Laboring Mothers: Reproducing Women and Work in the Eighteenth Century

In Laboring Mothers, Ellen Malenas Ledoux tackles a question as relevant to our own century as the eighteenth, which is the chronological focus of her study: How do women manage the demands of both paid work and motherhood? Or, as she writes, how are they both “productive and reproductive at the same time” (2)? Explicitly acknowledging the question’s relationship to the current moment’s “‘cult of motherhood 2.0,’” Malenas Ledoux historicizes the issue and traces the “mommy wars” to the cultural and political shifts of the Enlightenment (222, 6). She argues that “the intersection of two eighteenth-century phenomena—the emergence of the public sphere and the cult of motherhood—created an Enlightenment concept of maternity” that functioned differently across classes (3). While it allowed some women to earn income and even professionalize, it further marginalized those in less secure economic positions, ultimately denying them “the exalted role of motherhood,” one of the few socially acceptable feminine accolades (210).To make her argument, Malenas Ledoux divides the book into six case studies in addition to an introduction and conclusion. Each chapter centers a different “gig” that laboring mothers worked. She purposefully uses the term gig to draw attention to the “precarity this work involved” (11). Malenas Ledoux analyzes a wide variety of sources to better understand the historical experiences of working mothers, who are rarely represented in the archive. She draws on medical texts, fiction, memoir, newspapers, plays, and artwork, emphasizing in each instance the extent to which the mother in question was able to represent herself or whether, instead, someone else represented her experiences for her. Thus, Malenas Ledoux further divides the chapters into three sections based on women’s ability to self-represent. These sections include “Speaking for Herself,” “Spoken For,” and “Spoken About,” highlighting the author’s argument about self-representation’s key role in how successfully women could navigate their work while also mothering.First, Malenas Ledoux considers women who had access to the education, time, and resources required to write down their own thoughts about motherhood and paid work. Malenas Ledoux focuses on the actresses Sarah Siddons and Mary Robinson and looks at well-connected midwives who published about their profession. In both cases, women used emerging ideals of motherhood to justify, rather than condemn, their paid labors. When she was a mother of young children, for instance, Sarah Siddons used the need to provide for her growing family as grounds for her professional decisions, while many midwives argued that their firsthand knowledge of birth as mothers made their work superior to that of men. Then, Malenas Ledoux looks at cases where an individual’s narrative was mediated by a third party in the process of publishing. Here Malenas Ledoux examines the memoirs of gender-nonconforming soldiers and sailors such as Christian Davies and Hannah Snell and considers Mary Prince’s representations of mothering in her History, analyzing the ways that Prince’s own voice was likely altered (or not) by her publisher. Finally, Malenas Ledoux looks at women who had no role at all in their own representation: mothers practicing itinerant trades, whom male artists depicted in the “Cries of London” genre, and the status of the prostitute-mother as represented by reformers and authors of fiction.Malenas Ledoux’s analysis, as exemplified by the organization of her case studies, sheds new light on how to think about the emerging role of domestic ideology in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. From their more privileged positions, women such as Sarah Siddons and Mary Robinson could actually draw on the “cult of motherhood” to continue in a more “public” role in the imagined but culturally significant distinction between public and private life, but in doing so they simultaneously “unwittingly contribute[d] to its promulgation and policing” (5). By contributing to this divide, their rhetoric could “work to the detriment of their comparatively poorer sisters” who had no choice but to work and to mother in spaces considered public and could not defend themselves against charges of improper mothering (5). While mothering and working in similar ways to more privileged women, the nature of marginalized women’s labor made them “bad” mothers to many members of society, who then excluded them from the social status afforded to motherhood.Laboring Mothers is important reading for anyone interested in the histories of motherhood, gender, the family, the eighteenth century, and social reproduction. Ultimately, Malenas Ledoux comes to the sobering conclusion that “most mothers—because of pressing economic and political conditions—have no choice but to fall short of this ideal” of motherhood, and “very few representations laud mothers as workers” (13, 19). She ties this to the contemporary idea of “work-life balance,” which she finds “originates in a false construct meant to place the burden of resolving systemic forms of inequality on marginalized women” (19). In this way, Laboring Mothers is crucial reading for all of us as our society faces a so-called care crisis and we consider how to move forward more equitably.