The Culture of Motherhood in Red, White, and Blue
Texts for Study Sigourney, Letters to Mothers Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter Piatt, selected works Chopin, The Awakening Crane, Maggie: a Girl of the Streets The art work of Mary Cassatt . . . and more
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Through the study of art, literature, film, and popular culture, this Studies in Culture course will explore how the idea of “motherhood” has been historically constructed in the United States. Foregrounding study in the matrifocal nineteenth century, we will examine the origins of the “American Madonna” and explore how she has haunted the American imagination since the antebellum period. This course will also consider writers and thinkers who willfully resist the idealization of motherhood and who present an alternative maternal discourse that more fully expresses the complex experience of women who are mothers. This Spring 2011 class will meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 3:30-4:45 pm. To enroll in this class, students must have earned a C or better in ENGL 1102. For more information, contact Mary Wearn at 471-2989 or mary.wearn@maconstate.edu | An Exploration of Maternal Ideology in the 19th-Century and Beyond “Still, patriotism is a virtue in our sex, and there is an office where it may be called into action . . . . It depends not on rank or wealth, the canvassings of party, or the fluctuations of the will of the people. Its throne is the heart, its revenue in Eternity. This office is that of maternal teacher. It is hers by hereditary right. Let her make it an inalienable possession." Lydia Sigourney
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