The Gentleman's Daughter (17 page)

Such sentiments were not confined to interested parties and moral guardians. Jane Scrimshire who was a long-standing friend, close in age, worldly and a young mother herself, also wrote in philosophic vein preaching resignation:

John Parker died that March. Elizabeth Parker clearly reassured the family with a relatively calm acceptance of her loss, since Aunt Pellet recorded her ‘great satisfaction’ at ‘how well! you Madm know your Duty which consequently leads to the vertue of resignation to the unerring dispensations of Providence’. Elizabeth Parker was safely delivered of a son and heir twenty-three days later, amid a flurry of letters of congratulation and relief. Aunt Pellet hoped Elizabeth would be ‘so sensible of her
present blessings
as to forget all
past troubles
’.
⁵

Sixty years later a comparable crisis galvanized the women of the Whitaker network. In February 1814 the health of Robert Robbins, a London barrister and father of four was failing fast, to the obvious distress of his Lancashire-born wife Anne Eliza Robbins. Mary Whitehead, her elder sister, rushed from Preston to Lincoln's Inn Fields to offer comfort and support – a service deemed particularly necessary since Anne Robbins was ‘in the family way’, six months pregnant with her fifth child. By early March Robbins was dead and his wife utterly prostrated with grief. She was nursed through the immediate shock of her bereavement by her capable sister. Two London friends kept the household afloat and supervised the children. Lancashire kin were sent regular bulletins on the widow's mental state.
⁶
After two days delirious with grief, Anne Robbins found the strength to write to her niece, revealing her agonized struggle to bear Robbins's death with proper Christian resignation:

Her kindred were shocked by her plight and did not attempt to play down the magnitude of the tragedy. Anne's parents believed ‘the loss of such a husband [is] almost irreparable, but we must all submit to the will of the almighty’.
⁸
Eliza Whitaker rushed to London, despite her own ill health, in order to console her aunt in this disastrous spring. As the confinement approached, ‘a great test’, the older children were farmed out to the London friends. On 31 May 1814 Anne Robbins was safely delivered of a daughter.

Eliza Whitaker must have alerted her Lancashire friends to Anne Robbins's plight, since details of the drama reverberated throughout the Whitaker network in the spring of 1814. Intense sympathy for Mrs Robbins was widely expressed. She had been deprived of both her husband and a father for her small children, at a time when she could least afford the loss:

Resignation was seen to be the only course open to the widow, though she was considered better equipped than most to endure and submit, by virtue of her distinctive piety: ‘from her religious mind she will better enabled to undergo suffering’.
¹⁰
Above all, the women of the Whitaker network were convinced that, in time, Mrs Robbins would find comfort in her children (‘the many blessings she has left behind’) and consolation in her role as a mother.
¹¹
Recovering from labour, Anne Robbins found ‘so much cause for
thankfulness
’, because her ‘bodily sufferings’ had been comparatively slight. She assured her concerned nieces that she had ‘acquired a degree of composure … once thought impossible’, and was exerting herself against grief for the sake of the children. Asking after a Lancashire subscription
for an afflicted widow, Mrs Robbins preached the sermon she herself had received: ‘Poor Mrs Johnson how much has she occupied my thoughts, her situation is indeed truly
pitiable
, God grant it may improve and that she may recover to perform her duty to her Children with
placid satisfaction
…’
¹²

The letters generated by these two crises reveal the Anglican vernacular of the 1750s and 1810s. In response to bereavement both the Parker and Whitaker networks expressed an uncomplicated, unenthusiastic spirituality, preaching resignation to the irreparable and grateful acceptance of available consolations. At her father's death Elizabeth Parker was urged to reconcile herself to that which happened in all families: the inevitable succession of the generations. However, at the premature death of a young husband, the Whitaker network could make no appeals to the reassurance of the natural. Luckily, Anne Robbins was noted for ‘religious feelings’, which were expected to provide mysterious solace beyond the comprehension of ordinary churchgoers. Nevertheless, both the Parker and the Whitaker networks invoked God's providence as the arch determinant of life's joys and afflictions and to which it was wise to be reconciled. The woebegone were routinely directed to the book of Job.

Beyond their general assumptions about life and death, these crises also convey the particular fears surrounding pregnancy for the expectant mother and the unborn child. They testify to the place of pregnancy and childbirth in female culture. Pregnancy was first and foremost a woman's drama, a period of special vulnerability and a subject of shared female concern.
¹³
Pregnancy, confinement and children were everyday themes of women's letters across the centuries. In moments of tragedy it was female kin who were believed best qualified to advise and assist. For, as the celebrated midwife Sarah Stone put it, ‘there is a tender regard one Woman bears to another, and a natural Sympathy in those that have gone thro' the Pangs of Childbearing; which doubtless, occasion a compassion for those that labour under those circumstances, which no man can be the judge of.’
¹⁴
The Parker and Whitaker correspondents shared an overarching conviction that a woman's
raison d'être
was motherhood. The Parker crisis gave rise to explicit prescriptions of female duty, while the Whitaker letters carried tacit assumptions about woman's natural role. Whether her role was believed to be entirely natural or enjoined and learned, in 1750 as in 1820 a married woman was primarily a mother, before she was a daughter or a sister. Whether, in the final analysis, a woman's obligations to her children were seen to outweigh the claims of her husband is a more difficult question. Given paternal expectations and dynastic pretensions, conflict between the role of good wife and good
mother was probably comparatively rare. Yet the fragmentary evidence that exists on the issue suggests the potential for tension. A case in the Chester church courts is suggestive on this point. One of the very few admissions of female retaliation in marital conflict was justified by the claim that the children had been injured by their father.
¹⁵
By implication, outraged motherhood justified the abandonment of wifely submission. However, this rare privileging of maternal duty over patriarchal respect apart, it appears that no absolute hierarchy of roles was conventionally agreed amongst the genteel. Nevertheless, maternity was one of the defining features of most women's lives throughout the period, as doubtless in all periods.

