Mothering, Past and Present

Abstract

Mothering, Past and Present Lucia McMahon (bio) Sarah Knott, Mother Is a Verb: An Unconventional History. New York: Sarah Crichton Books, 2019. 306 pp. Notes. $27.00. Reading Mother Is a Verb: An Unconventional History immediately called to mind an essay that my dissertation advisor, Jan Ellen Lewis, shared with me shortly after the birth of my first child. In “Mother’s Love: The Construction of an Emotion in Nineteenth-Century America,” Lewis explored how maternal ideals and emotional standards took shape in the nineteenth century. The idealization of sentimental mothering, as Lewis and other scholars have argued, created gendered definitions and understandings of home and work. Motherhood was characterized as a labor of love defined primarily by emotional attachments, obscuring the actual work associated with childcare and housework. Although maternal ideals are often more prescriptive than descriptive, the cultural veneration of a mother’s generous, self-sacrificing love remains powerful and enduring. In the process, as Lewis argued, “living, fully dimensional mothers slip from our view.”1 Lewis’s brilliant insights help to highlight how mothers are at once ubiquitous and overlooked in the cultural imagination and historical record. To bring experiences and expressions of mothering into view, Sarah Knott employs an innovative approach that blends personal reflection and scholarly research. Knott’s methodology is self-consciously informed by and shaped by her mothering. “I was feeling my way as a new mother and as a historian together,” she acknowledges in her “A Note on Method” (p. 263). Throughout Mother Is a Verb, the rhythms of mothering are conveyed through historical anecdotes and analysis, as well as through Knott’s journal-like account of her pregnancy and early days of caring for her infant. In each chapter, historical insights and personal experiences are interwoven together to create a new form of scholarly exploration. Knott’s descriptions of reading while walking with a sleeping baby, or of trying to find small increments of time for writing, may be very familiar to anyone who has engaged in caregiving while in academia. Yet Knott transforms these emotive and embodied experiences into a distinctive form of scholarship. Indeed, the fragmented, sporadic “snatches [End Page 197] of time” in which Knott attempts to research and write provide a framework for the book’s structure and content (p. 8). The book is deliberately anecdotal, personal, and historical, all at once. The result is a compelling, insightful look at the processes and practices of mothering, and of Knott’s own labors as a mother and a scholar. Mother Is a Verb is deeply interested in the embodied experience of mothering, which, as Knott suggests, “is more bodily than biological” (p. 8). Bodily aspects of mothering—pregnancy, childbirth, nursing, sleep deprivation—have qualities and characteristics that move well beyond seemingly “natural” understandings of sexual and biological “difference.” Yet as Knott discovers, the experiences and expressions of mothering are challenging to research and reconstruct using conventional historical methods. “Even if quickening happens in every successful pregnancy,” she muses in an early chapter, “I can reconstruct no continuous history. The remaining records do not allow it” (p. 49). There is no distinct archive of mothering, no carefully catalogued set of records to reconstruct the contours of pregnancy, birth, nursing, and infant care. Instead, shards of evidence come to us in fragmented, piecemeal fashion, in forms that can seem disjointed, untidy, and challenging to contextualize. In Knott’s skillful hands, that fragmentation is not a deterrent, but rather a dynamic way to frame the emotional and experiential elements of mothering. She makes a compelling methodological case for the use of anecdotes to uncover “the traces of mothering left behind from former times and places” (p. 264). As Knott argues, anecdotes offer “a peculiarly powerful means of moving between History with a capital H . . . and the mundane stuff of living with an infant” (p. 85). Carefully attuned to anecdotes, fragments, and silences, Knott creates a patchwork of experience, feeling, and thinking related to mothering. The physical occurrences of pregnancy, labor, birth, and breastfeeding echo across time and place with resonant similarities, but also take distinct forms. “Mothering is plural and specific to time and place and situation” (p. 259). There is...