Modern Motherhood

Jodi Vandenberg-Daves

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780813573137
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Studi di genere

 How did mothers transform from parents of secondary importance in the colonies to having their multiple and complex roles connected to the well-being of the nation? In the first comprehensive history of motherhood in the United States, Jodi Vandenberg-Daves explores how tensions over the maternal role have been part and parcel of the development of American society.  Modern Motherhood travels through redefinitions of motherhood over time, as mothers encountered a growing cadre of medical and psychological experts, increased their labor force participation, gained the right to vote, agitated for more resources to perform their maternal duties, and demonstrated their vast resourcefulness in providing for and nurturing their families. Navigating rigid gender role prescriptions and a crescendo of mother-blame by the middle of the twentieth century, mothers continued to innovate new ways to combine labor force participation and domestic responsibilities. By the 1960s, they were poised to challenge male expertise, in areas ranging from welfare and abortion rights to childbirth practices and the confinement of women to maternal roles. In the twenty-first century, Americans continue to struggle with maternal contradictions, as we pit an idealized role for mothers in children’s development against the social and economic realities of privatized caregiving, a paltry public policy structure, and mothers’ extensive employment outside the home.Building on decades of scholarship and spanning a wide range of topics, Vandenberg-Daves tells an inclusive tale of African American, Native American, Asian American, working class, rural, and other hitherto ignored families, exploring sources ranging from sermons, medical advice, diaries and letters to the speeches of impassioned maternal activists. Chapter topics include: inventing a new role for mothers; contradictions of moral motherhood; medicalizing the maternal body; science, expertise, and advice to mothers; uplifting and controlling mothers; modern reproduction; mothers’ resilience and adaptation; the middle-class wife and mother; mother power and mother angst; and mothers’ changing lives and continuous caregiving. While the discussion has been part of all eras of American history, the discussion of the meaning of modern motherhood is far from over.

Part I

Roots of Modern Motherhood

Early America and the Nineteenth Century

Chapter 1

Inventing a New Role for Mothers

To understand the historical significance of modern motherhood, it helps to take a brief look backward to the essentially premodern world of mothers in the English colonies. Ideas about mothers as unique moral guardians only emerged at the time of the American Revolution. Before that, the nation’s Puritan ancestors, who left us the most voluminous records about seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century family life, held starkly different views. For them, mothers had no special place in the moral and spiritual education of their children. Fathers were considered the morally stronger of the two parents. According to one Puritan minister, “Persons are often more apt to despise a Mother, (the weaker vessel, and frequently, most indulgent).” Because a mother was sometimes “overmoved by her tender & motherly affections,” to quote another colonial commentator, she was not as capable as a father of exercising the stern authority Puritan children were thought to require.1

A Look Backward: Colonial Mothers under English Patriarchy

“There is in all children . . . a stubbornness and stoutness of mind, arising from natural pride, which must in the first place be broken and beaten down,” noted one Puritan minister. The stated goal of “breaking the child’s will” appears in a great deal of colonial sources about family life. For example, Susanna Wesley, an English woman, wrote to her grown son on the eve of his departure to Georgia in 1732, insisting that “in order to form the minds of children, the first thing to be done is to conquer their will and bring them to an obedient temper.” Such conquest was, in her view, “the only strong and rational foundation of a religious education without which both precept and example will be ineffectual.” Parents, especially fathers, commonly used whipping or caning as the physical discipline necessary to prepare a child for subservience within a patriarchal social order. Children were considered miniature adults, as is evident from seventeenth-century paintings that depict an adult face—and head/body proportion—on young children. Even babies were set forth on the path to early self-control: Puritans swaddled their babies with wooden rods and encouraged walking at an early age.2

Colonial parents loved and treasured their children, as is amply evidenced. One of the very few women writers of the period, Anne Bradstreet, frequently makes that point in her poetry. For example, she lamented the limits on a mother’s power to keep her beloved children safe from harm:

Great was my pain when I you bred,

Great was my care, when I you fed,

Long did I keep you soft and warm,

And with my wings kept off all harm,

My cares are more, and fears than ever,

My throbs such now, as ’fore were never:

Alas my birds, you wisdom want,

Of perils you are ignorant.