The institution of motherhood has been the subject of historical controversy. Historians of the family, of women and of medicine have all offered sweeping analyses of the place, power and emotions of mothers over time. It is the history of the family, and in particular of childhood, which provides the most widely known chronology. In brief, it has been claimed that the early modern period was a miserable time to be a child: no allowances were made for immaturity, discipline was rigidly enforced, warmth and affection were absent. Thus, parenting was cold and distant business; infant mortality left mothers unmoved since ‘maternal instinct’ had not yet been invented. In the eighteenth century, so the story goes, a revised view of children emphasized their innocence and unique individuality, permissive child-care regimes were established, parents displayed benevolent affection and women became ‘natural’ mothers. From here, parent–child relations steadily progressed to the apparently happy families of liberal modernity.
¹⁶
Unsurprisingly, this thesis has been pretty thoroughly dismantled by a new generation of scholars. The story proved at its weakest in the presentation of unremitting misery and severity in the seventeenth-century family – a picture which was laughably easy to disprove using letters, diaries and depositions, which revealed widespread emotional investment in children.
¹⁷
By contrast, the vision of Augustan improvement has proved harder to dislodge among non-specialists, who tend to see the decline of swaddling, wet-nursing and so on as the advent of mother love.
¹⁸
However, in stressing the continuities in good parenting from around 1600 to the present, the revisionists unwittingly invoked ‘instinct’ as an historical constant, implying that the force of ‘nature’ is immutable and inescapable – an uncomfortable suggestion for historians and feminists alike. Nevertheless, it is surely possible to accept that some elements of human experience are remarkably enduring without either endorsing an anti-feminist agenda, or suggesting that the family remains utterly the same down through time.
¹⁹
The core of parenthood may indeed
be biologically determined, but it is also framed by changing social and economic institutions and understood through a history of changing ideas and social values.

Women's history, by contrast, has long been firmly committed to a vision of the cultural construction of motherhood.
²⁰
Consistent with the conventional wisdom that separate gender spheres emerged in the later eighteenth century is the notion that between 1780 and 1850 women became newly defined as moral mothers, virtuous guardians of the nursery and domestic hearth.
²¹
A very similar argument tying the exaltation of motherhood to the development of capitalism (‘the counterpart to land enclosure at home and imperialism abroad’) is also current amongst scholars of eighteenth-century literature, although the phenomenon is usually back-dated to the middle decades of the eighteenth century. So eighteenth-century motherhood was ‘a newly elaborated social and sexual identity for women’, which, in tandem with the novel concept of ‘bourgeois womanhood’, redefined women as asexual beings and colonized the female body for domestic life.
²²
This old story has been freshly bolstered by Laqueur's argument that a new model of gender difference triumphed among medical theorists from the late seventeenth century, a model which emphasized the extreme physiological contrasts between men and women's bodies, supplanting the classical view derived from Galen which had emphasized the anatomical similarities – the vagina was but the penis inverted, and so on. By 1700 women were no longer seen as less evolved versions of men, rather as innately different beings with a distinct nervous system and separate set of biological impulses.
²³
Thus, Anthony Fletcher concluded a recent synthesis with the statement ‘the ideology of difference made possible the positive and idealised notions of domestic nurturance and emotional warmth which gave the wife and mother her place in society’.
²⁴
Motherhood as a social role was an eighteenth-century invention.

Is this plausible? After all, whether ordained by God or determined by nature, motherhood was a virtually inescapable institution for married women throughout the centuries. Research on the maternal ideals and practice of earlier periods suggests that eighteenth-century consecrations of natural motherhood were far from unprecedented. Judging from Patricia Crawford's analysis of seventeenth-century advice manuals, the ideal good woman had long been the good mother. Breast-feeding was justified by examples from nature; instances of infallible maternal instinct had anecdotal currency; and a mother's inability to love her offspring could lead to the diagnosis of insanity. Seventeenth-century women set
great store by their maternal experiences and used their maternity to claim authority. Victorian mothers would have no difficulty in recognizing the gender roles described here: ‘the rearing of children under seven was women's work and it was their natural function. Men in turn were expected to exercise authority over their families, to support them financially and to play a role in the education of older children.’
²⁵
So far, so familiar.

How convincing then is the argument that the eighteenth century saw the discovery of organic difference between men and women? Academic medical theory apart, there is plenty of evidence that men and women had seen themselves as quintessentially physically different from each other for centuries. The long-standing taboos surrounding menstruation, for instance, bespeak an enduring vision of woman as the mysterious other – unclean and in lifelong thrall to her unpredictable womb.
²⁶
Nor can a belief in natural feminine virtue be confined to the eighteenth century. Fenela Childs argues that although a fresh wave of cloying idealization set in from about 1710, the idealization of women was nothing new; visions of female nature had oscillated for centuries between the virtuous and the vicious. For all the early eighteenth-century praise of female purity and softness, there was no change whatsoever in the fundamental qualities expected of women. Whether the vision of the Madonna or the Magdalene was uppermost in male imaginings, the same modest demeanour was prescribed for women.
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