Augusta Webster’s Mother and Daughter and the only child debate

Abstract

The enduring debate about family size has roots in Victorian England, most notably in literary works addressing the issue of balancing motherhood and a writing career. One Victorian writer and activist, Augusta Webster (1837–1894), directly addressed the issue of family size in her uncompleted sonnet sequence Mother and Daughter (1895), which she began when her only child was a newborn. In this posthumous series of 14-line poems, Webster defends her decision to have one child and, in doing so, challenges popular assumptions that only women with multiple children could be considered ‘complete’, socially-acceptable mothers. Despite her efforts, however, and despite the rising popularity of one-child families, the results of numerous scientific studies and the lingering critiques of mommy blogs make it clear that challenges to mothers of ‘onlies’ remain.

Keywords:

• Augusta Webster
• sonnet
• mommy wars
• only child
• motherhood
• Victorian
• birth control
• women writers

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For more detailed statistics about perceptions of ideal family size, see ‘What is the Ideal Number of Children for a Family?’

2. In 2006, Deborah Siegel and Daphne Uviller published Only Child: Writers on the Singular Joys and Solitary Sorrows of Growing Up Solo. In ‘A Letter to My Second Child’, writer and comedian John Hodgman describes his only child experience as remarkably positive and nurturing: ‘The family of three is as stable as a triangle, unlikely to collapse, each point strengthening and relying on the other’ (Hodgman, 2006, p. 158). He continues: ‘The only child in a family without want is the apex of Western civilization’ (p. 159). Hodgman attributes a great deal of his success to the freedom he had as an only child to be his own person: ‘Assured of love and sustenance and space and time, the only child is free to cultivate idiosyncrasy’ (158).

3. Although Webster’s daughter is referred to as Davies Webster in some letters, this name is confirmed by Florence Boos’s copy of Mother and Daughter, which is inscribed to Margaret Davies Webster (see Sutphin, note 3).

4. In ‘Signs of Truce in the Mommy Wars’, Claire Cane Miller considers changes in perceptions about mothers in the workplace. Despite the fact that 70% of American mothers and 93% of American fathers work, a 2007 Pew Research Center study found that ‘41 percent of people thought it was bad for society when mothers worked, while 22 percent said it was good’. While these numbers may suggest increased acceptance of families making choices based on their individual situations, it also shows that the increase of working mothers is not reflected in perceptions of the ‘correct’ way to be a successful mother (Miller, 2015, pp. 2, 3).