity not fully a mother. She lacked appropriate gentility and feeling. Sentimental motherhood consolidated by the 1830s, not to be challenged until college-educated ideals of reproductive autonomy and vibrant, visible health emerged in the later nineteenth century.

For historians of medicine, Maternal Bodies is perhaps most useful in drawing together a largely English tradition of medical historical research, dominated by the likes of Roy Porter, Ludmilla Jordanova, and Mary Fissell, with the concerns of race and intersectionality that dominate early American women’s history. Aristotle’s Masterpiece, that manual popular on both sides of the Atlantic, ceded to the commentaries of physicians working among enslaved mothers and slave mistresses. The growing disembodiment in depictions of maternity showed itself in visual materials appearing in transatlantic medical treatises and in popular lady’s magazines oriented to a literate, middle-class American audience.

Meanwhile, Doyle is at her most original in drawing out the effortless—not just emotional—dimension of fantasies of sentimental motherhood, a feature not fully visible to scholars of representation. She is original, too, in her determination to consider maternity and sexuality together. In her hands, nineteenth-century authors’ accounts of the erotic delights of nursing need to be taken seriously—as seriously as they would be again among women’s liberationists like the lesbian poet Adrienne Rich.

Indeed, Doyle sounds most like Rich in proposing “ambivalence” as the core historical feature of maternity black and white. In both their hands, mothering oscillates, discomforts, between extremes. For Rich in the liberationist 1970s, the oscillation was between anger and tenderness. For Doyle and her eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women, the ambivalence of maternity—its tricky equivocality—was between fear and longing, work and pleasure, mortality and vitality.