Graduation Year
2026
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree
Ph.D.
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)
Degree Granting Department
English
Major Professor
John Lennon, Ph.D.
Committee Member
Philip Sipiora, Ph.D.
Committee Member
Cynthia Patterson, Ph.D.
Committee Member
Maria Cizmic, Ph.D.
Committee Member
Michelle Hughes-Miller, Ph.D.
Keywords
American literature, domestic ideology, feminist studies, motherhood studies, women and gender studies
Abstract
This dissertation examines how American women writers of the 19th and early 20th centuries constructed, contested, and reimagined motherhood as both a lived experience and a powerful social institution. Drawing on feminist theory and motherhood studies—particularly Adrienne Rich’s distinction between motherhood as experience and motherhood as institution and Shari Thurer’s definition of the “good mother”—it argues that this institution and ideology were never stable or universally attainable. Instead, it functioned as a shifting, exclusionary construct shaped by race, class, industrial capitalism, and patriarchal authority. Through close readings of domestic literature, poetry, fiction, and reformist texts by writers including Elizabeth Oakes Smith, Lydia Maria Child, Margaret Fuller, Sojourner Truth, Toni Morrison, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Frances E.W. Harper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Kate Chopin, Betty Smith, and Angelina Weld Grimké, this study traces three key historical moments: the rise of the mother as primary caregiver in the early 19th century, the emergence of the “Angel in the House” ideal in the Victorian period, and the rise of scientific motherhood in the early 20th century. Across these periods, maternal ideology intensifies rather than disappears, increasingly regulating women’s bodies, labor, and authority. By foregrounding working-class and Black maternal figures alongside white elite representations, this dissertation reveals how motherhood functioned as an exclusionary tool that reinforced racial and class hierarchies. At the same time, it demonstrates that women’s literary responses consistently exposed the contradictions and violences embedded in these ideals. Ultimately, this project reframes motherhood as a contested cultural site where women writers negotiated agency, resistance, and survival within—and against—restrictive social systems.
Scholar Commons Citation
Shkurti, Zabrina L., "Representations of Motherhood in 19th and 20th Century American Literature" (2026). USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations.
https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/etd/11417
