Ellen Ledoux’s Laboring Mothers is dedicated to women as nurturers and caretakers and their multifarious professions. The monograph consists of six chapters – organised into three parts – featuring mothers who worked as actors, midwives, soldiers, slaves, street hawkers and prostitutes. This selection already points to Ledoux’s central ambition to seek out intersections of gender and class in a diverse array of case studies. The female elite of eighteenth-century Britain is accordingly not her main focus; instead, she concentrates primarily on the lower and working classes, the mothers without a ‘voice’ or those whose ambitions cast them into obscurity. Working mothers, Ledoux determines, existed and continue to exist on societal and spatial thresholds in which the principles and expectations of the public and private spheres merge and/or clash.
Ledoux not only productively renders visible those mothers at the margins, but she also argues that they enabled and were enabled by two cultural and social circumstances of the eighteenth century: the emergence of the public sphere and the cult of motherhood. These conditions, she observes, “created an Enlightenment concept of maternity that galvanized privileged women’s ability to earn income and, in some cases, to professionalize” (p. 3). As this statement demonstrates, her study draws attention to the strategies that allowed women to deliberately profit from their status as mothers and also highlights rhetorical representations or visual reflections of motherhood. Laboring Mothers employs an intersectional feminist reading that applies a broad understanding of ‘text’ as anything pertaining to a signifier, which results in a vast and impressively researched corpus of paintings, poems, letters, advertisements, plays, contracts, newspaper articles and further materials that facilitate Ledoux’s reading of “literal and symbolic forms of motherhood” (p. 9). Her acknowledgement of women’s resilience is paired with sober reflections on the tolls of maternal caretaking and, at times, working conditions that render mothering impractical or even impossible.
Part 1 of the book (‘Speaking for Herself’) is dedicated to women utilising the public sphere to their economic advantage, a pursuit which is impaired by their social, financial, and educational status. Ledoux presents, in her first chapter, the cases of actresses Sarah Siddons and Mary Robinson. For both, maternity and motherhood were not damaging circumstances. They deliberately staged their swollen pregnant bodies and mother–child relations to curate their virtuous public images, which were paradoxically based on a display of the private. While they garnered societal criticism for their practices – especially once their bodies showed their advanced age and illnesses – their longstanding professional successes speak to the eighteenth century’s fascination with maternity on display. Their stagings were only acceptable if their motherly duties were not superseded by their desire for fame and fortune. Chapter 2 offers a different perspective on such public self-fashioning by turning to midwifery and its shifting trends throughout the eighteenth century, notably from female to male practitioners. In response to these developments, manuals by female midwives argued for their expertise, pointing to their first-hand experience as mothers as topping male medical education. The chapter effectively demonstrates the paradoxical rhetoric governing debates that appear to hinge on existential gendered distinctions and the scrutiny of gender.
While Part 1 presents professionalism and motherhood as being far from exclusive states, Part 2 (‘Spoken For’) opens with another apparent contradiction. In Chapter 3, Ledoux introduces two mothers who served in the military, Christian Davis and Hannah Snell. Their autobiographies are testimonies of women’s patriotism and a desire for a lifestyle detached from normative societal female obligations. The absence of motherly affection and care for their children is considered a rejection of any aspirations to adhere to ‘good’ motherhood. Ledoux refrains from speculating on the lack of remarks on their time as mothers or their disinterest in their children’s future. Instead, these gaps in their narratives are used to highlight the stark limitations of female virtues in a militant and thus masculine-coded field of work. Chapter 4 likewise deals with a narrative’s failings in addressing maternity and its affective dimension, in light of physically taxing work. While reciprocal caretaking had been possible in all previous cases, The History of Mary Prince (1831) emphasises the insurmountably different expectations towards empathic caretaking and the labouring and living conditions of female slaves. Ledoux observes what she terms as ‘slow violence’ (pp. 116ff) in early instances of Prince’s narrative. Her reading results in bleak imageries of motherhood that either end in spiritual defeat or the death of mother and child. The chapter adds to its primary case an array of caricatures that showcase how the supposed ‘natural’ nurturing abilities of black women have been used and reproduced in public debates surrounding childcare at English-owned plantations.
Opening Part III (‘Spoken About’), Chapter 5 consists of six representations of female street hawkers, all artistic renditions by (male) painters such as William Hogarth and Thomas Rowlandson. As caricatures, parts of larger ensembles or allegorical representations, women are depicted carrying their children as well as tools of their professions. This balancing act already runs counter to idealised practices of the ‘cult of motherhood’ that sees women solely focused on nurturing, as expertly demonstrated by Ledoux with the example of Caroline Watson’s Maternal Tuition (1793). In such street hawker prints, lower-class mothers – literally and metaphorically – buckle the expectations of mindful mothering while pursuing honest or socially degrading occupations. Failing at one task entails failing at the other; a gin seller, for instance, is bound to bring forth the next generation of drunkards. The influence of the mother’s profession on their offspring is, however, shrouded in silence in Ledoux’s final chapter on prostitutes. Demonstrating the eighteenth century’s shifting attitude towards prostitutes as victims rather than active perpetrators by exploring manuscripts relating to the Magdalen House. The case study highlights sentimental rhetoric as an effective tool to stage a woman’s resort to prostitution as a parental obligation, allowing for her potential readmission into society.
Ledoux expresses throughout her work an awareness of the complex etymology of terms central to her cultural research. Her collection of cases highlights the effects and processes of the dissemination of stereotypes surrounding the feminine and female, as well as the enduring issues related to womanhood and motherhood. Her conclusive remarks reflect her findings on prevailing contemporary formations and cement the importance of Ledoux’s work in addressing mothering as a profession, one whose compatibility with women’s working aspirations can greatly vary. Laboring Mothers is an excellent read for students and researchers of British eighteenth-century society and presents its readership with a productive intersectional feminist perspective with far-reaching applicability.
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Jasmin Bieber is a doctoral student at the University of Konstanz, Germany, where she is working on her PhD project dedicated to eighteenth-century British women travellers. Her research reflects her interests in gendered geography and literary spatiality, and she enjoys teaching undergraduate courses in early modern to contemporary literature.
Women's Studies Group 1558 - 1837 