1847 & 1848 MOTHER'S MAGAZINE. Significant Magazine of the "New Motherhood" and Idealized Femininity

Two full years of Abigail Goodrich Whittelsey’s classic maternal periodical. She became active in the Maternal Association of Utica and was almost immediately chosen to edit its new periodical, the Mother's Magazine.

The magazine quickly became an important national institution. Through Whittelsey's influence and correspondence, the Maternal Associations grew in number in the United States and in Europe. The periodical ultimately reaching a circulation of 10,000, a very substantial readership for the period, and the most widely distributed female edited magazine in America at the time.

The Mother's Magazine was one of the founding documents of a distinctly American ideology of intensive, evangelical Christian motherhood. It both reflected and shaped what historians now call the "cult of true womanhood" or Republican motherhood, the idea that women began to occupy a large responsibility as the primary teachers of virtue in the new republic, with mothers bearing responsibility for the moral character of each generation of citizens. The magazine gave this ideology an institutional voice and a national network through the affiliated Maternal Associations, which reported from congregations across the country and, through the magazine, created something like a national community of practice around child-rearing.

Mrs. A. G. Whittelsey [ed.]. The Mother's Magazine. Published Monthly for 1847. New York. S. Whittelsey, Brick Church Chapel, 1847. 352pp.

Contents include: Family Symptoms; Report of the New Hampshire Maternal Association of Clergymen's Wives; Be Decided with Your Child; Difficulties in Domestic Jurisprudence - Too Much Legislation for Children; Good People's Children as Bad as Others; Cultivating Social Affection in Children; Parents and Teachers the Best Reformers; The Reciprocal Influence of Brothers and Sisters; Covenant Blessings; The Self Convicted Mother; We Would we Were a Child Againl; On the Death of Little Isabella; Cotton Mather's Rules for the Young; Education Children for the Present Times by Joel Hawes [with full page engraving]; Faith the Mother's Shield; Woman and Domestics; The Inquiry Meeting; The Young Missionary Widow; The Two Sisters - An Allegory; On the Conversion of Children; Abbott's Institution for the Education of Young Ladies - New York; On Cultivating Taste for Drawing; Prompt Obedience - The Rod; Preserve Your Teeth; A Dream of Heaven; What can Mothers Do in the Work of Missions; Woman's Tenderness; A Blessing on the Dance;  etc. 

Mrs. A. G. Whittelsey & Rev. D. Mead [eds.]. The Mother's Magazine. Published Monthly for 1848. New York. Brick Church Chapel. 1848. 384pp.

Contents include: Family Government; Christ at Nain by J. Alden; A Mother's Influence on Absent Children; The Little Worshippers; Female Influence; Maternal Training; God's Estimate of Filial Obedience; Thoughts on Death; A Spirit of Ridicule; Report of the Maternal Association of Wan-Watosa, Wisconsin; Dr. Thomas Chalmers and His Daughter; The Missionary's Sacrifice; Nursery Maxims; The Pious Mother's Thoughts; Influence of Mothers at the East upon the West [Wisconsin]; The Step-Mother; Errors in Family Discipline; The Family Meeting; Reverence to Parents; A Vision of the Night; John Bunyan at Elstow; The Peculiar Duties and Responsibilities of Ministers' Wives; Letters of Dr. and Mrs. E. C. Bridgman - Missionaries at Shanghai; Wayward Children; etc. 

A good + volume in half calf, some scattered foxing; binding a bit rubbed as shown with fading to the spine. 1847 volume bound without a general title page.