Description
However, Doyle also shows that childbearing women contradicted the ideal of the disembodied mother in their personal accounts and instead perceived motherhood as fundamentally defined by the work of their bodies. Enslaved women were keenly aware that their reproductive bodies carried a literal price, while middle-class and elite white women dwelled on the physical sensations of childbearing and childrearing. Thus motherhood in this period was marked by tension between the lived experience of the maternal body and the increasingly ethereal vision of the ideal mother that permeated American print culture.
About the Author
Nora Doyle is assistant professor of history at Salem College.
Book Information
ISBN 9781469637198
Author Nora Doyle
Format Paperback
Page Count 296
Imprint The University of North Carolina Press
Publisher The University of North Carolina Press