Maternity and Black Women's Citizenship in Frances Watkins Harper's Early Poetry and Late Prose

Abstract

Since Ann Douglas famously opined in The Feminization of American Culture (1988) that “the nineteenth-century seemed bent on establishing a permanent ‘Mother’s Day’” (1), scholars have investigated a wide range of political, social, and aesthetic implications of maternal representations in the period. In Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (1980), Linda Kerber coined the now familiar term Republican Motherhood to describe the role of women in national life, suggesting that “a consensus developed around the idea that a mother committed to the service of her family and state might serve a political purpose” (5). According to Stephanie Smith, “It would be hard indeed for any sustained consideration of nineteenth-century cultural practices in the US not to comment on the degree to which maternal iconography signaled utopian perfection, making ‘mother’ a sacred, natural symbol of perfect, reciprocal relations” (3). Lauren Berlant sutures motherhood to the political imaginary, observing how maternal figures were “employed symbolically to regulate or represent the field of national fantasy” (26). The ability for maternal representations