Writing Maternity: Medicine, Anxiety, Rhetoric, and Genre

When did mothers start worrying so much? Why do they keep worrying so? Writing Maternity answers these questions by identifying the nineteenth-century rhetorical origins of maternal anxiety, inviting readers to think about worrying not as something individual mothers do but as an affect that since Victorian times has defined middle-class motherhood itself. In this book, Rossman Regaignon offers the first comprehensive study of child-rearing advice literature from early-nineteenth century Britain and argues that the historical emergence of that genre catalyzed a durable shift in which maternal care was identified as maternal anxiety.

This event is co-sponsored by The Medical Humanities Working Group