Just Mothering: Amy Coney Barrett and the Racial Politics of American Motherhood

Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination and confirmation featured frequent references to her role as a mother. This article situates these references within the trajectory of American political development to demonstrate how motherhood operates as a mechanism for enforcing a white-centered racial order. Through a close analysis of both the history of politicized motherhood as well as Barrett’s nomination and confirmation hearings, I make a series of claims about motherhood and contemporary conservatism. First, conservatives stress the virtuousness of motherhood through a division between public and private spheres that valorizes the middle-class white mother. Second, conservatives emphasize certain mothering practices associated with the middle-class white family. Third, conservatives leverage an epistemological claim about the universality of mothering experiences to universalize white motherhood. Finally, this universalism obscures how motherhood operates as a site in which power distinguishes between good and bad mothers and allocates resources accordingly. By attending to what I call the “republican motherhood script” operating in contemporary conservatism, I argue that motherhood is an ideological apparatus for enforcing a racial order premised on white protectionism.

Looking Beyond the Enlightenment Mother-Teacher: Anna Letitia Barbauld and the Eighteenth-Century Maternal Ideal

Based on her popular prose writing for children, liberal Dissenter Anna Letitia Barbauld has been cited as a prominent example of the Enlightenment mother-teacher associated with the influence of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. However, close reading of her poetry reveals a complex maternal ideal in operation that was in part that of the Enlightenment mother-teacher, in part a modified form of republican motherhood, a strategic composite drawn, on the one hand, from classical republican discourse, which promoted the woman’s role in fostering patriotism and liberty, and, on the other, from contemporary defences of commerce, which highlighted women’s civilizing and humanizing roles. Barbauld’s poetic career is compelling in illuminating not only the complexity of the eighteenth-century maternal ideal but also its simultaneous opportunities and limitations for women. While the eighteenth-century maternal ideal allowed the possibility for exciting innovation and reinterpretation of traditional gender categories, expanding the boundaries of feminine authority and authorship, it could equally be exploited by those bent upon undermining women’s efforts to enlarge their social and cultural sphere of action.

Bachelors, Bureaucrats, and Marrying into the Nation

This chapter recounts the passage of the 1927 Law of Independent Nationality, in which French women who married immigrant men could for the first time retain their French nationality after marriage. It explains how the 1927 law permitted the French women's foreign-born husbands to obtain French citizenship with fewer delays and decreed that the children born of those unions on French soil would automatically become French. It also analyses the state's movement to facilitate intermarriage between Frenchwomen and foreign-born men on a vast scale, using marriage as a means to repopulate France. The chapter discusses the notion of republican motherhood, which held that Frenchwomen could use their influence within the domestic sphere to assimilate their foreign husbands and their half-foreign children into the French nation. It elaborates how intermarriages between Frenchwomen and immigrant men were favorable but indispensable for many Third Republican contemporaries.

Sarah Miriam Peale's Mary Leypold Griffith and the Staging of Republican Motherhood

Much of Sarah Miriam Peale’s work was done from observation – from life which begs the question: why would Peale depict Mary so very much alive and so mature when she had in fact passed away that year? This essay analyzes Peale’s portrait in relation to period ideas about gender, education, and death to argue that Peale aged and animated Mary in order to represent her as a young patriot. Thereby, the portrait aided her mother Priscilla’s mourning process, but also served as proof that—despite Mary’s premature death—Priscilla had fulfilled her maternal duties. In serving this function for Priscilla, the portrait served it for Sarah Miriam Peale, too. Although Peale had no children of her own, painting young patriots enabled the artist to contribute to the health of the Republic and thereby fulfill her maternal duties as well.

“My lot is cast in with my sex and country”: Generic Conventions, Gender Anxieties and American Identity in Emma Hart Willard’s and Catherine Maria Sedgwick’s Travel Letters

The article analyses generic conventions, gender constraints and authorial self-definition in two ante-bellum American travel accounts – Emma Hart Willard’s Journal and Letters, from France and Great Britain (1833) and Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home (1841). Emma Hart Willard, a pioneer in women’s higher education and Catharine Maria Sedgwick, an author of sentimental novels, were influential figures of the Early Republic, active in the literary public sphere. Narrative personas adopted in their travel letters have been shaped by the authors’ national identity on the one hand and by ideals of republican motherhood, which they propagated, on the other. Both travelogues are preceded with apologies filled with self-deprecating rhetoric, typical for women’s travel writing in the early 19th century and both are intended to instruct the American reader. Other conventional features of American antebellum travel writing include comparisons between British and American government and society with a view of extolling the latter as well as avid interest in social status and public activities of European women. Willard and Sedgwick deal with possible gender anxieties of their upper middle-class female readers by assuring them that following one’s literary or educational vocation in the public sphere does necessarily mean compromising ideals of true womanhood in private life.