Puritan minister Cotton Mather, who saw eight of his fifteen children die before reaching adulthood, poignantly acknowledged parents’ pain in losing children at a time of very high infant and child mortality. “We have our children taken from us . . . the Desire of our Eyes taken away with a stroke.”3

Still, there is no denying that children were considered economic assets in the colonial world. In the English colonies this was most obviously true for enslaved African children, most of whom began field labor around age ten.4 It was also true for the thousands of poor English children shipped overseas to work in the cash-crop colonies of Maryland, Virginia, and points farther south. Even in the Northeast, where more children lived in intact families and family labor prevailed, children’s labor was sorely needed. Because of this economic reality, people did not talk about innocent children, but rather about children whose wills needed to be broken.

At the same time, Puritan religious thought found even babies tainted with original sin. For all these reasons, socializing children into a religious worldview and teaching them to work for the family were tasks assigned to the father, at least in theory. By English and colonial law, fathers ruled their families, including their wives, their children, and their servants. The English common-law tradition of coverture meant that married women were legally “covered” by their husbands. Without legal identity of their own, wives were simultaneously defined as economically dependent. Married women had no rights to either the property they brought into the marriage or any money they earned while married, and they had no legal rights to their children. They could not sign contracts in their own names and could not make their own wills unless and until they were widowed. Widows were customarily entitled to only one-third of a husband’s estate. The will of New England “goodwife” Judith Coffin’s husband instructed one of their sons to “take spesshal care” of Judith and “provid for har in all Respectes.” The other sons were instructed to also pay a yearly maintenance sum for their mother’s upkeep. But in practice, many widows struggled to survive on the good graces of sons to whom most of the family’s wealth had been bequeathed.5

Fathers’ rights in the family were especially strong in New England. Here, a healthful climate made possible a strong patriarchal family structure in which a father would be likely to live long enough to exercise his rightful authority. Puritan fathers led their households, including children and servants, in learning both religious education and the “good lawes of the Colony.” They also guided their sons in finding vocations, and their consent to their children’s marriages was a legal right. At a time when land was the basis of the next generation’s livelihood, fathers’ control of property gave them a powerful voice in the occupational plans of their sons and the timing and selection of their daughters’ husbands.6 Fathers, especially those who had the most wealth and status to protect and control for the next generation, were ideologically invested with civic responsibility as well as moral and familial leadership.

In colonial New England, the town fathers policed the behavior of children through their laws and established themselves as the ultimate disciplinarians in cases where a son was “Stubborn and Rebellious, and will not obey [his parents’] voice and chastisement.” In Massachusetts, town fathers assigned themselves the tasks of overseeing particular families to ensure that community norms were enforced. In actuality, women informally policed a great deal of community behavior. But when informal mechanisms failed, the hand of the law was clearly male, patriarchal, and not particularly concerned with what more modern Americans would consider a sphere of familial privacy.7

In practice, too, the socialization of children was a widely shared task, certainly not reserved exclusively for, or even assigned primarily to, mothers. Because home and work were not separated for most colonial families, fathers and mothers were often present in children’s day-to-day life. In families that could either afford servants or own slaves, these nonfamily members also shared in child care. These servants or enslaved persons, therefore, had limited opportunities to spend time with their own children. Children were kept busy in all cultures, from fieldwork to tending to babies. Children often spent much of their childhood in apprenticeships, farm labor, or household service. Thus, many people beyond parents participated in socializing children.

