SOURCE: “The Mother's Lament: Nineteenth-Century Consolation Literature” in Centuries of Solace: Expressions of Maternal Grief in Popular Literature, Temple University Press, 1992, 33-104.

In the following excerpt, Simonds and Rothman explore the various ways in which mothers expressed their grief at the death of a child in the context of nineteenth-century American culture.

The literary forms women have used to describe their experiences of pregnancy loss and infant death have changed over the past two hundred years, but women's primary purposes in writing about these events have remained constant. From the nineteenth century to the present, American women's writing about infant death has served as a means of self-expression for its writers as well as an aid to other women coping with grief. The existence of literature created for bereaved mothers in the nineteenth century shows that the suffering of bereaved mothers is not just a modern cultural phenomenon...