Reviewed by: Other Mothers: Beyond the Maternal Ideal Susan C. Greenfield (bio) Other Mothers: Beyond the Maternal Ideal, edited by Ellen Bayuk Rosenman and Claudia C. Klaver; pp. vii + 348. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2008, $55.95, $9.95 CD-ROM. This anthology opens with two related reminders about domestic history. The first is that the image of the full-time, self-sacrificing, and sexually compliant mother is a modern invention that “gained its full ideological force in the nineteenth century”; the second is that the image was illusory and that no mother then or now has met its saintly standards. “In this sense,” Ellen Bayuk Rosenman and Claudia C. Klaver write, “all mothers are other mothers” (1). The volume’s fifteen essays address an array of historical, social, and geographical contexts, but each also takes the idealization and impossibility of maternal norms as a starting point from which to explore a variety of specific representations and experiences. Rosenman and Klaver suggest that despite the general homage Victorian studies has paid to the problematic ideals of maternity, relatively few scholars treat motherhood itself as a central object of inquiry. There are “important exceptions” here (8), and the editors pay special tribute to the works of Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Carolyn Dever, Jill Matus, Mary Poovey, Ellen Ross, and Sally Shuttleworth. But they stress that most relevant scholarship tends to place motherhood “at the center of [End Page 140] constructions of femininity and domesticity” (1)—to mention and then subsume it “into a more general analysis of gender roles” (2). In redressing this oversight and dedicating itself to direct discussions of maternity, Other Mothers offers a valuable addition to Victorian and gender studies. The anthology’s theoretical agenda is less ambitious. For despite their interest in specifying maternity’s role in gender studies, Rosenman and Klaver repeat one of the field’s most well-rehearsed theories: the idea that gender, along with race, class, and nationality, are mutually constitutive and contextually determined positions. That gender identity is neither stable nor singular is likely to be a familiar conceit to many readers, and none of the authors here offers much critical perspective on it. Instead, the volume’s goal is to insert maternal identity into this familiar paradigm and to chart its variability. At its best, Other Mothers charts this very well. The individual contributors trace the categories and contradictions underwriting a particular representation or experience, and together they document the multiple possibilities—and impossibilities—of maternal identity. Many different kinds of mothers start to emerge. Some are historical figures: the prolific Margaret Oliphant who outlived all her children; Lady Duff Gordon, the self-professed mother of her Egyptian servants and slaves; Frances Knorr, executed in Australia for allegedly murdering two children; the Jamaican born Mary Seacole who “mothered” British soldiers during the Crimean War. The vast majority of the volume’s “other mothers” appear in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century fiction. There are essays on the fallen mother in Felix Holt, The Radical (1866); alcoholic mothers in Hesba Stretton’s temperance publications; pregnant mothers in stories by indigenous Australian women; and mothers who give birth to texts instead of children in fin-de-siècle books. An essay on Charlotte Yonge’s The Daisy Chain (1856) analyzes a middle-class mother’s reaction to her baby’s death from opium (often used in children’s medicine). And one of the volume’s early essays, which focuses on the selfish elderly mothers in Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1846–48), is intriguingly off-set by a later one on fat and nurturing maternal surrogates in The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41) and David Copperfield (1849–50). The editors divide the collection into four relatively equal parts. The first, “Beyond the Maternal Ideal,” echoes the book’s subtitle and opens with Deidre D’Albertis’s smart and lively account of the commercialization of maternal standards in Victorian times and our own. Victorian mothers were the “producers” and “curators” of “an empire of things” (29), which today includes organic baby food, Baby Einstein DVDs, and limousine strollers. In both cases, D’Albertis argues, purchasing the right accoutrements is what most...