Laboring Mothers: Reproducing Women and Work in the Eighteenth Century

By Ellen Malenas Ledoux

Motherhood inherently involves labor. The seemingly perennial notion that paid work outside the home and motherhood are incompatible, however, grows out of specific cultural conditions established in Britain and her colonies during the long eighteenth century. With Laboring Mothers, Ellen Malenas Ledoux synthesizes and expands on two feminist dialogues to deliver an innovative transatlantic cultural history of working motherhood. Addressing both actual historical women and fabricated representations of a type, Ledoux demonstrates how contingent ideas about the public sphere and maternity functioned together to create systems of power and privilege among working mothers.

Popular culture has long thrown doubt on the idea that women can be both productive and reproductive at the same time. Although the critical task of raising and providing for a family should, in theory, foster solidarity, this has not historically proven the case. Laboring Mothers demonstrates how contemporary associations surrounding economic status, race, and working motherhood have their roots in an antiquated and rigid system of inequality among women that dates back to the Enlightenment.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Nov 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9780813950297

Book preview

Cover Page for Laboring Mothers

Laboring Mothers

Laboring Mothers

Reproducing Women and Work in the Eighteenth Century

Ellen Malenas Ledoux

University of Virginia Press

Charlottesville and London

University of Virginia Press

© 2023 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

First published 2023

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Ledoux, Ellen Malenas, author.

Title: Laboring mothers : reproducing women and work in the eighteenth century / Ellen Malenas Ledoux.

Description: Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023020369 (print) | LCCN 2023020370 (ebook) | ISBN 9780813950273 (hardcover ; acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780813950280 (paperback ; acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780813950297 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Working mothers in literature. | English literature—18th century—History and criticism. | English literature—Women authors—History and criticism. | Working mothers—England—Social conditions—18th century. | Working mothers—England—Economic conditions—18th century. | Public sphere—England—History—18th century. | LCGFT: Literary criticism.

Classification: LCC PR448.W67 L43 2023 (print) | LCC PR448.W67 (ebook) | DDC 820.9/35252—dc23/eng/20230608

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023020369

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023020370

Cover art: The Enraged Musician, William Hogarth, line engraving, 1741. (Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection)

For Alexandre and Charlotte

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Navigating the Cult of Motherhood in the Emerging Public Sphere

Part I. Speaking for Herself: Privilege and Creating Counterpublics

1. Staging Motherhood: Sarah Siddons and Mary Robinson

2. Mother-Midwife: Women’s Work and the Phenomenon of Birth

Part II. Spoken For: Mediated Maternity and the Politics of Exclusion

3. Compulsory Maternity: Gender Nonconformity in the Military Memoirs of Christian Davies and Hannah Snell

4. Abortive Attempts: Forced Labor and the Impossibility of Motherhood in The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave

