A Woman's Work
Reclaiming the Radical History of Mothering
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
From the author of Unwell Women comes a powerful and groundbreaking new narrative history of motherhood and mothering.
Mothers make history. But what it has meant for mothers to do the physical and emotional work of mothering has, for centuries, been neglected in the stories of the past. Patriarchal control of motherhood has relegated the acts of growing, birthing, nurturing, and loving to the sidelines, and deemed it unimportant, women's work. Now, through the voices of women themselves, Elinor Cleghorn reclaims and retells the history of motherhood, showcasing the mothers, othermothers, midwives, activists, community leaders, and more who have shaped the course of history.
Beginning in the ancient world, we encounter a figurine made for a childbirth ritual over three thousand years ago. We meet extraordinary writers and poets, like Anne Bradstreet and Elizabeth Jocelin, who were expressing their innermost feelings about motherhood. During the seventeenth century, in the streets of London, we encounter unmarried mothers struggling against stigma and shame, and the women who strove to help them. Later, pioneers like Mary Wollstonecraft laid the intellectual foundation for the liberation of motherhood from male control, and the abhorrent treatment of enslaved mothers was brought to public attention by courageous activists like Sojourner Truth. These and many other brave characters lobbied for mothers of all classes and circumstances to be valued, respected, and supported--not as reproductive vessels, but as people.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Motherhood has "compelled women to contribute to and transform their societies" since time immemorial, according to this wide-ranging study. Beginning with an 8th or 9th century BCE clay model of a human fetus left by a pregnant woman as an offering to a goddess of childbirth, historian Cleghorn (Unwell Women) shows that women have always thought about and reckoned with motherhood as a profound and fraught state of being. The narrative spans from ancient Greece and Rome, where breastfeeding was so rare among upper-class women that having done so was mentioned on a young mother's sarcophagus, through the early modern era, where readers encounter Elizabeth Jocelin, a 17th-century British woman who pioneered the "maternal conduct book," a popular genre in which a mother addressed life advice to her newborn in the event of her death in childbirth. Among Cleghorn's aims is to explore how society is always debating what is "natural" about motherhood—Are women naturally maternal? Is breastfeeding a natural means of bonding?—as well as spotlight those who pushed back against supposedly "natural" limitations. However, for a book on "radical" mothering, much time is spent describing ways that men have weighed in—readers may not be enthused, for example, to learn yet again about Plato's notion of the "wandering uterus." Still, it's a meticulously comprehensive survey that, at its best, casts fascinating light on mothers' thoughts on mothering.
