ABSTRACT
Motherhood was a vital part of the lives of middle-class wives In Victorian England, but very few studies have treated the phenomenon and none has dealt with the most important perspective on the subject, the viewpoint of the mother herself. The function of bearing children has long been considered part of nature’s plan and therefore either inconsequential or, at least, because of its fundamentally unchanging nature, not susceptible to historical analysis. Yet middle-class women in the nineteenth century who became mothers did have some distinctive attitudes toward motherhood and were groping for some new approaches. With them, and doubtless with many other groups of women in the past, motherhood did have a history.