Part III. Spoken About: Marginalized Maternities

5. Street Life: Picturing Mothers Practicing Itinerant Trades

6. Mother Magdalen: Penitential Poverty and the Prostitute-Mother

Afterword: The Twenty-First-Century Afterlives of Enlightenment Maternity

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

1. James Gillray, La Promenade en Famille—A Sketch from Life, 1797

2. William Hamilton, Mrs. Siddons and Her Son in the Tragedy of Isabella, 1783

3. James Roberts and J. Thornthwaite, Isabella or the Fatal Marriage, 1776

4. Benefit night ticket for Mrs. Robinson

5. Thomas Rowlandson, A Midwife Going to a Labour, 1811

6. Thomas Rowlandson, Touch for Touch; Or, a Female Physician in Full Practice, 1811

7. A Man-Mid-Wife, ca. 1795

8. Richard Bridgens, detail from Cutting Canes, 1836

9. George Cruikshank, detail from The New Union Club, 1819

10. James Gillray, The Fashionable Mamma—or—The Convenience of Modern Dress, 1796

11. William Holland, Johnny Newcome in Love in the West Indies, 1808

12. Caroline Watson, Maternal Tuition, 1793

13. Marcellus Laroon, The London Begger, 1687

14. Paul Sandby, title page to Twelve London Cries, 1759

15. Francis Wheatley, Milk Below Maids, 1793

16. William Craig, Chairs to Mend, 1804

17. William Hogarth, detail from The March to Finchley, 1750

18. William Hogarth, detail from The Enraged Musician, 1741

19. Thomas Rowlandson, A Milk Sop, ca. 1811

20. Thomas Rowlandson, Water Cresses, Come Buy My Water Cresses, 1799

21. John Goldar, detail from Statute Hall for Hiring Servants, 1770

22. Sample petition from The Rule and Regulations of the Magdalen-Charity, 1769

23. Frontispiece to The Rule and Regulations of the Magdalen-Charity, 1769

Acknowledgments

If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes at least that many supporters to complete a monograph. I feel honored to thank all the talented people and generous institutions who helped me write this book. I was lucky to have kind colleagues who volunteered to read early drafts of the chapters. To my dear friends Sarah Hagelin and Jill Rappoport, who provided rigorous yet affectionate feedback on the entire book, I am eternally grateful. I owe much to their unflagging enthusiasm and gentle course corrections. I also want to extend gratitude to my magnanimous colleagues—both inside and outside my university—who offered meaningful revision suggestions on individual chapters, including Sarah Allred, Jennie Batchelor, Laura Engel, Marilyn Francus, Keith Green, George Haggerty, and Elaine McGirr. Special recognition is due to my friend and mentor Lynne Vallone, who read large portions of the manuscript and offered invaluable advice during publication. I am indebted to her for gently shepherding me through the process of completing a second book.

Beyond these individuals, there are several institutions that contributed to this project’s fruition. I want to thank the 2020–21 cohort of Seminar Fellows at Rutgers Institute for Research on Women, especially my respondent Sara Perryman, who helped me think through the early stages of chapter 2. This project would not have achieved its aims without the generous support of the Lewis Walpole Library at Yale University, where I had the privilege of being a Visiting Fellow. Director Nicole Bouché and the staff, including Kristen McDonald, Scott Poglitsch, Cindy Roman, and Susan Walker, worked tirelessly to help me find the primary source material discussed throughout this book. I am also grateful to the Chawton House Library, particularly the former director, Gillian Dow, for hosting my research during a Residential Research Fellowship, which provided much of the impetus behind chapter 6. The Rutgers Research Council underwrote my work at the Harvard Theater Collection and helped support the publication of the book’s images through a subvention grant.

I was lucky to present my work in progress to several scholarly groups that collectively helped me think through early iterations of several chapters. Thanks are due to the 2015 workshop participants at the Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies at Indiana University. My fellow presenter, Christy Pichichero, and our panel’s commentator, Rob Schneider, were essential to shaping chapter 3. This chapter also benefited from the feedback of participants at the 2017 Queer Lives Symposium (Lewis Walpole Library) and the 2015 Washington Early America Seminar (University of Maryland). I also appreciate the input I received from the 2012 Delaware Valley British Studies Group, including conveners Seth Koven and Lynn Hollen Lees, who contributed to my early conception of chapter 1.

Gratitude is due to Angie Hogan, my editor at the University of Virginia Press. I am so thankful for her support and continued enthusiasm for the project. This book also would not have reached its full potential without the constructive suggestions for revision offered by my anonymous readers. I am grateful to Rowman and Littlefield publishers for their permission to reprint a revised portion from chapter 1 previously published in Stage Mothers: Women, Work, and the Theater, 1660–1830. A short extract from chapter 3 appeared in The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 60, no. 3 (Fall 2019). I am also thankful to the University of Pennsylvania Press for their permission to reprint this text.

Finally, none of this work on laboring mothers would have been possible without the support of my wonderful family. My two sisters, Lisa Demarest and Laura Malenas, offered kind encouragement when the work seemed long and lonely. My husband, Alexandre, and my daughter, Charlotte, have given me unremitting love and support throughout the ten years it took to bring this book to life.

