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H. R. French, Joanne Bailey. Parenting in England, 1760–1830: Emotion, Identity, and Generation., The American Historical Review, Volume 118, Issue 3, June 2013, Pages 928–929, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/118.3.928a
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Peter Burke has observed that the history of emotions is “one of nuances.” Joanne Bailey's book exemplifies this. As with her earlier monograph on domestic violence, this study offers an extremely sensitive, historiographically wide-ranging, and methodologically innovative consideration of the subject of parenthood and parenting from the perspectives of both parents and children. She concentrates on two broad areas of the parent-child relationship: “emotionology,” that is, the ways in which emotions were restrained, controlled, and encouraged by and through discursive norms across the period; and “emotional communities,” that is, the groups created by shared experiences, similar interests, and common styles of behavior in relation to parenting. Her work explores these two dimensions by considering the emotions produced by the parent-child relationship, the complexities inherent in accounts of parenting (spanning the divide between individuals and groups), and how parents and children reflected upon their experiences over time.
In the context of the literature on parenting and gender, Bailey's work is innovative in several respects. First, as in her book on domestic violence, she investigates the subject by assembling a greater variety of sources than has so far been used by existing studies, which have focused primarily on conduct literature, family correspondence, or biographical/autobiographical accounts. Bailey employs all of these materials, including substantial letter collections from four “(upper) middle-class” families and forty-five autobiographies or biographical accounts. In addition, she uses extensive collections of pauper letters; trial pamphlets; fiction, poetry, and ballads; medical literature on child-rearing; religious tracts and conversion narratives; and sketches, drawings, and material objects (notably ceramics). Second, as a consequence, Bailey moves seamlessly between individual expressions or behavior and collective/mass cultural norms or patterns. She can embed specific parent-child feelings within a broader cultural context and ground the general strictures of advice or medical literature within particular instances of family life. Third, Bailey concentrates on “embodied” experiences of parenting in the first section of the book, particularly the physical sensations of parental love such as parental embraces, nursing sick children, playing with young children, and the emotional fulfillment and anxiety that such experiences provoked. This follows the recent trend in histories of gender and the body to try to interpret cultural representations and discourses through embodied experiences and practices.
