Moms in Chief: The Rhetoric of Republican Motherhood and the Spouses of Presidential Nominees, 1992–2016. By Tammy R.Vigil. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. 2019. 258 pp.

2019 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 234-235
Author(s):  
Erin F. Doss
Keyword(s):  
Republican Motherhood

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

Laws ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 36
Author(s):  
H. Howell Williams
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Political Development ◽  
American Political Development ◽  
White Family ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
History Of ◽  
Republican Motherhood ◽  
A Site ◽  
Confirmation Hearings

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.

scholarly journals “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

2018 ◽  
pp. 51-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Małgorzata Rutkowska
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Private Life ◽  
American Government ◽  
Early 19Th Century ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Women's Higher Education ◽  
The One ◽  
Republican Motherhood ◽  
Women's Travel

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.

Bachelors, Bureaucrats, and Marrying into the Nation

2020 ◽  
pp. 39-70
Author(s):  
Nimisha Barton
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Born ◽  
Domestic Sphere ◽  
French Nation ◽  
Republican Motherhood ◽  
First Time ◽  
Immigrant Men

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.

“With Knives Drawn”

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brianna Leavitt-Alcántara
Keyword(s):  
Social Support ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Moral Status ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Public Defenders ◽  
Political Landscape ◽  
Jesuit Missionaries ◽  
New Challenges ◽  
Republican Motherhood

Chapter 6 analyzes how non-elite women outside of marriage navigated the shifting religious and political landscape in the decades after Independence. Laboring women undeniably faced new challenges, including their exclusion from republican citizenship, pastoral instability, and the decline of confraternities, which undermined traditional forms of spiritual and social support, and the renewed emphasis upon female sexual purity by both Church and State. While laboring women could not live up to the elite ideal of “Republican Motherhood,” they found new ways of establishing their moral status as public defenders of the faith. Their actions shaped the development of popular conservatism in Guatemala, which successfully reigned from 1838 to 1871. Non-elite women also forged alliances with Jesuit missionaries and took advantage of new devotional opportunities as nineteenth-century Church officials, more dependent than ever upon laywomen, mostly abandoned early modern restrictions on active lay female religiosity.

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