Laboring Mothers

Introduction

Navigating the Cult of Motherhood in the Emerging Public Sphere

This book—like so many feminist projects—began with what I perceived as a personal problem. In my mid-thirties, I needed to produce a book and get tenure, but this time was, according to my obstetrician, the one at which I also needed to get pregnant if I wanted children. My mission: to produce original scholarship and to reproduce a human being at the same time. Compared to most women, I had it easy—seven weeks of paid leave, health insurance, an employed spouse—yet I found meeting the demands of high productivity and reproductivity simultaneously almost impossible.

Wondering if others manage this challenge better than I do, I started to attend to moments in my ongoing research in which eighteenth-century women writers discussed the demands of productivity and reproductivity intersecting. At first, it just felt good to know that my feelings of beleaguerment were nothing new and shared by women I admired. If an intellectual giant such as Mary Wollstonecraft had trouble sleeping and concentrating under the demands of breastfeeding and complained about it in her letters to Gilbert Imlay, one could not expect more from a mortal such as myself.¹ Then, I started to ponder two simple questions: How did these women manage to work while, in many cases, perpetually pregnant, nursing, and caring for children? How did they create the physical space, time, and intellectual bandwidth to write, to teach, and to practice trades? Mary Robinson, for example, discusses correcting the proof sheets for her Poems by Mrs. Robinson (1775) while her daughter Maria sleeps in a basket nearby: my table was spread with papers; and every thing around me presented the mixed confusion of a study and a nursery.² A rueful, sympathetic smile emerged as I recognized this mixed confusion as the venue in which many women create. As Virginia Woolf observes in A Room of One’s Own, women are allocated neither physical space nor time to write: Dogs will bark; people will interrupt; money must be made; health will break down.³ At the same time, as the ensuing chapters demonstrate, these constraints can also spur the imagination. These women’s ability to engage in creative problem solving partially answered my next question: how did they get away with it? That is, how did they create the rhetorical space to render their work socially tolerable and, in some cases (e.g., Sarah Siddons) integral to their professional persona? (Throughout, I will use the term professional in its most basic sense to denote any paid work regardless of its perceived cultural status or longevity.)⁴

These fleeting moments, however, only reflected the writing of privileged women who were literate and had the resources to engage in self-fashioning through letters, memoirs, and portraits. Poor women have no choice but to work, and it is rare for them to have the education necessary to engage in self-fashioning without another professional mediating their image. Who, then, got to tell their stories, and how did that change how their lives as working mothers are represented? For historical, working-class or enslaved women who achieved some notoriety, such as Christian Davies or Mary Prince, their ideas about maternity are represented by proxy, through a male editor with his own agenda. For every Davies and Prince, however, there are thousands of unrepresented women whose personal struggles remain in obscurity. Their working maternity is represented in fictional accounts with varying degrees of sympathy. For example, the anonymous The Histories of Some of the Penitents in the Magdalen House (1760) attempts to represent in fiction the maternal solicitude that many prostitutes likely felt toward their children—a subject on which the historical Magdalen House documents remain surprisingly silent.

The working mothers I discuss—everyone from the historical woman to the mythologized celebrity to the fictional representation of a type—received some social pushback to their dual roles. Venues such as reviews, caricatures, and satirical poems challenged the idea that any woman could be both productive and reproductive at the same time. She could be either a good mother or a good worker; she could not be both. The more I researched this problem, however, the more I realized that the degree to which the women could successfully parry these critiques depended on two things: how rhetorically savvy the individual representation of maternity was and, most important, how marginalized the individual mother was based on a variety of factors, including class, race, gender expression, and sexual orientation. As I discuss in chapter 1, a shrewd and privileged working mother, such as Sarah Siddons, invoked the responsibilities of motherhood to authorize her professional ambition. Yet, in the case of the gender-nonconforming soldier Christian Davies, evidence that she had breastfed (discovered when a medic treated her battle wound) reveals her biological sex and swiftly ends her military career.

