Maternal Bodies : Redefining Motherhood in Early America / / Nora Doyle.

• VerfasserIn: Doyle, Nora,
• Place / Publishing House: Chapel Hill : : The University of North Carolina Press,, [2018]; ©[2018]
• Year of Publication: 2018
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (xii, 272 pages :); illustrations

This new approach to the history of motherhood examines the role the female body played in defining motherhood from the mid-eighteenth century through the first half of the nineteenth century, demonstrating that physical representations or perceptions of the body were crucial to defining motherhood in different ways both for mothers themselves and for American culture at large.

Table of Contents

In search of the maternal body -- The tyrannical womb and the disappearing mother: the maternal body in medical literature -- Writing the body: the work of the body in women's childbearing narratives -- The highest pleasure of which woman's nature is capable: breastfeeding and the emergence of the sentimental mother -- Good mothers and wet nurses: breastfeeding and the fracturing of sentimental motherhood -- The fantasy of the transcendent mother: the disembodiment of the mother in popular feminine print culture -- Imagining the slave mother: sentimentalism and embodiment in antislavery print culture -- In search of the maternal body past and present.