Periodicals like The Mother's Magazine, British Mother’s Magazine, and The Mother’s Friend played a prominent role in the development of a uniquely Victorian maternal ideology. These periodicals added to the discussions in which many conduct manuals, cookbooks, sermons, and lectures engaged. Some major works involved in this discourse included Mrs. J. Bakewell’s 1836 The Mother’s Practical Guide in the Early Training of her Children, Sarah
Stickney Ellis’s 1843 The Mothers of England, Isabella Beeton’s 1861 The Book of Household Management, and John Ruskin’s 1864 “Of Queen’s Gardens.” Together, texts and lectures like these created a strong sense of duty surrounding maternity. We have seen how such works helped establish the idea that maternity was instinctual. This section examines how the focus of advice literature shifted throughout the mid-century, teaching mothers how to properly perform the maternal duties that were no longer seen as innate while still placing stringent expectations upon mothers.
Victorian advice literature saturated the conversation about women’s roles, and Jane Long has discussed the contradictory nature of the messages it conveyed. According to Long, “There was no shortage of voices telling mothers how best to meet the challenge that lay before them . . . At once mothering was cast as both the most 'natural' state, and as a precarious role whose success was determined by the vicissitudes of social and economic life, morality, and education.” While early advice literature highlighted what was expected of mothers, it was not until the mid-late 1850s that it began clearly explaining how women should go about adhering to maternal expectations. Deborah Gorham has shown that “motherhood came to be defined as a skill that had to be learned,” noting that “the modernisation of motherhood implied a willingness to seek advice and information from those who were considered to have an expertise based on systematic knowledge” (65).
Charles Pardey’s 1857 guide for mothers points out the change of attitude toward maternal education that was occurring in the mid-1850’s. Pardey laments, “It is the misfortune of young mothers, that by the ideas of female education prevalent in this country, it is considered right that they should be left in ignorance of all that relates to early infancy, so that they are compelled to undertake the maternal responsibility without any previous instructions as to the
proper method of discharging the duties entailed upon them” (7-8). Clearly, people were discovering the necessity of educating mothers about day-to-day aspects of childrearing and questioning the evangelical version of the ideal laid out in early magazines. Still, the notion prevailed that a mother’s primary task was to care for her children’s moral and spiritual welfare.
In 1860, after the push to educate mothers had begun, The Mother’s Thorough Resource Book demonstrated the blend between emerging maternal notions and earlier ones that continued to maintain an ideological hold. “The instruction of a child in religious faith, religious
sentiments, and religious principle, is a duty which specially devolves upon the mother,” the text noted, demonstrating the continued importance, at least to some, of religious sentiments
(Mother’s 236). At the same time, however, the book called itself “a work of purely practical nature,” and it enumerated in detail many pragmatic aspects of the management of children (Mother’s 223). Thus, while showing that religious notions were still at play in later maternal ideologies, The Mother’s Thorough Resource Book likewise demonstrated how the need to provide mothers with practical guidance was blending with former advice practices.
Despite providing pragmatic advice, these later writings did not make it easy for women to perform maternal norms. Rather, because they aimed to address a major social concern, they enhanced the pressure for mothers to meet the standards of maternal expectations. The
instinctual nature of motherhood was called into question largely in response to high infant mortality rates, leading advocates for maternal education to insist that proper maternal training could save children’s lives. Advice literature began to address more specific aspects of daily motherhood, with much advice directed at caring for “infants,” a term that seems to have somewhat indiscriminately referred to children under the age of either five or seven. An article from an 1859 issue of The English Woman’s Journal expressly lays out the crisis to which advice
literature of the mid-late 1850s responds. It explains, “The rate of infant mortality among our and other civilized communities, is something unparalleled in all creation. Out of every hundred of our little ones, thirty are cut down . . . before five summer’s suns have shown upon them, and a great part of the remainder grow up weak and sickly” (“Details” 219).
An article in The Englishwoman’s Review and Home Newspaper from the same year blamed the high infant mortality rate on general lack of sanitary knowledge, suggesting that mothers must learn to properly care for children in order to save lives. Noting that “sanitary science is in its infancy,” the writer lamented mothers making ill-informed choices like “soothing their babes with laudanum,” but remarked that efforts were being made to educate mothers (“Health” 234). “To remedy this crying evil a society has been formed,” the article explains, which “has already published several useful tracts” (“Health” 243). This society was the Ladies’ Sanitary Association, which formed both to help improve society and to teach mothers to care for their children. This association became a large contributor to the mid-late 1850’s push to
disseminate practical advice to mothers; it published tracts and pamphlets on various topics related to physically caring for children, such as How to Manage a Baby and The Cheap Doctor.