To the extent that women had a special role in rearing the next generation, they were to bear children and help them survive their early years in the harsh disease climate of colonial North America. Women’s fertility was essential to community survival. Ministers told women that pregnancy was the “first privilege of the Sex.” Colonial headstones emphasized not women’s social or religious influence on children, but the fact that they were, as Judith Coffin’s stone read in 1704, “Brave, sober, faithful, and fruitfull of vine.” Coffin’s progeny at the time of her death numbered 177 children and grandchildren combined. Her fecundity was typical of New England white women, who spent on average twenty to twenty-five years pregnant or nursing babies.8

Premodern cultures conceived of fertility broadly, from pregnancy through the end of the nursing period. The birthing process was an especially dangerous ordeal. Bradstreet, for example, emphasized her role in her children’s survival at least as much as in their socialization. In one poem, she asked her children to remember that

You had a Dam that lov’d you well,

That did what could be done for young,

And nurst you up till you were strong,

And ’fore she once would let you fly,

She shew’d you joy and misery;

Taught what was good and what was ill,

What would save life, and what would kill.

In another poem, Bradstreet suggested that the “travail” of birthing a child was a sacrifice for which children owed a mother special gratitude and respect. In Bradstreet’s day, New England women bore an average of seven to nine children and stood a one in eight chance of dying in childbirth. Bradstreet also wrote of the physical burden and special sacrifice of nursing children in another poem, written from her imagined perspective of a child:

With tears into the world I did arrive,

My mother still did waste as I did thrive,

Who yet with love and all alacrity,

Spending, was willing to be spent for me.

With wayward cryes I did disturb her rest,

Who sought to appease me with her breast:

With weary arms she danc’d and By By sung

When wretched I ingrate had done the wrong.9

For colonial women breastfeeding was not only a physical sacrifice but also a spiritual gift. Providing the only sustenance that allowed infants to live, women who nursed their children sustained life in ways that sometimes inspired religious metaphors among the Puritan clergy. “Grace goes directly to Christ, as a childe new borne goes to the mothers breast, and never leaves crying till it be laid there.” Ministers referred to themselves as “breasts of God” and invited good Christians to church services to “suck the breast while it is open.” Breast milk could be also found in medicinal recipes, and many a sick adult was said to have been “cured by sucking a Woman’s Breast,” as a publication for midwives reported in 1660. It was used in salves and employed to treat eye problems, earaches, and any number of other ailments, as well as in childbirth. Many believed that drinking another mother’s milk might speed up a woman’s labor or relieve her pain. Women’s fertility, including their fertile, breastfeeding function, was highly valued by premodern cultures throughout the world. For example, in the West African societies from which enslaved women were forcibly removed, the announcement of an upcoming marriage prompted the friends of the bride-to-be to ritually prepare her for pregnancy.10

In practice, colonial women were also valued for their contributions to the material survival of their families. Throughout most of human history, the vast majority of women have had to combine “productive labor,” the work of producing goods and services that provided food, shelter, and other material goods, with “reproductive labor,” the labor of bearing and rearing children, caring for the sick, and generally maintaining family life. Colonial women in all the major cultural groups of North America were no exception. Indeed, both kinds of labor were so extensive that colonial mothers had little time to focus on tending to each individual child’s spiritual and emotional development. New England housewives worked from dawn to dusk: they planted and maintained kitchen gardens, spent hours each day building and tending to fires to heat homes and cook, baked bread and other foods, made cider and beer, traded and bartered for sugar, wine, spices, and other goods produced beyond the farm, spun and carded wool, and sewed and ironed clothing. Women’s work was seasonal, from processing milk and making butter in the spring to butchering livestock and preserving meat and vegetables in the fall. In Native agricultural tribes, women were the farmers, who also provided most of the subsistence necessary for family and community survival: they baked bread; gathered wild plants for food, medicine, and dyes; harvested, processed, stored, and prepared other foods; ground grain for bread; cured meat; made utensils and clothing; and wove mats and carpets.11

