The feminine script of early nineteenth century centered on women's role as patient, long-suffering mothers. By mid-century, however, their daughters faced a world very different in social and economic options and in the physical experiences surrounding their bodies. In this groundbreaking study, Nancy Theriot turns to social and medical history, developmental psychology, and feminist theory to explain the fundamental shift in women's concepts of femininity and gender identity during the course of the century -- from an ideal suffering womanhood to emphasis on female control of physical self. Theriot argues that social psychological theories, recent work in literary criticism, and new philosophical work on subjectivities provide helpful lenses for viewing mothers and children and for connecting socioeconomic change and ideological change. Within this methodological perspective, she reads medical texts and women-authored advice literature and autobiographies, relating the early nineteenth-century notion of "true womanhood" to the socioeconomic and somatic realities of the meddle-class woman's lives, particularly to their experience of the new male obstetrics. This provocative study invites women historians to explore alternative explanatory frameworks.