Mother Is a Verb: An Unconventional History

Historian Knott (Sensibility and the American Revolution) explores the concept of mothering throughout history in this intricate and complex narrative. Knott views the practices of mothering through the lens of such actions as conceiving, birthing, cleaning, feeding, sleeping, and being interrupted. The latter, she notes, is a constant condition of motherhood (“Before the baby,” she writes of her own experience, “my daily routine had been coordinated with the rhythms of working life­—teaching, meeting, writing deadlines”). Knott has scoured the historical research on mothering, coming up with “shards” gleaned from journals, diaries, letters, court records, and anthropological fieldwork. She writes of the 17th-century English medical practitioner Sarah Jinner, who referred to late pregnancy euphemistically as “the rising of the apron”; of 18th-century Cherokee women who “removed themselves to special cabins for menstruating and birthing”; and an Alaskan Inupiaq mother living in the 1940s who ran out of breast milk and offered her infant fish roe and broth. Knott’s own exhaustion in the chapter on sleep (and sleeplessness) is palpable, as is the fatigue of a Kentucky mother in 1937 Knott writes about, who nurses her baby through the night and wakes when the rooster crows. This painstakingly researched work will be of most interest to social historians. (Apr.)