ABSTRACT
The marriage of motherhood and sentimentality in America seems an inevitable union, for nineteenth-century perceptions of the maternal were often covalently connected to the culture of the feelings. Motherhood was perceived as a fundamentally affective role in the nineteenth century, and women’s moral authority and cultural prestige were immanent in their
selfless, sympathetic care of family. An 1852 Godey’s Lady’s Book article entitled “The Mother’s Love,” reveals the imagined emotional core of the maternal office:
Figuring maternity as a bridge between contending forces, as the very source of “social union,” this portrait of motherhood is the perfect model of the sympathetic engagement on which the sentimental relies.
