eighteenth century. She is the author of two books: Laboring Mothers: Reproducing Women and Work in the Eighteenth Century (2023) and Social Reform in Gothic Writing: Fantastic Forms of Change, 1764-1834 (2013). She has published widely on women’s cultural history and Gothic writing in journals such as Studies in Romanticism, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, Women’s Writing, and Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture.
Ledoux applied the “Page 99 Test” to Laboring Mothers and reported the following:
Page 99 of Laboring Mothers falls at the end of an introductory section entitled “Martial Ventriloquism: Crafting the ‘Woman Warrior’ Persona” that is about the ways in which famous (or infamous) female soldiers of the eighteenth century were unable to tell their own stories on stage and in print due to their class status and relative illiteracy. At this point, we find one of the chapter’s heroines, Hannah Snell, signing an affidavit in front of the Lord Mayor of London with her mark, an “+,” to signify the veracity of her story as printed by her handler and amanuensis, Robert Walker. So, while Snell’s narrative purports to be non-fiction—Walker maintains that “we chose to entertain our Readers with Real Facts”—many questions are raised about veracity and representation on this page. These questions have bearing on life writing as a genre in the eighteenth century, and, most importantly, on how issues of class status affect how that life’s story of motherhood is told.Visit Ellen Malenas Ledoux's website.
If a browsing reader were to pick up my book at page 99, that reader would have keen insight into one of the book’s main contentions: that the more marginalized a maternal figure is within systems of power and privilege, the less likely she is to be able to parry critiques about her working motherhood. Indeed, the book is divided into 3 main sections—“speaking for herself,” “spoken for,” and “spoken about”—each of which contain 2 chapters delineating the representation of working maternity. In “speaking for herself,” the 2 chapters on mother-actresses and midwives demonstrate how women who had the power to self-fashion through print, portraiture, or public speech leveraged the ideals of eighteenth-century motherhood to frame themselves as better workers or better mothers or both. Contrast this rhetorical sleight of hand with figures such as Snell and Christian Davies whose poverty, illiteracy, and gender nonconformity placed them on the fringes of a society that either sidelined or maligned their respective experience of motherhood. In the ensuing chapter, “Abortive Attempts,” racial oppression runs so deep that imagining or retelling stories of successful mothering within chattel slavery becomes impossible for Mary Prince: the first woman to publish a slave narrative. In the final 2 chapters, itinerant traders and prostitutes become conflated as women whose work in the London streets renders motherhood both an inevitable status but one which paradoxically must be given up for the worker to be successful at her trade. In the book’s Afterword, I trace how these eighteenth-century constructs still pervade our ideas about mothering. Little has changed in how working motherhood is either lauded or demonized based on how closely a woman conforms to a white, middle-class, cisgender, heteronormative ideal in the age of the “supermom.”
--Marshal Zeringue
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