Laboring Mothers

Ellen Malenas Ledoux is Associate Professor of English and Communication at Rutgers University-Camden and the author of Social Reform in Gothic Writing: Fantastic Forms of Change, 1764-1834.

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction: Navigating the Cult of Motherhood in the Emerging Public Sphere Part I. Speaking for Herself: Privilege and Creating Counterpublics 1. Staging Motherhood: Sarah Siddons and Mary Robinson 2. Mother-Midwife: Women's Work and the Phenomenon of Birth Part II. Spoken For: Mediated Modernity and the Politics of Exclusion 3. Compulsory Maternity: Gender Nonconformity in the Military Memoirs of Christian Davies and Hannah Snell 4. Abortive Attempts: Forced Labor and the Impossibility of Motherhood in THe History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave Part III. Spoken About: Marginalized Maternities 5. Street Life: Picturing Mothers Practicing Itinerant Trades 6. Mother Magdalen: Penitential Poverty and the Prostitute-Mother Afterword: The Twenty-First-Century Afterlives of Enlightenment Maternity Notes Bibliography Index

Here's hoping that Ellen Ledoux will both continue her investigation in the fertile area of the productive and reproductive female and inspire other researchers to do the same! It's a rich topic!-- "The Eighteenth-Century Intelligencer" In this beautifully written book, Ellen Ledoux reveals the eighteenth-century origins of modern discourses of working motherhood and the structures of inequality that underpin them. In six illuminating chapters on real and fictionalised mothers, Ledoux reveals the uncomfortable truth that the history of working motherhood is a history of power and privilege in which some women found ways to access to the more culturally valued aspects of maternity at the expense of others. After reading the various and usually fraught ways that women - celebrated actresses, military women, enslaved women, sexworkers and midwives - managed their domestic and working lives, you will never see the so-called 'Mommy wars' the same again. --Jennie Batchelor, University of Kent, author of ?The Lady's Magazine (1770-1832) and the Making of Literary History Poised to make a significant contribution to the scholarship in the field. There is no single book that encompasses what Professor Ledoux does here. --Marilyn Francus, West Virginia University, author of Monstrous Motherhood: 18th-Century Culture and the Ideology of Domesticity Though "perpetually pregnant, nursing, and caring for children," and in the face of the solidifying "cult of motherhood," some eighteenth-century British mothers nevertheless created space for their own intellectual explorations and even performed waged labor. Laboring Mothers asks how they managed it. Ellen Malenas Ledoux proves a trustworthy guide to a wide range of evidence -- not only eighteenth-century literary and visual representations of working maternity, but also documented choices made by real-life working mothers. She reviews influential scholarly conversations about Enlightenment maternal ideals, offers a balanced view of the limitations and affordances of the "public sphere" model for understanding working maternity, and points to twenty-first-century "afterlives" of eighteenth-century assumptions about mothers and work. Every student of eighteenth-century British culture will benefit from reading this book. --Toni Bowers, University of Pennsylvania, author of The Politics of Motherhood: British Writing and Culture, 1660-1760