This observable trend is the point at which Laboring Mothers intervenes. I argue 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 galvanized privileged women’s ability to earn income and, in some cases, to professionalize. (By privileged, I refer to white women who had some access to education and at least a limited ability to self-represent in various media.)⁵ These women parlayed their natural role and experience as mothers into a much-demanded explanation for doing paid work in the public sphere. The separate spheres—long thought as limiting women’s professional potential—in many cases worked greatly to more privileged women’s favor. These mothers elevated literal forms of caretaking into the symbolic realm, invoking the maternal impulse to authorize caretaking (rather than management) of careers and professional networks, thereby gaining further economic and cultural power.

For marginalized women—the poor, the illiterate, the enslaved—the very distinction between the domestic and public spheres, which privileged women used to justify their work, remains an illusion. Poor women take their children to work, and their children start working alongside them early in their lives. In her poem The Woman’s Labour (1739), Mary Collier documents this phenomenon. Although not a mother herself, Collier had firsthand experience of poor women’s plight, as she labored chiefly as a washerwoman, housekeeper, and occasional field worker in Hampshire.⁶ As the first laboring woman to publish poetry in England, Collier chose to articulate the strain posed by women’s dual roles, a focus that underscores how this strain was of urgent concern to poor, rural women.⁷ As Donna Landry notes, the poem redresses traditional historical silences regarding laboring women’s oppression: the triple burden of wage labor, housework, and childcare.⁸ Through her observations, Collier delineates the challenges female agricultural laborers faced as they attempt to mother and to contribute to the harvest simultaneously while also enlisting their own children in the collective work:

Our tender Babes into the Field we bear,

And wrap them in our Cloaths to keep them warm,

While round about we gather up the Corn;

And often unto them our Course do bend,

To keep them safe, that nothing them offend:

Our children that are able, bear a Share

In gleaning Corn, such is our frugal Care.

When Night comes on, unto our Home we go,

Our Corn we carry, and our Infant too;⁹

Here, Collier notes the difficulty of keeping children safe while laboring in the fields. Babes are bundled for warmth; older children’s work is supervised with frugal Care. Yet the image of the women trudging home while bearing two loads—their infants and the corn—literalizes the heavy burden under which these women persevere. For them, idealized forms of motherhood are an unaffordable luxury. As Collier’s verse makes clear, to manage this dual workload is already a Herculean effort.

Because these competing priorities result in maternal compromise, authors and artists who lack Collier’s firsthand knowledge and sympathy frequently represent poor women as distracted or neglectful mothers—a distorted stereotype that persists today.¹⁰ In the satirical print A Milk-Sop (ca. 1811), Thomas Rowlandson depicts a milkmaid ignoring her two screaming infants trapped in a pail while she flirts with a customer. Similarly, in plate 5 of William Hogarth’s The Harlot’s Progress (1732), Moll Hackabout’s son sits dangerously close to a roaring fire as he tries to prepare his own meal. If the work was dangerous, children might be left alone or with an indifferent caretaker. This phenomenon, represented in its most sympathetic light, still appears a harrowing dilemma. For example, one of the most touching scenes in The Histories of Some of the Penitents in the Magdalen House occurs when the mother of a starving child must leave him alone and look for sex work to buy bread. Her choices for her child are neglect or starvation. So, while privileged women’s deployment of Enlightenment constructs broadened their professional opportunities, this same model of woman as caretaker simultaneously disqualified marginalized women from being perceived as good, let alone competent, mothers. Indeed, Marilyn Francus notes how social and legal structures began to turn a blind eye to working-class women’s infanticide to recuperate these women back into the work force.¹¹

The systemic inequalities that this book outlines have relevance for both eighteenth-century scholars and researchers interested in how parents, including those in our contemporary moment, manage the competing priorities of paid work and family responsibilities. For scholars of the Enlightenment, the book draws on work by Joan Landes, Geoff Eley, Mary Ryan, and Nancy Fraser to further erode the notion that there is a clear, bright line between the public and private spheres.¹² The separate spheres ideology is traditionally considered a hindrance to women’s professional advancement, but this study documents a much more complex relationship between the ostensibly private role of mothering and paid work in the public sphere.¹³ Timing is crucial here. The very moment that the separate spheres ideology and its corollary—the cult of motherhood—begin to crystalize is also the very moment that privileged women have invoked private life to begin making public advancements. (Coined by Felicity Nussbaum, the cult of motherhood refers to how middle-class English women were encouraged to limit themselves to a type of maternal domesticity seen as essential to nation and empire building.)¹⁴ At the same time, marginalized women—who must work and therefore bring their children into public or risk leaving them unattended—get excluded from this effort.

