Mothering’s Many Labours. Edited by Sarah Knott and Emma Griffin

ARTICLE

Theorizing and Historicizing Mothering’s Many Labours

Sarah Knott

Pages 1–24

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtaa032

In early twentieth-century Hobbema, now Maskwacis, in western Canada, Cree women had long-standing habits of multigenerational extended mothering. Breastfeeding was usual, a birth mother’s own task. Other forms of childcare might be carried out by female relatives, especially grandmothers. They gathered moss for the cradleboard, or laundered newer-fangled cloth nappies. They cross-fed, nursing another’s child, when there were twins. A grandmother or an aunt might sleep with the baby during weaning, ready with warm soup or a broth of scrapings from buffalo hide.

This Cree historical scene highlights mother as a verb: a form of labour, a set of activities based in a relationship, entailing many ways of interacting and doing. Seeing mothering in this light, the Cree scene also reveals that maternal labour dispersed beyond birth or adoptive mothers. Indeed, several centuries earlier, among the Miami peoples in a similarly harsh northern climate, ‘mother’ and ‘maternal aunt’ were precisely the same word, a telling fusion of terminology.

PART I: PHYSICAL LABOUR, MOTHERING, OTHERMOTHERING

The Driveress and the Nurse: Childcare, Working Children and Other Work Under Caribbean Slavery

Diana Paton

Pages 27–53

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtaa033

Between 1770 and 1796 an enslaved woman known to us only as Phillis worked as driver of the ‘grass gang’ or ‘small gang’ of Rozelle Estate, a few miles west of the town of Morant Bay in St Thomas in the East parish, Jamaica. She directed the work of a group of between seven and thirty-one enslaved children and teens, ranging in age from 4 to 18 years. These children did ‘light’ agricultural work, primarily weeding around the developing sugar cane plants. From the middle of the 1780s another two women, Bessy and Mary Ann, took care of the younger children on the estate, usually until those children were 6 years old. Between them at any given time they were responsible for the care of around twenty infants, toddlers and very young children.1 Phillis, Bessy and Mary Ann were all born in the early 1730s, most likely in Africa, and thus probably experienced the dislocation of removal from their homes and the terror of enslavement and the voyage across the Atlantic on slaving ships as young adults.2 As younger women they had worked as field labourers. In their late fifties and sixties they were described as ‘weakly’, but their work was essential to the running of Rozelle estate. Without Bessy and Mary Ann’s work, Rozelle’s managers would have found it more difficult to force the children’s mothers to work the long days in the sugar fields that were routinely required of them. Without Phillis’ work, cane growth would have been restricted by rapidly growing weeds. Less sugar would have been cut, and less profit made.

Mothering Solidarity: Infant-Feeding, Vulnerability and Poverty in West Africa Since the Seventeenth Century

Christine Whyte

Pages 54–91

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtaa037

Poor and marginalized people have always distributed the labour of mothering, among their extended kin networks, with friends and neighbours and within their communities. This essay argues that taking a long historical view on the distribution of infant-feeding as labour serves as a useful corrective to modern western or imperial models which reify exclusive breastfeeding in the mother–baby dyad, and opens up questions about how the work of feeding babies has played a role in generating and sustaining rigid gender binaries. The article excavates traces of information about the feeding practices of people in West Africa who are members of gender-segregated solidarity societies, from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century. These institutions regulate much of economic and social life in the region, which incorporates parts of Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea, reflecting the endurance of institutions of social reproduction through widespread political change. Practices of infant-feeding show similar endurance, shaped more by economic necessity than political pressure. The article focuses on the experiences of West African men and women, along with the babies they feed with milk of all kinds, rice, palm oil and water. This mothering labour is part of a wider knowledge of the body which has been passed down among Africans and the African diaspora, and with which historians of labour, the body and emotions could usefully engage.

Becoming the ‘Natural’ Mother in Britain and North America: Power, Emotions and the Labour of Childbirth Between 1947 and 1967

Joanna Bourke

Pages 92–114

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtaa031

PART II: MOTHERING, FAMILY AND HOUSEHOLD

Mothering Illegitimate Children in Late Eighteenth-Century England

Kate Gibson

Pages 117–144

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtaa034

Mothering and Labour in the Slaveholding Households of the Antebellum American South

R J Knight

Pages 145–166

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtaa039

In 1841, the Hillsborough, North Carolina slaveholder Laura Norwood approached the ‘most undesirable event’ of childbirth. That spring, she was one of two expectant mothers in the household she shared with her husband Joseph. Eliza, a woman enslaved by the Norwoods, would also be confined ‘just about the time’ Laura thought she ‘shall need her most’. These dilemmas of childbearing and labour would continue: in later years, another enslaved domestic labourer, Adeline, fell pregnant; then, Dinah. By 1844, Laura was faced with the ‘appalling prospect’ that the four enslaved women working in the household would have a total of six children under three years old. She thought ‘it almost impossible to make them earn their victuals and clothes’. Laura found these enslaved women’s pregnancies, childbirth, and childcare disruptive to her household routines: they worked for Laura and her family variously as nurses, housemaids, milkmaids, cooks and washerwomen. Both Laura’s childbearing and that of the women she enslaved demanded the reorganization of domestic labour in the household, including, at times, the introduction of new labourers.

