Maternalism

Influence of Victorian Industrial Period

Drawing upon notions of motherhood that emerged in the industrial period, where work and home and public and private became distinct and isolated spheres, maternalism elevates the work and lives of mothers and the values of mothering. As many sociologists and historians have shown, prior to the industrial period in the United States and western Europe, work and home were often integrated. Daily life for the majority of people included myriad seamless transitions from caring for the house and the children and more explicitly commercial endeavors, including both male-dominated trades and female-dominated household work. While women may have been responsible for the majority of childcare in preindustrial times, high rates of fertility, childhood mortality, and death in childbirth for both women and children, as well as early integration of children into work life, created a world in which both childhood and mothering were more practical and less idealized. In short, neither childhood nor mothering existed as the independent ideal-types identified in contemporary society.

Instead, childcare was one of many tasks that women engaged in, and women, overall, were less invested in mothering as their dominant responsibility or social identity. The development of a distinct separation between work and home created [Page 713]the groundwork for the contemporary ideals of motherhood and the ideology of maternalism. With industrialization, more men began working outside the home in the public sphere, and women's roles became focused on the home, producing an ideology of the “moral mother,” where women in the home were expected to serve as moral guides and nurturers to both their children and their husbands as a respite from the immoral and competitive public sphere.

This ideology of the “moral mother” asserts that the home is pure and innocent and the public sphere is corrupted. The implication of this transformation of the practice of childcare into the ideology of motherhood generates two related ideas about mothering. First, that women are inherently better suited for mothering because women are more moral, innocent, and uncorrupted; therefore, children may be best raised by women in order to protect children from the evils of the world. Second, that women may become transformed through the process of caring for children and husbands so that they become even more nurturing and supportive, and are therefore too fragile to be exposed to the evils and corruption of the public sphere. The historical creation of the Victorian ideals of motherhood is manifest today in the ideology of maternalism.

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