Author. Teacher. Leader.

Laboring Mothers begins with the premise that ideas about what constitutes “good” and “bad” mothers fundamentally structure the way we think about women, families, and work. Laboring Mothers traces the roots of these ideas, especially as they relate to work outside the home, back to the eighteenth century. Through analyzing aesthetic and historical representations of mother-workers in Britain and her colonies, the book demonstrates how the intersection of two eighteenth-century phenomena—the transformation of the public sphere and the “cult of motherhood”—plays a critical role in creating lasting models of ideal and incompetent mothers.

Enlightenment concepts of maternity claimed women’s nurturing behavior as natural and figured women’s domestic work as central to forming future citizens and subjects. The book argues that these same concepts paradoxically galvanized privileged women’s ability to earn income and to professionalize. Drawing on the late eighteenth-century rhetoric of women as nourishers and domestic educators, savvy and industrious mothers suggested that work, rather than depriving children of their attention, enabled them to better care for their offspring. At the same time, this model of mother as caretaker disqualified the most marginalized women (the poor, the enslaved, the sexually stigmatized) who were obligated to work outside the home, from being perceived as suitable, even competent mothers. Laboring Mothers suggests that our contemporary discussion around “work-life balance” originates in a false construct meant to place the burden of resolving systemic forms of inequality on marginalized women. The book thus creates a through line between the difficulties faced by (re)productive women today and the unfulfilled promises of the Enlightenment.