Mother Is a Verb
An Unconventional History
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Welcome to a work of history unlike any other.
Mothering is as old as human existence. But how has this most essential experience changed over time and cultures? What is the history of maternity—the history of pregnancy, birth, the encounter with an infant? Can one capture the historical trail of mothers? How?
In Mother Is a Verb, the historian Sarah Knott creates a genre all her own in order to craft a new kind of historical interpretation. Blending memoir and history and building from anecdote, her book brings the past and the present viscerally alive. It is at once intimate and expansive, lyrical and precise.
As a history, Mother Is a Verb draws on the terrain of Britain and North America from the seventeenth century to the close of the twentieth. Knott searches among a range of past societies, from those of Cree and Ojibwe women to tenant farmers in Appalachia; from enslaved people on South Carolina rice plantations to tenement dwellers in New York City and London’s East End. She pores over diaries, letters, court records, medical manuals, items of clothing. And she explores and documents her own experiences.
As a memoir, Mother Is a Verb becomes a method of asking new questions and probing lost pasts in order to historicize the smallest, even the most mundane of human experiences. Is there a history to interruption, to the sound of an infant’s cry, to sleeplessness? Knott finds answers not through the telling of grand narratives, but through the painstaking accumulation of a trellis of anecdotes. And all the while, we can feel the child on her hip.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
