“The tender mother”: The social construction of motherhood and thelady's magazine

Abstract

My aim in this essay is to explore the politics of one of the seemingly least political forms of literature, the woman's magazine. Specifically, I will analyze the ideological content of the Lady's Magazine, one of the most popular and profitable of British monthly miscellanies in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth‐centuries.1 In this essay I will explore the role the Lady's Magazine played in the development of the idea of the “tender mother,” a concept which was key in the formation of the cult of domesticity and in the development of the ideology of “woman's sphere” as a realm distinct and separate from the man's world of work.2An underlying assumption informing this essay is that the concept of motherhood was (and still is) culturally constituted,3 and that literature, including popular literature found in magazines, has played an important role in this process.4 In the Lady's Magazine's portrayal of motherhood we can see one of the means by which the ideology of motherhood, in particular, the concept of the tender mother, was created, legitimated, and perpetuated.5