The Evolution of Motherhood: A Working Mom Historian's Account
A striking and moving portrait of the vast and complex experience of motherhood.

This book says that human history is the history of mothers.
The human condition shows that it is the mother's condition.

This is the truth.
Don't cry and read...

Jeong Hee-jin (Visiting Professor at Ewha Womans University, Editor-in-Chief of [Jeong Hee-jin's Study])

What did being a mother look like back then?
An intimate and original study that revives the lost stories of ordinary women.

This book begins with the question, "What did being a mother look like in the past?"
For centuries, historians have written extensively about wars, politics, and revolutions, but they have neglected the everyday history of raising children.
The experiences associated with becoming a mother have been lost or forgotten.
The author, a history professor at Indiana University and mother of two, explores fascinating sources—diaries, letters, short notes, lines from court records, and portraits—left behind by mothers of the past to vividly bring to life the lost stories of ordinary women.
From 17th-century North American mothers who bore an average of eighteen children to late 20th-century feminists debating whether to have children, the author creates a striking and moving portrait of the vast and complex maternal experience.

Beginning her research while pregnant with her second child, Knott attempts to combine history and essay by adding her own experiences to past anecdotes about pregnancy, childbirth, and childcare.
This new proposal for a history that is verb-oriented, anecdotal, and written in the first person offers an excellent methodology for approaching the maternal experience, free from the myth of objectivity in translation.

Perhaps the best way to explore what it was like to have children in the past is to set aside the grand narratives and focus on the fragments and anecdotes.
Perhaps the best way to explore what it was like to be a mother in the past is to build a grid of tiny scenes, tracing the many different related events.
Pregnancy, miscarriage, fetal movement, preparation for labor, childbirth.
Next, washing, feeding, sleeping, not sleeping, providing for needs, being disturbed, leaving, and coming to find.
All of this forms the very essence of the instinctive process, the very blood and guts of 'being with children'.
They are verbs.
As a verb, it is 'to become a mother'.

---From the "Prologue"

In other words, it is much more difficult to present a living mother as an enslaved woman, an indigenous woman, or a working-class woman with her own past.
Writing and reading were strictly forbidden among the slave classes, which means that we have very little information about them.
All Native American tribes transmitted their culture orally rather than writing it down and storing it in archives.
The working class, regardless of race or ethnicity, spent most of their waking hours simply trying to make ends meet.
But I will push through.
Without them, perspectives become misunderstood, diminished, and wrong.

--- p.31

What about the behavior of the post-1963 generation? Bonnie Pereira, a young lesbian in the 1970s in America, said she "wanted to be a mother" and had sex with men solely for that purpose.
Her contemporary, Michelle O'Neill, explained to the same researcher that she had conceived her son through artificial insemination, saying she "always loved children, especially babies."
Turkey-baster babies (a dropper-shaped tool used to scoop up the juices from a whole turkey roast, and then used to collect the semen inside a condom after sex for artificial insemination. - Translator's note), they were first called this.
Now, not only can sex be separated from procreation, but both sex and procreation have been liberated from heterosexual relationships.

--- p.47

To feel the inner tactile sensations of a child, we need the privilege of relative silence.
A woman on a South Carolina rice farm was typically around nineteen when she felt her first movements.
The season would have been mostly late spring or early summer.
On these plantations, pregnancy usually occurred in winter, when the hectic labor of harvest was replaced by the work of repairing roads and canals and milling wheat.
Perhaps the first movement this woman felt was as she straightened beside the wooden washtub, or perhaps as her hands coiled and tied the straw into a broad, round basket for winnowing rice, her fingers moving in the design of her Senegambian or Angolan ancestors.
Perhaps he sensed the movement while standing there, covering the rice seeds with his feet after they had been scattered in the furrows, or while chasing away the yellow and black rice-feeders, also called rice-eaters, that were about to migrate south in late summer when the rice was ripe and beginning to bow its head.
Or perhaps the baby's first movement responded to the ecstatic sounds of the sacred worship of slave religion, where call and response intersect and rice mortars are beaten with drums covered with animal skins.