The ensuing chapters also describe how privileged women who benefit from the private/public distinction unwittingly contribute to its promulgation and policing. The rhetorical strategies some women invoke work to the detriment of their comparatively poorer sisters. To return to the example of Mary Robinson editing her poems while caring for a newborn: undeniably, this scene documents a kind of demanding multitasking very rarely asked of male poets. Yet this scenario pales in comparison to what is asked of working-class or enslaved mothers. For example, Christian Davies abandons her children to enlist in the army; prostitute-mothers must relinquish custody of their children to enter the Magdalen House and be trained for legitimate work; and Richard Bridgens’s West India Scenery: With Illustrations of Negro Character (1836) documents the makeshift nurseries lactating enslaved women were forced to create during the sugarcane harvest. Economic factors exclude some women from even becoming mothers; for example, in The Wrongs of Woman (1798), a working-class character named Jemima takes an abortifacient because she lacks the social and financial support to care for a child.

This book’s main intervention takes on greater urgency when one recognizes that Enlightenment ideas about working mothers still influence twenty-first-century culture. The book exposes how conversations around social class, race, and working motherhood are based in an outmoded, rigged system of inequality among women. The momentous task of raising and providing for a family should create solidarity, but historically women are their own toughest critics—especially where mothering is concerned. In the twenty-first century, this phenomenon manifests as the mommy wars and the avalanche of media (books, blogs, podcasts) that discipline and punish mothers who do not embody or who actively reject white, middle-class ideals.¹⁵ Similarly, whether eighteenth-century women are characterized as good or bad mothers is dependent on the woman’s economic status, race, and how closely she conforms to gender and sexual norms. This book helps uncover the roots of those false associations in relation to women’s employment outside the home.¹⁶ Lastly, Laboring Mothers unapologetically celebrates mothers’ economic and cultural achievements by documenting how women have always contributed meaningfully to industries while raising the next generation of people.

Theorizing Maternal Systems of Power and Privilege

Intersectional feminism is the main theoretical lens through which I approach the texts considered in this book. My goal is to articulate how systems of power and privilege shape the representation of eighteenth-century working mothers across the social spectrum. Thus, thinking about the subjectivity of working mothers who simultaneously embody multiple marginalized categories is vital to my arguments. Because intersectionality is a contested term, even among feminist theorists, it is important to clarify how I deploy it.¹⁷ Intersectional feminism developed incrementally as a response to second-wave feminism, but it experienced a watershed moment with the publication of legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw’s seminal 1989 essay that flagged the inadequacy of gender-based or race-based research and the ways in which it failed to account for the cumulative effect of multiple forms of marginalization.¹⁸ Concurrently, other women of color feminists, such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Patricia Hill Collins, Angela Davis, Cherríe Moraga, and many others articulated similar models for analyzing systems of power and privilege.¹⁹ These ideas have been broadened and applied to queer studies, disability studies, ecocriticism, and beyond.²⁰

In our current moment, intersectionality can best be described as a mode of inquiry and a set of investigational and activist practices. As Vivian May writes, Intersectionality calls for analytic methods, modes of political action, and ways of thinking about persons, rights and liberation informed by multiplicity.²¹ Although this book performs a cultural critique of Britain and its colonies during the long eighteenth century, approaching questions with an intersectional lens demands leveraging theoretical constructs that transcend academic disciplines and traditional historical categories. Some of the critical practices associated with intersectional feminism that are most important for this book’s analysis include reconsidering marginality as a potential source of resistance or power; embracing a complicated notion of subjectivity that can shift and be deployed strategically; and recognizing how a discourse meant to liberate can unwittingly reify privilege and bolster hierarchy.²²

