Can I read Motherhood, Respectability and Baby-Farming in Victorian and Edwardian London on EtoBox?

Motherhood, Respectability and Baby-Farming in Victorian and Edwardian London by Joshua G. Stuart-Bennett is a book available to read on EtoBox.

What is Motherhood, Respectability and Baby-Farming in Victorian and Edwardian London about?

Motherhood, Respectability and Baby-Farming in Victorian and Edwardian London explores a largely obscured marketplace of motherhood that provided ways for women to manage the stigma of illegitimacy and their respectable identities within Victorian and Edwardian society. It focuses on the extent of women’s ‘dirty work’, when maternal problem management was fundamental to the general maintenance of respectability and, by extension, to Empire and Civilisation.Despite its intrigue, history has struggled to understand and represent an uncomfortable but significant artefact of Western modernising society: ‘baby-farming’. During a period when ideologies of respectability and civilisation arguably mattered most, the ‘right’ kind of parenthood – especially motherhood – became paramount. As the ‘wrong’ offspring could jeopardise a woman’s chances of being respectable, a wholesale, informal, and somewhat clandestine marketplace emerged that catered to various maternal difficulties. Within this marketplace, a pregnancy or newborn child who may have compromised a woman’s respectability could be ‘disposed’ of through different means, for a fee. From the Victorian period to the present, the comme

Author

Joshua G. Stuart-Bennett

Publisher

Routledge

Published

2023

Language

EN