Constructing Motherhood Identity Against Political Violence PDF Download

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the United States saw drastic shifts in the life of the nation, particularly with reforms centered on and affected by women. This project asserts that throughout this period, women in particular used the image of the angel of the house as the impetus to step out of the home, first into society and later into the political sphere, and so transformed maternity into a political identity. Each chapter explores a distinct iteration of this identity and examines theatrical depictions of each to determine how maternal identity shifts as the ends for which it is leveraged change. Chapter one examines what I have identified as the salvific mother, an iteration of maternal identity which came about as progressive reform surrounding the issue of poverty swept the nation. Within this identity, women leveraged the nineteenth-century notion that mothers were the moral center of the home to argue that they could also be the moral center of the nation. Chapter two explores the iteration of the maternal feminist, an identity that formed as women pushed to formalize their role as moral center of the nation in the voting booth. Chapter three then turns to the warrior mother identity, which saw Black female dramatists deploying the notion of mothers as the moral center of the nation for the dual purposes of asserting Black humanity and dignity in front of white audiences and forging African American identity. Each of these distinct ways of construing and constructing maternity reveals the fact that motherhood is an important aspect of women's studies and that our understanding of American history is incomplete without an understanding of the evolution of maternity.