Abstract
This thesis is a reappraisal of domestic child-rearing practices amongst the English Georgian elite. It argues that contrary to the established notion that the eighteenth century saw medical and pedagogical experts persuading receptive upper-class parents to overturn the archaic and interventionist child-rearing practices of their predecessors, elite Georgian mothers – acting autonomously, knowledgeably, and authoritatively, and in line with mainstream medical opinion – were already well informed about best practice. An examination of how mothers, aunts, and grandmothers from this social set understood and dealt with some of the most common childhood afflictions (smallpox, teething, worms, rickets, scrofula, and consumption) reveals a remarkably active community of women making informed decisions about how best to protect and future-proof their children’s bodies at a time when those bodies – which were still conceptualised within the terms of humoral physiology – stood little chance of escaping disease and deformity without a mother’s unremitting attention and constant management.These women were emblematic of a vibrant culture of motherhood, whose shared knowledge, experience, and authority effectively set the child-rearing standards for the day. By reconstructing events from the perspective of those ultimately responsible for children’s physical welfare in this period, rather than from the perspective of an emerging discourse that sought to disenfranchise traditional female advice, this is a history from – not below, but – the place where women held greatest social authority. Far from having the domain of childcare removed from their sphere of influence, elite Georgian women possessed remarkable agency and moral authority over the health, wellbeing, and survival of their children. Offering an important new perspective on domestic childcare in a period where ‘men of science and sense’ supposedly re-wrote the rules of child-rearing, this thesis contributes to a number of historical fields including histories of: family, childhood, parent-child relations, patient-practitioner relations, domestic medicine, women, gender, the body, pain, and the emotions.
| Date of Award | 1 Jul 2022 |
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| Original language | English |
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| Supervisor | Anna Maerker (Supervisor) & Rowan Boyson (Supervisor) |