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

At some point in my courses in history of women and history of reproduction I like to show students images of pregnancy from eighteenth-century medical anatomy texts. I ask my students to gaze at images from William Hunter or William Smellie, to think about how these illustrations of disembodied pelvises, chopped-off limbs, and abdomens splayed open affected how doctors and others approached reproducing women. If a young man learned about childbirth from a dismembered torso, detached from a woman’s mind and voice, how could this shape his actions in the midst of a birthing scene? How could these illustrations influence understandings of women’s bodies or their reproductive activities, and limit women’s roles in determining medical care or their ability to be heard? Nora Doyle answers these questions and many more with her study of the maternal body in early America. Uncovering descriptions, images, and ideals of the maternal body in print culture between 1750 and 1850, Doyle examines popular narratives about women birthing and nursing children, but more compellingly compares these narratives to women’s personal writings about their reproducing bodies. Juggling this multiplicity of sources, Doyle is able to present an original, timely, and captivating history.

While the histories of reproduction and motherhood are rich genres, historians have rarely placed the body so squarely in the center of a study. Bodies often show up on the margins, but usually remain background or context for learned medicine, female activism, and governmental policy. Doyle considers both bodies in their unruly corporeality—leaking breasts, aching backs, tearing flesh—and their culturally mediated discursive and visual representations; perhaps most importantly, she delves into how these aspects of the maternal body are indelibly intertwined. Doyle shows not only that bodies matter but also that we cannot understand the institution of motherhood without a deep analysis of understandings of the bodies involved.

Beginning in the middle of the eighteenth century, two cultural transformations severely shaped the maternal body in American print culture. Following a similar movement in Europe, American medical men began to seek out the business of birthing women. These men instantly faced the social task of overturning the notion that entering a birthing room, sitting with a laboring woman, and examining how her labor was progressing (which usually included raising her skirts and looking directly at her vagina) was not something that a respectable man should be doing. As Doyle demonstrates, aspiring male-midwives, seeking to desexualize the experience, shifted the focus during birth from the woman to the uterus. Medical texts and advice manuals depicted the womb as an active agent in charge of expelling the child, and in illustrations as physically separated from a woman with a voice, a will, or even complete legs. As male practitioners divided and dismembered the female body, women were essentially erased from the event; their maternal bodies became invisible and inactive.

At the same time, Enlightenment projects crafted idealized womanhood as a mother focused on the emotional, moral, and spiritual nature of producing and raising children. Prescriptive literature, fiction and poetry, and images appearing in women’s magazines depicted an orderly, gentle, calm maternal body. Doyle highlights the presentation of breastfeeding in these narratives, the one physical activity that could be reconstructed as a moral, orderly pursuit. Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers could portray breastfeeding as a pleasurable emotional activity, unlike childbirth. The typified sentimental mother only received pleasure from her mothering; it was dangerous to acknowledge the pain, distress, and the supreme physicality of motherhood.

To fulfill her goal of restoring the body “to its rightful place in the history of motherhood,” Doyle cannot rely only on the print culture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (210). She also analyzes the impact of these genres by investigating the centrality of the body within women’s personal writings about pregnancy, childbirth, and nursing. Doyle discovers a range of women’s reflections on and reactions to their physical...