The Birth of the Mother: Puritanism and Conceptions of Maternity in American Literature, 1650--1859

The history of childbirth in America appears to be characterized by a radical break; suddenly, doctors appeared at births and midwives vanished. This dissertation argues that the discursive climate required to enable such rapid change preexisted the forceps, and the physician, at American births and that it dates back to the Puritan period. Puritanism contained within it a system of gender paradigms that at once made possible woman's submission and emancipation. A variety of texts, from journals to novels, from histories of childbirth to works of literary criticism, are considered in order to present not just a story of male cooptation of birth, but instead one that accounts for women's role as agents of change and dissent. Chapter one looks to the seventeenth-century American Puritans at the Antinomian Controversy of the 1630s as well as the poetry of Anne Bradstreet. Chapter two considers the life of Jonathan Edwards, as well as that of his daughter, Esther Edwards Burr. Burr, especially, is revealing as a mid-eighteenth century mother who straddles the Puritan and pre-revolutionary periods. The final segment of chapter two addresses Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette (1798). Chapter three considers the nineteenth century boom in mothering manuals as well as Lydia Maria Child's novel Hobomok (1824), which revisits the Puritan period to consider the pressing question of "woman's sphere." Chapter four takes on the work of the Beecher sisters, particularly Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel, The Minister's Wooing (1859), as well as some of the activist writings produced by her and her sisters, in order to consider a dominant narrative about woman and her place, as well as the ways in which women were pushing back against this narrative. All four chapters account for the history of American childbirth, and links these events to a larger story about women's relegation to a "sphere" and their fight to expand and even escape it. The conclusion goes on to consider what happened in the birthing room over the course of the twentieth century in order to trace the emergence of the "assembly line" that characterizes most births today.