This intersectional model is in conversation with some of the most vexing questions raised by postmodern feminism in the 1990s and 2000s about subject formation and women’s historical performance of agency and political resistance. So, while I invoke a Foucauldian notion of subjectivity—a site of discourse that produces the very knowledge it purports to describe—this discussion also assumes that power/discourse cannot completely quell resistance.²³ As Judith Butler and others have argued, in this model of subjectivity, forms of resistance often unwittingly reinscribe the power structures they attempt to undermine. Although Butler gestures toward the notion that discourse could enable forms of agency or that performativity could transcend perfunctory repetition and become resignification, a theoretical model of how this might occur on the individual or societal level remains elusive.²⁴ Rather, as Seyla Benhabib suggests, to make sense of the struggles of women . . . we must at least create the conceptual space for thinking of the possibility of agency, resignification, subversive deployment.²⁵

Nancy Fraser—whose feminist critique of the public sphere is central to my arguments—goes one step further by acknowledging that feminist theory must address other, intersecting axes of stratification and power and offers suggestions about how postmodern feminism might respond to them through an eclectic, neopragmatist approach.²⁶ This book embraces Fraser’s proposal, which balances an awareness of the operation of power structures with the potential for resistance and change. Laboring Mothers invokes a type of intersectional methodology that Leslie McCall terms intercategorical complexity in which scholars provisionally adopt existing analytical categories to document relationships of inequality among social groups and changing configurations of inequality among multiple and conflicting dimensions.²⁷ My arguments claim categories strategically while remaining self-conscious that these categories are social constructions that are constantly renegotiated throughout historical moments, cultural contexts, and geographic space. As Stephanie Shields notes, an intersectional position may be disadvantaged relative to one group, but advantaged relative to another.²⁸ The working mothers studied in this book are represented as highly conscious of these shifting power dynamics. Rather than being what Shields calls passive recipients of intersecting social categories, eighteenth-century working mothers often practice and stage them to their advantage.²⁹

As a mode of inquiry, intersectionality has some drawbacks that bear mentioning.³⁰ First, when one invokes multiple categories of subjectivity for analysis, a degree of complexity is introduced that does not permit a full investigation of each category’s individual nuance. In addition, scope must be restricted, for when one studies everything, one studies nothing. This book focuses primarily on how the intersection of gender and class operate, while invoking other forms of marginalization, such as race, sexual orientation, gender presentation, and national origin as they become relevant to individual chapters. For example, chapter 3, on military memoirs, delves deeply into the marginalization Christian Davies and Hannah Snell experience due to their status as gender-nonconforming veterans. In chapter 4’s discussion of The History of Mary Prince, addressing issues of race and imperialism takes on vital urgency.

Intersectional modes of inquiry are not only self-conscious; they are also self-critical. For example, I flag the ways in which my inquiries might unwittingly reproduce structures of inequality. While some might view a self-consciousness critique as undermining the analysis, I view it as one of this study’s greatest strengths. That I cannot speak without reproducing structures of inequality is perhaps the most concrete evidence I have to confront those who would claim the nonexistence or irrelevance of systematic oppression. For this reason, I want to acknowledge up front how this book perpetuates a legacy of self-representation that privileges the elite. Many forms of privilege (racial, economic, educational) make my research possible; privilege allows the time, space, and academic training to investigate the history of working mothers. Thus, I attempt to remain vigilant about the ways in which my project both undermines and promotes hegemonic maternal norms.

The book’s methods follow organically from these theoretical constructs. Gender studies and cultural studies are, by definition, interdisciplinary modes of inquiry. While my training is as a literary scholar, this book attempts to capture a moment in cultural history in which literature plays one, albeit important, role among other textual sources and respects no aesthetic hierarchy regarding forms of cultural expression as low or high. My project is interested in examining zeitgeist, so the degree to which a text circulates and how it is disseminated is more important to my analysis than the text’s alleged aesthetic merit.