Most of the labor of enslaved women belonged to their masters. Most enslaved African women in the southern English seaboard colonies worked in the fields. By working very long hours from approximately age ten to age fifty, these women produced wealth for the English planters of rice, tobacco, and indigo. Some also worked more intimately for Europeans in domestic service. Charles Pinckney and Thomas Jefferson received a great deal of their physical nurture as children from enslaved women. Pinckney said that he had “gained strength at the breasts of domestic slaves.” When possible, African women and men tried to provide extra sustenance for their own children through planting small garden plots, hunting, and fishing.12

But the English had long placed less cultural value on women’s contributions to the material well-being of families than did Native or African societies. Indeed, English women were considered simply the “helpmeets” of their husbands. In 1704 Judith Coffin’s husband’s headstone emphasized not his ability to produce children, but his economic role: “On earth he purchased a good degree,” read the first line. In both the Old World and the New World, European women were denied access to apprenticeships to become skilled tradespersons, and once the Industrial Revolution created more wage-earners, women’s economic second-class citizenship would be everywhere apparent in their measly wages, when compared to men. For example, women’s wages averaged less than half those of men between 1800 and 1850.13

The English view of women’s labor would prevail and be elevated by the good fortune of New Englanders. The Puritans liked to think of themselves as enjoying God’s favor as they gradually gained control of the northeastern seaboard. In reality, historical accident was a critical factor: the British crown protected the settlers, while Old World diseases killed enormous swathes of the Native population. New World diseases also wiped out scores of Europeans farther south, which meant that family formation for the first century of colonization in the southern colonies was extremely difficult. The traditions of Africans, American Indians, and many other cultural groups continued in spite of many obstacles. But ultimately it was the good fortune of the English to be the lawmakers of what became the United States; British laws and cultural values would have a lasting and disproportionate impact on the family lives of all Americans.14

The English came from an Old World society that valued private property. Marriage determined how property would be passed from generation to generation, and marriage laws reinforced social inequality. In English law and custom, marriage was the only legitimate avenue to social acceptance for mothers and children. “Bastard” children lacked the legal right to support from their fathers, and woe to the woman who conceived out of wedlock and could not convince the baby’s father to marry her. Indentured servants who became pregnant out of wedlock could face fines, whippings, and extra years of service for lost labor. Courts could also take children away from these mothers and indenture the child as a servant to another family. A free woman who became pregnant out of wedlock might receive help from her family in persuading the future father to marry her. She was far more likely to succeed if the father-to-be was from an established family of means, but, if this effort failed, she might be publicly tried for fornication and face poverty and social ostracism. Even economically privileged married women’s place as mothers was shaped by their legal and economic dependence on men. Long after mothers gained a special status as children’s moral guides, they continued to be shackled by the coverture laws that kept them without a legal identity outside the context of marriage.15

Prohibitions on interracial marriage and the placement of an economic value on African women’s reproductive capacities were also important legacies of colonial America. In 1644 and 1662, respectively, Marylanders and Virginians legislated “legitimate” families and furthered the system of race-based chattel slavery. Maryland outlawed interracial unions between “freeborne Englishwomen forgetful of their free Condition” who “to the disgrace of our Nation doe intermarry with Negro slaves.” This first “anti-miscegenation” law—a law to prohibit interracial sex or marriage—was followed by many more state laws. Not until 1967 did the U.S. Supreme Court strike down these state laws, which also had an impact on American Indians and Asian Americans. In Virginia, English colonists defied the mother country’s legal tradition of offspring receiving their social status from their fathers. Enslaved women who became pregnant—no matter who made them pregnant—instead passed their enslaved conditions onto their children.16 In this way, the child of an enslaved woman was automatically defined as a slave for life; therefore, the rape of enslaved women by white men, endemic to the system of slavery, often resulted in economic gain in the form of interracial childre...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Roots of Modern Motherhood: Early America and the Nineteenth Century
• Part II: Modern Mothers: 1890–1940
• Part III: Mothers of Invention: World War II to Present
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author