A Woman’s Work: Reclaiming the Radical History of Mothering

Motherhood has “compelled women to contribute to and transform their societies” since time immemorial, according to this wide-ranging study. Beginning with an 8th or 9th century BCE clay model of a human fetus left by a pregnant woman as an offering to a goddess of childbirth, historian Cleghorn (Unwell Women) shows that women have always thought about and reckoned with motherhood as a profound and fraught state of being. The narrative spans from ancient Greece and Rome, where breastfeeding was so rare among upper-class women that having done so was mentioned on a young mother’s sarcophagus, through the early modern era, where readers encounter Elizabeth Jocelin, a 17th-century British woman who pioneered the “maternal conduct book,” a popular genre in which a mother addressed life advice to her newborn in the event of her death in childbirth. Among Cleghorn’s aims is to explore how society is always debating what is “natural” about motherhood—Are women naturally maternal? Is breastfeeding a natural means of bonding?—as well as spotlight those who pushed back against supposedly “natural” limitations. However, for a book on “radical” mothering, much time is spent describing ways that men have weighed in—readers may not be enthused, for example, to learn yet again about Plato’s notion of the “wandering uterus.” Still, it’s a meticulously comprehensive survey that, at its best, casts fascinating light on mothers’ thoughts on mothering. (Mar.)