Centuries of solace

by Wendy Simonds

Since the late 1970s, the grief of women who experienced miscarriage, stillbirth, or the death of an infant has been an increasingly visible topic in mainstream American publications. Wendy Simonds and Barbara Katz Rothman look to nineteenth-century women's magazines and later to confession magazines to explore the antecedents of modern writings on maternal grief and the information they convey about women from each period. This is the first book that analyzes popular consolation literature as it changed over two centuries. The authors include a large selection of the writings they view as social records that recognize and legitimize women's experience. Women's magazines of the last century, such as Godey's Lady's Book and Petersen's, ran numerous poems, stories, and essays in which women writers shared their grief through symbolic language and Christian evangelism. Such expressions brought together middle-class women's views about motherhood and religion, the two most crucial institut