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

Nora Doyle joins a growing and esteemed group of historians, from Kathleen Brown and Emily West to Stephanie Camp and Jennifer Morgan, who are tracing the history of the body in American culture. These historians, along with feminists and critical-race theorists, place the body in a wide range of historical contexts, revealing the meanings given to it; its uses as political, economic, social, and cultural capital; and how these various processes of becoming, including the very idea of the body materializing, have been fraught and deeply contested. The limited opportunities available to women because they bear children, or biological determinism, have raised important questions about the body beyond and prior to discourse. Conceding the body as mere flesh discoursed upon, and therefore historically contingent and culture-bound, makes possible women's liberation from second-class citizenship.

Yet, as Doyle so crucially shows in this very important volume, "it is also important to recognize the ways in which the biological capacities of [women's] bodies truly did shape their lives. Women did lactate, not men, and this seemingly simple fact shaped the rhythms of their lives and the meanings they drew from their roles as women and mothers, as well as influencing the ways in which women were imagined in American culture" (12). Doyle's deftly researched book is an incisive rebuttal to assumptions of the passivity of the physical body. Discourses about the body have significantly impacted women's lives. But the body's materiality, including childbearing, has also shaped women's lives and their culture. The physical body, then, is an important subject of history.

Among the most significant contributions of Doyle's richly illustrative book is showing that the restrictive meanings with which medical literature and print and visual culture bombarded motherhood did not emerge from mothers' physiological needs. Instead, the desexualized mother who was pious, sentimental, and transcendent arose from factors external to women's biology, including anxieties around sexual propriety wrought by men's entrance into midwifery, the socioeconomic instability America's industrialization and rapid urbanization produced, and the Second Great Awakening's promotion of spirituality and emotionality. In the first chapter, for example, Doyle shows how the new proximity of male midwives to women's bodies and their private quarters raised concerns about sexual propriety. Accoucheurs had "to justify their presence at deliveries and to develop ways of legitimizing their practice by demonstrating not only their medical competence but also their respect for decency and sexual propriety" (16). In addition to desexualizing the maternal body, medical doctors averted their gaze from the female form as a whole and attended only to body parts relevant to the birthing process. Before the 1700s, published writings about midwifery spent much time contemplating women's sexual pleasure alongside their quest to unlock the mysteries of reproduction. To ease fears about physicians' sexual impropriety, medical writers narrowed their explorations to the mechanics of childbirth. Medical illustrations replaced the entire person with the uterus, delineated as most relevant to childbirth. In childbirth illustrations, the uterus came to stand in for the mother. Physicians exalted the wonders of the uterus and its ability to contract beyond the woman's control. Eventually, physicians defined the uterus as so powerful and autonomous it overpowered the mother. The skilled intervention of medical practitioners was therefore necessary to mediate between the uterus and the mother.

Contrasting with doctors whose representations of childbirth were informed by social anxieties their close proximity to women's bodies and private quarters stoked, mothers themselves understood motherhood as physically demanding, hard work. Reflecting on women's letters and diary recollections, Chapters 2 and 4 poignantly show that the body's physical demands were mothers' foremost concern. Mothers wrote of being "so sick every morning I couldn't do anything," "my Legs & Feet swell very much indeed four Weeks to Day since I was down Stairs" (68). Descriptions...