FREE Kindle eBook - Maternal Bodies: Redefining Motherhood in Early America
From the Free Booksy email list, a FREE Kindle eBook, “Maternal Bodies: Redefining Motherhood in Early America” by Nora Doyle.
The "Free" part should be good for at least all of today, Monday, October 2, 2023. But whether today or later, double-check and make sure the price is still in fact FREE.
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For those outside the US, go to your country's Amazon site. Search for the eBook from there, and see if it's free. The Link below works for the US Amazon site, but (for example) probably won't let you get the book for free at “Amazon Canada”.
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From the Publisher's description:
In the second half of the eighteenth century, motherhood came to be viewed as women's most important social role, and the figure of the good mother was celebrated as a moral force in American society. Nora Doyle shows that depictions of motherhood in American culture began to define the ideal mother by her emotional and spiritual roles rather than by her physical work as a mother. As a result of this new vision, lower-class women and non-white women came to be excluded from the identity of the good mother because American culture defined them in terms of their physical labor.
However, Doyle also shows that childbearing women contradicted the ideal of the disembodied mother in their personal accounts and instead perceived motherhood as fundamentally defined by the work of their bodies. Enslaved women were keenly aware that their reproductive bodies carried a literal price, while middle-class and elite white women dwelled on the physical sensations of childbearing and childrearing. Thus motherhood in this period was marked by tension between the lived experience of the maternal body and the increasingly ethereal vision of the ideal mother that permeated American print culture.
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Here's a Link to the Amazon listing, which should get Free Booksy their referral credit.
Free Booksy operates much the same as the Robin Reads email list. I previously covered the free Robin Reads email list, which you can read HERE.