Maternal Martyrdom Unmasked: British Fatherhood and the Masculinization of War in Napoleonic Veterans’ Tales of Infant Suffering

Despite the growing masculinization of Europe’s armies, domestic ideals such as maternal breastfeeding and nurturing fatherhood appeared with surprising frequency in British accounts of the Napoleonic Wars. Veterans’ memoirs of the British Army’s retreat to Corunna recalled heartrending scenes of dead mothers with infants struggling to nurse at frozen breasts. Pacifist poets had eagerly seized similar stories to demonstrate the horrors of war, but this article shows the way in which mother and infant suffering could become a pro-war tool used by the Army. Officer memoirists subtly condemned Army wives for following the drum while highlighting their own fatherly compassion.

Uncle Tom and Sister Maria

The two best-selling books in the US before the Civil War were Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery. On the surface, these two could not be more unalike. Stowe’s work dramatized the moral arguments of abolitionism, changing hearts and minds about slavery, while Monk’s book offered sensational anti-Catholicism. Yet the two works were stories of their age, each focusing primarily on female sexual purity, marriage, and the family. Abolition and anticonvent literature shocked readers with descriptions of rape, torn-apart marriages, and mother–child separations. Depictions of the “erotic South” and “priests’ brothels for women” (convents) contrasted with the era’s vision of “true womanhood,” companionate marriage, and happy homes. This chapter explores how abolitionists and convent opponents advanced their movements by presenting slavery and convents as a threat to womanhood and the family, revealing how these domestic ideals shaped some of the era’s most significant moments.

Y Gymraes (The Welshwoman): Ambivalent Domesticity in Women’s Welsh-language Interwar Print Media

This chapter offers a case study of the Welsh-language women’s monthly domestic magazine, Y Gymraes (The Welshwoman). The first magazine called Y Gymraes was founded in 1850 in response to accusations of immorality against Welsh women made in the 1847 Reports of the Commissioners of Enquiry into the State of Education in Wales. The chapter focuses on the second incarnation of the magazine, published between 1896 and 1934, which was the official magazine of the Temperance movement in Wales. Women’s publications in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Wales have begun to receive critical attention over the past few decades, but little has been written about their development during the interwar years. This chapter seeks to remedy this by examining conflicting notions of Welsh and British womanhood in the domestic ideals presented by the magazine at a time of increased Welsh national consciousness.

Raising Government Children

In the 1930s, buoyed by the potential of the New Deal, child welfare reformers hoped to formalize and modernize their methods, partly through professional casework but more importantly through the loving care of temporary, substitute families. Today, however, the foster care system is widely criticized for failing the children and families it is intended to help. How did a vision of dignified services become virtually synonymous with the breakup of poor families and a disparaged form of "welfare" that stigmatizes the women who provide it, the children who receive it, and their families? Tracing the evolution of the modern American foster care system from its inception in the 1930s through the 1970s, this book argues that deeply gendered, domestic ideals, implicit assumptions about the relative value of poor children, and the complex public/private nature of American welfare provision fueled the cultural resistance to funding maternal and parental care. What emerged was a system of public social provision that was actually subsidized by foster families themselves, most of whom were concentrated toward the socioeconomic lower half, much like the children they served. Analyzing the ideas, debates, and policies surrounding foster care and foster parents' relationship to public welfare, Rymph reveals the framework for the building of the foster care system and draws out its implications for today's child support networks.

Womanly Women and Moral Uplift

Imagery surrounding the female readers on the Chautauqua tent circuit reflected appropriately domestic ideals. Chautauqua, which lasted from approximately 1904 to 1930, was a commercial venture with “talent” supplied by regional entertainment bureaus. The brochures compiled by the Redpath Bureau document ensembles known as concert companies, which regularly featured women “readers.” Due to Chautauqua’s conservative audiences, spoken word performers worked to distinguish themselves from actresses, through women were sometimes marketed to audiences based on their attractiveness. Readers accompanied themselves in pianologues, such as those by Clay Smith, or recited to others’ accompaniments in musical readings. In spite of the tensions between its highbrow ideals and the necessity of presenting more popular middlebrow entertainment, Chautauqua had a wide cultural impact in rural America.

‘A house divided’

HGTV (Home and Garden Television) is an American cable channel devoted to property TV, with programs that combine lifestyle and reality, demonstrating the rewards of home investments. Despite the focus on domestic property and the well-styled home, the programs are generally considered bland, and the cumulative impact of the network’s simple, formulaic programs is considered relaxing and even comforting. But some HGTV programs prominently feature domestic conflict as part of their repetitive narrative formula, disturbing the domestic ideals that the network promotes. While pat endings for individual episodes restore domestic harmony and unity through new (or renewed) domestic space, domestic disputes serve as a persistent reminder of everyday domestic discontent. This emerges in the shows with narratives that highlight conflict – House Hunters, House Hunters International and Love It or List It. But the implications resonate further in the context of the broader esthetic-textual dynamics of HGTV. Repetition within episodes, between episodes of any given show, among many different shows, and in the programming schedule makes the ‘happy endings’ as transitory as the domestic disputes that dominate individual episodes. HGTV programs are lifestyle–reality hybrids that promote quality lifestyle through reality-styled drama. The same textual strategies that demonstrate quality lifestyle also open the door to a lingering sense of domestic unease.