ABSTRACT
Harriet Beecher Stowe was no “typical” nineteenth-century mother, even when measured exclusively against her white, Northern, middle-class peers. Having garnered the finest, most progressive education available to a young woman of her day, she spent the bulk of her married life-not simply as maternal guardian of her domestic enclave-but also as the primary breadwinner for her family in a very public literary arena. As the mother of seven children and arguably the most successful American woman writer of the nineteenth century, Stowe struggled valiantly but often in vain to strike a sustainable balance between her fertility and creativity, between her professional and domestic duties.