The Value of Motherhood: Understanding Motherhood from Maternal Absence in Victorian Britain

Emma Griffin

Pages 167–185

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtaa035

In the late eighteenth century, as the unpaid work performed by western mothers emerged as something worthy of discussion, a clear image of the good mother was created: she was supposed to be selfless, tender, full of love and ever devoted to her offspring.1 Contemporary writers were interested in the sentiments of motherhood rather than the more mundane aspects of day-to-day care — a focus that was no doubt connected to the fact that their writing emanated from elite culture, where the rearing of infants and children was undertaken by paid servants rather than the birth mother herself. And inevitably, the concerns of these early writers and thinkers inflected the ways in which historians of the second half of the twentieth century later approached the topic. The first generation of family historians did not, of course, accept these claims about maternal love uncritically. But they did place the existence of love (or otherwise) at the heart of their enquiries, focusing upon the emotional texture of the mother–child relationship and the extent to which expressions and experiences of love have evolved over time.

Mothering in the Archives: Care and the Creation of Family Papers and Photographs in Twentieth-Century Southern England

Jane Hamlett

Pages 186–214

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtaa036

During the 1910s, Edith Vidler, the wife of a shipping merchant based in Rye, began work on a scrapbook devoted to the life of her daughter Barbara, born in 1902 (see Plate 1). The opening pages were inscribed ‘Barbara Elneth Cressy Vidler — Her Book’ and ‘For mother to keep a record of my years’. Beginning with Barbara’s birth and birthplace, Edith created a visual and material record of Barbara’s life as a child and her family history. A series of photographs charted Barbara’s development from baby to young girl, and later showed her schooldays. These are juxtaposed with small material trophies that could be easily fastened and folded within the text, including invitation cards, locks of hair and swathes of fabric. Later, Barbara herself added to the book, and mother and daughter worked on it together. Interspersed with Barbara’s story are quotations, often about the nature of motherhood and children, and images of motherhood, both religious and secular. An artist’s daughter who continued to work as a professional craftswoman after her marriage, Edith was unusual in possessing the skills needed to bind and inscribe the book herself and her high-Anglican perspective clearly informed its tone and imagery. But the book was also part of a wider culture of making that was associated with mothering in early twentieth-century England. At this point, it became increasingly common for families to document their lives by assembling papers, ephemera, photographs and other objects. These archives were often made by mothers.1 A wide social range of people recorded their activities visually, as photography became cheaper and easier to use — family collections filled with snapshots and photograph albums.2 In this essay, I will explore the creation of family archives as material practices of mothering and expressions of care, paying close attention to this new visual component.

PART III: EMOTIONAL WORK, ORGANIZATIONAL LABOUR

Worry Work: The Supernatural Labours of Living and Dead Mothers in Irish Folklore

Clodagh Tait

Pages 217–238

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtaa042

Last Acts of Mothering: Nuptial Counselling in Late Colonial French Soudan (Mali)

Devon Golaszewski

Pages 239–262

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtaa038

The Mother Within: Intergenerational Influences Upon Australian Matrescence Since 1945

Carla Pascoe Leahy

Pages 263–294

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtaa041

Career, Family and Emotional Work: Graduate Mothers in 1960s Britain

Helen McCarthy

Pages 295–317

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtaa040

In 1963, the sociologist Viola Klein embarked on a major investigation into the careers of married female graduates in Britain. With the help of local branches of the British Federation of University Women (BFUW), of which she was herself a member, Klein collected written information from around nine hundred respondents concerning past education and training, family size and current and previous employment.1 Klein’s aim was to map patterns of paid work over the life-course and to identify the determinants of women’s movements in and out of the labour market, especially as they related to maternity and child-rearing. This was a topical theme. Earlier marriage, smaller families, expanding educational opportunities and the growth of part-time work had made re-entry to the workplace an increasingly common step amongst mothers in their late thirties and forties, a phenomenon which Klein had studied through a comparative lens with her co-author Alva Myrdal in Women’s Two Roles, published to acclaim in 1956. Myrdal and Klein framed this pattern as an emerging feature across all advanced industrial societies, and one which reflected fundamental changes in women’s material aspirations and psychological needs.

‘How is She Going to Manage with the Children?’ Organizational Labour, Working and Mothering in Britain, c.1960–1990

Eve Worth and Laura Paterson

Pages 318–343

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtaa043

In the late 1980s, Pauline’s friends criticized her decision to retrain and work as an auxiliary nurse. She had been working one day per week for the preceding ten years, since her children were born: ‘You feel a bit defensive, because you know you’ve put all these systems in place. You know you’re doing it for yourself, but you also know there’s no way you would neglect your children’.1 Pauline’s defensiveness offers a glimpse into the behind-the-scenes work that women did to combine paid employment with motherhood and domesticity. Her acquaintances and friends, concerned with the question, ‘how is she going to manage with the children?’, did not see the plans and procedures Pauline implemented within her family and in her home and workplace to ensure that the children were taken to school, dinners were cooked and housework was done, so that she could get to her job on time.

INDEX

Index Mothering's Many Labours: Note: Plates are indicated by ‘Plate' following the page number. Footnotes are indicated by an italic n following the page number, the number following n indicates the footnote number.

Pages 344–355

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtaa050