The last forty years have witnessed a vast reclamation project in ancient history, as scholars have worked to recover the lives of historically muted groups, particularly those of women and children. The result is an impressive body of work collecting the traces ancient women and children have left behind, as well as a sophisticated epistemology of the biases, gaps, and silences in the historical record. From this perspective, the absence of ancient mothers has represented an ineluctable reality and a methodological hurdle, but rarely a subject of study in its own right. Yet the evidence suggests that mother absence was not merely a secondary artifact of bias or artistic and historiographical conventions; it was also a primary condition of antiquity, one whose root causes, social articulations, and psychological effects have never been fully described or explored, even as it had a profound effect on ancient family life and the experience of childhood.
In approaching the causes, forms, and effects of ancient mother absence we now stand to benefit not only from the last four decades of research into the ancient and pre-modern family (including a growing bibliography on ancient mothers, e.g., the recent collection of Petersen and Salzman-Mitchell (eds.), Mothering and Motherhood in Ancient Greece and Rome [Univ. Texas Press, 2012]), but also from recent research into contemporary mother absence. The root cause of ancient mother absence, of course, was death, with the result that a significant proportion of ancient children grew up without their biological mothers. In the contemporary West, by contrast, mother absence is increasingly the product of the number of working and career mothers (now two-thirds to three-quarters of all mothers in Germany, Switzerland, France, and the U.S.), a social revolution that is rapidly transforming the practices, economics, ideals, and politics of mothering. Cameron Macdonald’s Shadow Mothers: Nannies, Au Pairs, and the Micropolitics of Mothering (Berkeley 2011), for example, investigates the ways in which mother-work has been commoditized, outsourced, and negotiated between mothers and “shadow mothers” over the last two decades. Macdonald’s account of the economics, class tensions, and strategic postures shaping the relationships between contemporary mothers and a quasi-professionalized class of surrogates is a thought-provoking read for anyone acquainted with the various “shadow mothers” of antiquity. This and similar research suggests that ancient historians should attempt to see the phenomenon of ancient mother absence as a continuum, ranging from its obvious manifestation in the total absence caused by maternal death, to the partial absences of various forms of maternal separation brought about by economic necessity, divorce, slavery, social conventions, and perhaps even choice on occasion.