Few topics seem as appropriate for discussing at the very beginning of a new year as family–the people who shape us and the people whom we shape in turn. And so, in this first Ideas in Progress interview of 2025, I am grateful for this conversation with Agnes Howard, a historian who writes about motherhood, family history, everyday life–and the meaning of all of this.
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In your previous book, Showing, you considered the ways pregnancy shapes a mother’s character. In the interview about the book in early 2023, you wrote: “Iām also partway into a personal project, looking at my own family history to consider the currents around education, marriage, and spiritual life within that experience.” I am thrilled to hear that this project is now under contract–with Cascade imprint of Wipf & Stock. Thank you for agreeing to answer some questions about it at this stage! To begin with, what is the overall premise of this project? I would love to hear the story behind it–how did you get to it?
This book validates the reasonable sense readers might have that life now is strange. Its focus is not conspicuous crises in public realms and in news cycles, where we already have plenty of accessible arguments to explain the world. Instead, it looks at the texture of everyday life where it may be difficult to pinpoint what seems off. I follow that sense of disquiet into areas where we do some of our most important living: what Americans eat and how schools teach our children, how we choose work, find love, raise families, and live faithfully. I try to size up current manners in each category and explain how things got to be that way. The book depends on one really big truth, wonder at our embodied life in God’s creation, and one modest human tool, history.
My own disorientation led me into this project. As a Christian walking through adulthood with feet in both academic and at-home mothering tracks, I straddled a gulf that sometimes stretched pretty wide. Many times, I was startled by what was expected of me as a mother or employee or neighbor. Meanwhile, my writing and teaching kept me aware of scholarship on marriage, work, and parenthood, which produced awkward sensations of living through the phenomena I was studying. I was startled that conditions for women doing adult life differed so much from what I anticipated, even though I had been paying attention to social trends and trying hard to do the right thing.
What are the overall themes and questions you are exploring in this new book? Who is your target audience?
The questions in the book arise from everyday living–how to cook dinner, what shapes good work, how dating works–and the answers come from academic training in history. I can explain the audience a little better with reference to my siblings. They all are scientists or engineers. One brother studied computer science in the 1980s when many of the technologies we now take for granted were in their infancy. I remember him once calling me to say something like, “Computers are taking over everything! I’m a geek and I find things confusing. I don’t know how anybody can get by without being a geek.” I think something similar: I don’t know how anybody can get by without being a historian. I hope to reach readers, mostly women, who could use some historical tools to make sense of their world and their place in it. My primary audience would be from my generation, mostly women. Another would be recent college graduates, like wonderful students I have taught. They are much more savvy to the present than I am but could use backstory or a guide to help clarify how things got to be the way they are.
You are a scholar and a mother, and you research and write about the history of pregnancy and motherhood. Maybe I’m betraying my own assumptions excessively here, but it just seems impossible to remain a perfectly objective historian when writing on these topics. How do you navigate this tension between the personal aspect and the historical in your research and writing? Have you had to set any boundaries, for instance?
Perceptive question! A too easy answer is that I did not try for perfect objectivity here. It is not that kind of project. Since the history in these chapters is intended from the outset to explain why things in the present look the way they do, the framing is not the same as would be suitable for an academic project, addressing questions specific to the past on the specific past’s own terms. I do strive to be faithful to how things actually were and are. The personal aspect requires setting stricter boundaries. I decided fairly early not to name family members in the book and, though I write pretty personally, I try to be discreet.
You have recently taught a history class, “Making Babies,” to college students. I assume the class has built on both your previous book and your work on this one. How have your students reacted to this topic? Have there been any surprises for you in the process?
The students were tremendous. They brought full candor, humor, and skepticism to antique ideas about the female body and birth. Some engaged their own parents and grandparents on the topic. A surprise to all of us, I think, was observing in practice what a different place parenthood occupies in the imagination of young men and women. I thought this abstractly beforehand but we experienced the disparity together in class discussions. The women in the class reported that motherhood was a normal feature of their talk with friends and in their ideas about their own future–even women who said they did not plan to have children–whereas men seemed to think much less about the future prospect of fatherhood. In remedy, the students hosted a symposium to ask a panel of friends, all men, questions about family life and birth.
There have been quite a few new books over the past few years on motherhood, parenting, and various aspects of pregnancy–including Jennifer Banks’s Natality. Do you see notable “blind spots” or areas that you think still require much more attention in this field? What questions would you like to see discussed in more detail?
I envy young women considering motherhood now because of all the excellent books they have available. Regrettably, recent journalism about pregnancy and birth tends to emphasize dangers, I think partly in response to Dobbs, but this undermines the rehabilitation accomplished by midwifery advocates, encouraging people not to view birth primarily in terms of fear and risk. Other blind spots: I’d love to see theology of pregnancy and birth in books for interested lay readers–not just for moms and not just devotionals. And I’d love to see a book about birth that men would deem a must-read.