Making Mothers: British Motherhood in the Age of Revolution

My dissertation grew out of the intersection of my own motherhood, my passion for literature and my persistent interest in political discourses on rights and gender. I loved writing and researching it, and it still percolates in the back of my mind as an interesting project tying into so many of the activist interests in my own life. Someday, I hope it will be become a book, but for now children ahead of chapters.

Research Summary:

The turn of the 19th century represented a time of flux in attitudes towards maternity, as understandings of motherhood gradually shifted from a religious and dynastic basis to a scientific and naturalistic one. The Regency decades, especially, revealed important struggles in this shift, generating multiple possibilities of what mothering could mean in both social and political terms and fostering a climate favorable for both radical reinterpretations of motherhood like that of Mary Wollstonecraft and conservative ones like that advocated by Hannah More.

“Mother,” I argued, does not refer to a simple biological act uniting women across history and geography. Rather, it represents a shifting identity and a way of designating various social relations. Looking at late-18th and early-19th century medical, educational, political and fictional texts, I traced the ways in which maternal bodies were differentiated and integrated into medical expertise, tied to family space and children through practices of breastfeeding and education and made to appear natural in domestic fiction, creating a domestic mother whose work and energy invisibly upheld the liberal political state delineated by authors like Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

In researching and writing my dissertation, I worked towards several over-arching goals:

• recovering the fraught and complex formations of the term "mother";
• revealing the significant impact that debates over midwifery and female education had on redefining motherhood;
• challenging the dominant view relegating motherhood to a private sphere distinct and separate from the public sphere of politics;
• clarifying the political differences inherent in motherhood as articulated by radicals, liberals and conservatives;
• suggesting that modern liberal politics in the West depend upon the definition of the domestic, reproductive mother put forth at the turn of the 19th century.