These short tracts were not the only works that aimed to teach mothers how to care for their children’s health, as much advice literature of the time had similar goals. Advice columns appeared in most domestic magazines, and texts like A Few Friendly Words to Young Mothers (1856), The Mother’s Nursery Guide (1857), The Mother’s Best Book: or Nursery Companion (1859), and The Mother’s Thorough Resource-Book (1860) aimed to provide simple, practical advice on caring for the health of young children. The advice pamphlet A Few Friendly Words to Young Mothers was published in 1856, with a dedication to Dr. J.T. Conquest. The dedication and Dr. Conquest’s introductory letter validated the book by suggesting that a medical doctor
sanctioned the text’s suggestions. In his letter of approval, Dr. Conquest wrote, “I have read the proof very carefully, and, so far as the Pamphlet goes, it contains much sound useful advice, and many important suggestions” (v). Dr. Conquest's endorsement helped validate this pamphlet as a useful parenting tool for two reasons. First, it enhanced the credibility of the author,
demonstrating that she had both experience and the opinion of a medical expert to support her ideas. Second, it reminded readers that this pamphlet, although written by a mother, was not like earlier advice literature. Instead, it blended experience with medical knowledge and focused on more practical, physical aspects of childrearing. Priced at sixpence per pamphlet and directing much attention toward the importance of overseeing nurses, it was clearly geared toward middle- class mothers.
Like other texts aiming to educate mothers and reduce infant mortality rates, A Few Friendly Words to Young Mothers increased the pressure on middle-class mothers. It reiterated that caring for her children should be a middle-class woman's primary occupation, and it
suggested that mothers should be willing to give up other pleasures in order to carefully monitor their children. “I pray you, Young Mothers,” the author pleaded, “if you have any regard for the happiness of your dear ones, to ‘hover’ about them” (Few 2). The book suggested that mothers were better caregivers than nurses, explaining, “A mother’s quick eye, her sympathy with the sufferings, her watchfulness of the wants of her child, are more keen than the cold experience of mere hirelings” (Few 3). Although attempting to avoid alienating mothers who were more concerned with social functions, the book still ultimately suggested that mothers should give up their own pleasures for their children. “Far be it from me to wish young mothers to sacrifice themselves to their family, or to relinquish the pleasures of society,” the text noted, although it clearly suggested a middle-class mother should avoid leaving her children with nurses to attend
to other duties (Few 3). “A moderate attention to the duties we owe to society is, generally speaking, quite consistent with a fulfillment of the claims of home,” the author explained, “but whenever they are likely to clash . . . do not hesitate how to choose” (Few 3).
A Few Friendly Words to Young Mothers followed the later trend of providing practical advice, but it also held loosely to earlier tenets of maternal ideology by indicating that a mother’s instinct was better than acquired knowledge about childcare. For instance, while the book did not support relying on nurses, it recognized that most middle-class mothers employed nurses and offered advice for managing them. Despite recognizing that many nurses had undergone training and had much experience in childcare, though, the book still suggested that mothers trust their own feelings over the nurse's experience. While this pamphlet provided many more practical details than most advice texts published before the mid-1850s, its advice placed an even stronger burden on the mother, playing into the expectation that a mother be ever present and ever
watchful over her children.
The Mother’s Best Book: or Nursery Companion, published in 1859, had a similar aim as A Few Friendly Words to Young Mothers. It provided practical advice to mothers who needed help dealing with different medical issues their babies might face. Laid out like a magazine, its cover was filled with scare tactics to convince readers of the book’s necessity. It contained a quote attributed to the Registrar’s Statistics in large bold letters at the top of the front cover, which stated, “Forty babies out of every hundred die before they are five years of age.”12 The
12 This statistic differs from the one previously referenced in the1859 issue of The English
Woman’s Journal. If the numbers provided in the Registrar General’s report from the same year (published in 1861) are correct, it is possible that both magazines were providing inflated
content provided information about details like suckling, weaning, and treating diseases as serious as bronchitis, small-pox, whooping cough, measles, and croup, all in attempt to decrease the number of deaths among young children. At a price of only two pence, it opened medical advice to mothers with meager financial means. The Mother’s Best Book blatantly blamed mothers and caregivers for the high infant mortality rate, claiming on the top center of the cover, “More children die from ill-nursing than from disease.” Although the tone of the actual writing was much less harsh, the existence of such rhetoric in large, bold print on the cover perpetuated the idea that bad mothers were harming children.
Such texts heightened pressures on mothers for multiple reasons. First, texts like The Mother’s Best Book blamed mothers for infant deaths, and second, they perpetuated a set of increasingly complicated expectations. They often followed the example of earlier advice literature by asserting that a mother’s most important duty was to tend to the moral and spiritual welfare of her children. Even The Mother’s Best Book,meant to teach mothers how to care for their children in order to decrease the number of child deaths in England, attested that moral care was a mother’s most important task. “The moral care of children is the most sacred duty that can devolve on woman—one of the highest trusts committed to her care,” it explains (Mother’s 15). Unlike earlier advice literature, however, The Mother’s Best Book did offer more pragmatic advice about morally training children. It explained, for instance, “Crying is the defensive weapon of a child, and if this resistance is successful, by the yielding of the nurse or mother, she
105,849 deaths of children under one year of age. This statistic would make the death rate
15.34% of infants, or approximately fifteen out of every 100 births, although it is more difficult to determine the number of children under the age of five who died during a specific period of time (Twenty-Second).
will often find difficulty in regaining her lost dominion” (Mother’s 15). Further, the book suggested, “Children are readily perceptible of feelings of jealousy. Therefore allow no marked preference to be shown. Such error is the common source of envy and hatred in a family” (15). Thus, while such texts perpetuated maternal expectations and complicated the maternal role, they usually also accomplished some aim toward explaining to mothers how to go about living up to social expectations.