--- p.82~83

In other times, the idea of ​​motherhood gave individual women room for negotiation, even power.
A pregnant mistress was so angry at one of her apprentice's behavior that she took him to the Lord Mayor's Court in London.
Husbands who maintained patriarchal authority believed that they should accommodate their wives' reasonable whims.
A famous botanist was told by his pregnant wife that she wanted to smash a dozen eggs in his face—and he complied.
Strange stories have made morality flat.
In the 18th century, a husband, unable to buy lobster for his wife at Leadenhall Market, surprised her by bringing home one.
But later the child was born “red and bubbling.”

--- p.97

Telling anecdotes seems to me a particularly powerful way to move between capital-H history—slavery, the rise of industrialization, revolutionary ideologies—and the very ordinary issues of life with children.
Anecdotes provide a rare opportunity to interpret various scenes, references, and objects that illuminate what it means to be with a child.
Even if there is no continuous data, and the meager traces of records that remain usually seem to be of little importance or trivial.
Anecdotes are the only means by which we can continue to ask, 'What was it like?'

--- p.135

San Francisco, 1896.
Jeong Hing Tong is looking forward to a “red egg and ginger party” to celebrate one month since giving birth to her first child.
She was a Chinese immigrant from a town called Foshan, and was part of the first generation to come to America from Asia, following a long tradition of immigrants since the Gold Rush of 1848.
In Chinatown, such women are typically completely confined.
Once outside, I was ridiculed for my bound feet.
The plan for eggs and ginger, good luck and recovery, will be ruined by a massive earthquake anyway.
People will pour out into the streets.
With her baby in her arms, she will somehow make it to the Golden Gate Bridge in a horse-drawn cart and see the city engulfed in flames.

--- p.150

It can be argued that interruptions are indeed a common condition of most people's everyday experiences.
Interference is a condition of care.
Being interrupted is a common experience for anyone who primarily cares for someone else in a direct way, in a time that is not their own.
In a patriarchal time and place, the wife will take care of her husband.
In the early modern period, apprentices became masters.
A domestic slave is a slave owner.
The housekeeper is the employer.
Nurses are doctors and patients.
Secretaries are bosses.

--- p.185~186

From the late eighteenth century onwards, the blissful sensation of breastfeeding was newly and characteristically defined, moralized, expressed, felt, recalled, and recorded – that is, sentimentalized.
It appeals to emotions and is moralized.
Completing the duty of breastfeeding with pleasure will give you “the sweetest and most heart-fluttering joy” (William Buchan, bestseller Advice to Mothers).
Breastfeeding is “the best source of the most tender and loving kind of joy” (Maternal Solicitude, or, Lady's Manual, by American midwife Mary Watkins, 1809).
It was also felt as a “painful yet pleasurable sensation” (Cincinnati-born writer Ann Allen, 1858).
The passage, “I miss the mouth of my dear little daughter, who longed for my breast” (letter from the Duchess of Devonshire, 1784), while weaning her one-year-old child, reflects the passage of time.

--- p.232~233

Distinguishing the special role of friends from that of mothers, relatives, neighbors, and grandmothers made little sense in Onni Lee Logan's Alabama.
Her local and family world did not allow for separate gatherings of her own generation.
Among the many women she advised over her long career, the distinctiveness of "friends' suggestions" may have been most familiar to her racially mixed clientele of the 1970s and early 1980s.
By that time, the civil rights movement had made basic health care available to poor black communities, and those who benefited from Oni Lee's knowledge included young white women in the counterculture.

--- p.298

Navigating these periods of childhood—and for me, those brief periods, slow to live and fast to disappear—is largely a matter of managing and getting along, of living through each stage of life.
Caring for a baby is hard work.
Holding a baby often requires two hands.
Raising very young children is unlikely to lead to political upheaval, revolution, reform, or the creation of literature and art.
Perhaps they will later become activities that bring new insights, passions, priorities, or skills.

--- p.390

So I accept anecdotes as one of the valuable states of creating knowledge.
That is, it is produced by the present mother, available from scattered historical sources, and creates knowledge with a solid genealogy through historical writing.
Clearly there is tension between these three origins.
For example, the sense of interruption that characterizes so much contemporary parenting is neither universal nor transhistorical, yet has its own particular history.

--- p.407