Throughout the book, I employ the word text in its poststructuralist sense: a presentation of signifiers necessary to the reading process, which can be words, images, sounds, gestures, etc. These signifiers function irrespective of traditional generic or disciplinary boundaries.³¹ Thus, in addition to reading written texts of many genres—plays, letters, memoirs, medical manuals—the book pays sustained attention to the visual arts, embodied performances, and primary historical documents, such as rule books and theater tickets. Because my arguments are specific to the political, cultural, and historical moment of imperial Britain in the long eighteenth century, I will also refer to discourse as social parlance that derives from particular social conditions, class-structures, and power relationships that alter in the course of history.³²

Some of the book’s methods involved difficult choices that perhaps require some explanation. First, I chose to include both literal and symbolic forms of motherhood in my discussions, because eighteenth-century representations treat being a mother as both a biological phenomenon and a symbolic state that can include surrogacy, adoption, proxy, acting as if, and other conditional statuses, such as when a miscarriage or an abortion occurs. The biological act of giving birth is a prerequisite for some jobs, such as a wet nurse. Being or having been a mother is seen as a qualifying attribute for other positions, such as a midwife. Yet some positions, such as that of a governess, use maternal care as the professional model for behavior, asking women to act as surrogate mothers to their pupils, despite that the governess’s status as single and childless is often a prerequisite of gaining her employment.³³

The notion of literal and symbolic motherhoods also leads to another thorny question of whether real historical mothers, for example, Mary Robinson or Hannah Snell, should be read differently from representations of motherhood, such as Emily, a penitent Magdalen from The Histories. Although initially I tried to be very mindful about the distinction between representations of motherhood and historical mothers, I very soon found it impossible to parse the real from the performative mother, and I ultimately determined that the most intellectually generative way to discuss every working mother figure is as a representation. The reasons are both practical and theoretical. First, the practical: except for the most privileged of historical subjects, most eighteenth-century mothers have their identities mediated by some sort of handler: promoter, editor, compiler, amanuensis, clergyman. For example, Hannah Snell, although illiterate, comes to public prominence because Robert Walker records, publishes, and promotes Snell’s narrative and stage performance at the New Wells Spa Theater in 1750, acting as the eighteenth-century analogue of a talent agent. When marginalized working mothers are not represented through a handler, they are imagined and reimagined by more privileged women or thoroughly enfranchised men. As Jennie Batchelor and Megan Hiatt note, the Reverend William Dodd’s The Magdalen (1783) is an expanded plagiarism of the first narrative of The Histories of Some of the Penitents (1760) crafted by an anonymous female author.³⁴ Sometimes this blurring of reality and representation is intentional. Consider, for example, Sarah Siddons playing opposite her biological son Henry during her 1782 London comeback performance in Isabella; Or, The Fatal Marriage.

Another level of complication is raised when one considers how the working life of mothers is structurally inclined to temporary and contingent forms of work. Although current business writing speculates about the increasing role the so-called gig economy will play in employment, eighteenth-century mothers had already mastered finding, creating, and extending different work opportunities that were dynamic and transient. As Katrina Honeyman notes, It was not unusual for women to change occupations several times during their lives or to perform several jobs simultaneously. As a result, women’s identification with any one occupation was typically weak.³⁵ For example, in her biography Christian Davies recounts stints as an innkeeper, a soldier, and a sutler. Fictional representations of working mothers reflect these experiences. In an inset narrative in The Wrongs of Woman, Jemima catalogues working as an apprentice, a prostitute, a washerwoman, a housekeeper, and a prison guard. Jemima’s creator, Mary Wollstonecraft, also experienced the vicissitudes of fortune, changing jobs with varying levels of status. She was a paid companion, a governess, a schoolteacher, a journalist, an author. She wrote about the plight of prostitutes and was symbolically branded as one for her political beliefs.

Because of the precarious nature of their employment, working mothers’ fortunes also varied widely at different life stages. While some aspects of privilege—such as a woman’s education—can always prove a resource in finding employment, even women of extraordinary talent experience boom and bust cycles. Consider Mary Robinson, who knows both the deprivations of a cell in debtor’s prison and the luxury entertainments of late Georgian high life. These historical trends are mimetically reproduced in representations of working mothers. Prostitutes, for example, are depicted