Reviewed by:

• Maternal Bodies: Redefining Motherhood in Early America by Nora Doyle
• Andrea Charise (bio)

Nora Doyle’s study of motherhood, childbirth, and discourses of maternity is a significant contribution to our understanding of the complex social life of reproduction in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Anglo-American culture. Maternal Bodies joins a wealth of historical scholarship that documents the fraught depiction of motherhood during this period, including Richard W. Wertz and Dorothy C. Wertz, Lying-In: A History of Childbirth in America (1977); Susan E. Klepp, Revolutionary Conceptions: Women, Fertility, and Family Limitation in America, 1760–1820 (2009); Katy S. Smith, We Have Raised All of You: Motherhood in the South, 1750–1835 (2013); and Jennifer L. Morgan’s indispensable Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (2004). In keeping with more recent historical investigations, Doyle’s study attends to early American maternity’s gendered delineations—as documented by women and men alike—and, crucially, to the divergent realities of white middle- and upper-class maternal experience with Black women’s reproductive labour under the conditions of slavery. Employing personal letters, diary entries, archival photos, and newsprint illustrations to explore “lived” and “imagined maternal bod[ies]” (5), Doyle’s book has already been recognized for its historical value. Its further interweaving of anatomical illustrations, bawdy midwifery manuals, and “prescriptive” medical writings (115)— which sought to divorce the physiology of childbearing from its compromising proximity to pleasure, sexuality, and coarse animality—yields a dynamic archive that conveys just how contested motherhood and maternity as disciplinary territories were (and, indeed, remain).

It is Doyle’s close attention to language and a substantial treatment of poetry that makes Maternal Bodies an especially rich interdisciplinary resource, with added value for scholars in the history of medicine, medical/health humanities, and literary studies who are invested in the exploration of “motherhood both as a lived identity and as a cultural symbol in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century America” (1). Its methodology illustrates the clarifying power of juxtaposition: be it of textual sources, gendered experience, racial disparities, and the enduring pasts and present(s) that continue to articulate maternal discourse. As Doyle writes, “historians ... tend to bring to life the thoughts and feelings of the women and men of the past, while allowing the flesh to remain dead and forgotten. In order to find the historical body, we must peer imaginatively at every source, for inevitably the body is present just [End Page 469] below the surface” (13). Chapter 1 explores the maternal body as an emergent concern for early eighteenth-century medical professionals, which would eventually supplant earlier corporeal vernaculars of the woman’s body with the uterus “as the primary agent in childbearing” (9). Increasingly aligned with the male professional’s outlook, such texts foregrounded fragments of the woman’s body—the pelvis, the uterus—to dissociate the embodied woman from childbirth and certain unsettling moral challenges induced by pain and fear. Chapter 2 contrasts such “prescriptive” texts with “discursive,” albeit fragmented, glances into women’s own descriptive testimonies of childbirth in diaries and personal writings: the stock language and narrative structures that consistently conveyed, even as they veiled, middle-class and elite white practices of contraception, pregnancy, childbirth, and its aftermath. By contrast, the conditions of slavery meant that Black women’s firsthand narratives of childbearing were “most profoundly shaped by the commodification of their bodies as mothers” (9); for example, key episodes in Harriet Jacobs’s autobiography Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) depict how white women’s collusion with the institution of slavery “destroyed what should have been an empathic community of mothers” (80).

In her book In the Wake: On Being and Blackness (2016), Christina Sharpe describes the structural history of ungendering that has long worked to “dis/figure Black maternity ... turn[ing] the womb into a factory producing blackness as abjection much like the slave ship’s hold” (74). Such “orthographies” of Blackness (to use Sharpe’s term) proliferate today—often in the form of a digital archive of...

审核人：

• 孕产妇：诺拉·道尔（Nora Doyle）在美国早期重新定义了母性
• 安德里亚·查里斯（生物）

诺拉·道尔（Nora Doyle）对母性，分娩和生育方式的研究对我们对18世纪末和19世纪初英美文化中繁复的生殖的复杂社会生活的理解做出了重要贡献。孕产妇机构加入了丰富的历史奖学金，记录了这段时期对母亲的苦恼描述，其中包括理查德·W·沃茨和多萝西·C·沃茨，《躺着：美国的分娩史》（1977年）。苏珊·克莱普（Susan E. Klepp），《革命概念：美国的妇女，生育力和家庭限制》，1760年至1820年（2009年）；凯蒂·史密斯（Katy S. Smith），《我们已经集结了大家：南方的母亲》，1750年至1835年（2013年）；和詹妮弗·摩根（Jennifer L. Morgan）必不可少的劳动妇女：新世界奴隶制中的生殖和性别（2004）。为了与最近的历史研究保持一致，Doyle的研究关注了美国早期孕妇的性别划分（男女都有记录），并且至关重要的是，白人中产阶级和白人在黑人妇女的生殖劳动下经历了不同的现实。奴隶制的条件。多伊尔的书利用私人信件，日记条目，档案照片和新闻纸插图来探索“活着的”和“想象中的母亲身体”（5），其历史价值已经得到认可。它进一步交织了解剖插图，笨拙的助产手册和“规定性”医学著作（115），这些试图将生育的生理学与享乐性，性行为，

杜伊尔（Doyle）对语言的密切关注和对诗歌的实质性对待使孕产妇得以成长这是一种特别丰富的跨学科资源，对于医学，医学/健康人文学科和文学研究领域的学者来说具有附加价值，他们在18世纪末期和早期投入了大量资金来探索“母亲作为生活的身份和文化的象征”十九世纪的美国”（1）。它的方法论说明了并置的澄清力量：无论是文本来源，性别经验，种族差异，还是持续表达母体话语的经久不衰的过去和现在。正如多伊尔（Doyle）所写，“历史学家...往往使过去男女的思想和情感栩栩如生，同时又使肉体保持死亡和被遗忘。为了找到历史遗体，我们必须在每一个方面都富有想象力地凝视，因为不可避免地存在着遗体，[结束页469]低于表面”（13）。第1章探讨了孕产妇的身体问题，这是18世纪早期医学专家的紧急关注，他们最终将子宫“作为生育的主要媒介”取代了妇女体内较早形成的有孔白话（9）。这些文字越来越与男性专业人员的观点保持一致，以女性身体的碎片（骨盆，子宫）为前瞻，以使女性的身体脱离分娩，以及因痛苦和恐惧而引起的某些令人不安的道德挑战。第2章将这类“说明性”文本与“分散性”（尽管是零散的）一目了然，对比了一下妇女自己在日记和个人著作中对分娩的描述性证词：股票语言和叙事结构始终如一地传达，即使它们蒙着面纱，中产阶级和白人精英的避孕，怀孕，分娩及其后果的做法。相比之下，奴隶制的条件意味着黑人妇女对生育的第一手叙述“最深远地受到了她们作为母亲的身体商品化的影响”（9）；例如，哈丽雅特·雅各布（Harriet Jacobs）自传中的关键片段《奴隶女孩生活中的事件》（1861年）描述了白人妇女与奴隶制的勾结是如何“摧毁了原本应该有同情心的母亲社区”（80）。

克里斯蒂娜·夏普（Christina Sharpe）在她的著作《苏醒：生与黑》（2016）中描述了未涂抹的结构历史，长期以来一直致力于“消除/塑造黑人孕妇……将子宫变成制造黑社会的工厂”就像奴隶船的船舱一样”（74）。这种黑度的“正字法”（用夏普的术语来说）在今天激增，通常以...的数字档案的形式出现。