Bodies at Odds: The Maternal Body as Lived Experience and Cultural Expression in America, 1750-1850

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Between the 1750s and the 1850s American society saw the emergence of a new ideology that defined motherhood as women's primary role. This project shows that central to this vision was an evolving understanding of how women's bodies were supposed to look, act, and feel as mothers. I argue that cultural representations of the maternal body increasingly sought to refine the body, or even make it disappear entirely, in order to project an idealized vision of sentimental motherhood. Over time these cultural representations became invested in assumptions about race and class, defining the ideal mother as white and middle-class. Yet cultural definitions of the ideal mother bore little resemblance to the ways in which women experienced the physical challenges of childbearing and childrearing. I argue that women consistently contested prevailing cultural ideals by perceiving their identity as mothers to be fundamentally defined by the work of their bodies. Moreover, in their emphasis on the physical work of childbearing, women revealed a deep-seated ambivalence toward motherhood that contrasted markedly with predominant cultural ideals. Women's articulations of embodiment pose a challenge to the current periodization of the history of motherhood by showing that women's own perceptions changed relatively little, revealing the history of motherhood in this period to be a story of continuity as well as change over time.

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