Invisible Women: On the Victorian Custom of Cutting Mothers Out of Portraits

Image via Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Gift of Lee Marks and John C. DePrez, Jr.

In the weeks after the birth of my second child, I began saving pictures  of Victorian hidden mother portraits, which are, to this day, interspersed on my phone with images of my newborn and my older child, sleepy and shocked by the transition to family of four, respectively. In the black and white photographs, Victorian mothers remain obscured so the babies can be photographed; they are often draped in sheets or curtains and holding their children, helping them stay still while the early cameras’ long exposure times captured infancy and toddlerhood. Like their mothers, I am nowhere to be found in my own pictures on my camera roll of that tender era.

In these examples of early photography, Victorian hidden mothers are both present and absent, embodying furniture on which their babies sit or lie, becoming their cradles or chairs, shrouded in floral blankets or shadow-dark. In most of the photos, the mothers’  heads and faces are thoroughly wrapped as though they are corpses, and in others, a hand might be coming from nowhere to grip their toddler in place.

Sometimes they hold more than one child, or crouch behind a wooden chair, arms sticking out to support a wobbly baby, the tops of their heads and their upright child the only clue that they were present. The images are sometimes ghostly and others, downright comical. Why not just photograph the mother? I wish I could ask the photographer.

Holding my own nursing baby, I didn’t know why I was searching for these hidden women, or what they meant to me in my early postpartum haze, but I was drawn to the genre’s creepiest examples—the ones in which I don’t even register the children meant to be captured by the image, because the hidden mother is too distracting. Still, she presumably wanted her child photographed to preserve something of that time of her own life. None of the photographs could exist without the thing they are trying to hide.

Susan E. Cook, author of “Hidden Mothers: Forms of Absence in Victorian Photography and Fiction,” explains on her website why the images might fascinate us almost 200 years later. They “draw attention to the shrouded figure they are attempting to obscure,” she writes, “and beg the question of why this figure is shrouded to begin with. Is this actually a member of the family (the mother of the children), or an employee (a nanny or an assistant at the photographic studio) whose job it is to essentially become a piece of movement-restricting furniture?”

This is easy to believe when you see, for example, a black arm holding a white child—further erasing the importance of women of color, who cared for the children but whose bodies weren’t visible in the documentation. Cook also cites a horrifying debate she read on a post about hidden mother portraits on Chelsea Nichols’s blog, The Museum of Ridiculously Interesting Things, about whether some of the children are even alive, or if they had to be propped up by hidden mothers because the portraits are actually a memento mori. Cook points out that this debate further obscures the mothers.

The Victorian era marked a permanent shift in how society viewed families. The period’s focus on domesticity positioned families as an emotional unit rather than a purely economic one, and children as subject to their parents’ desire to preserve their innocence. Although the method of hiding the mother is ridiculous, I still recognize the impulse. After all, in preserving memories of my own children through my phone’s camera lens, I am erasing so much of the work it took to feed, clothe, and otherwise care for them, getting them into position for the photo.

Motherhood can feel like a shrinking of the self, until our families’ attention to our own needs vanishes entirely. There are things I want to remember—their sweet smiles or cozy dreams—and things I don’t—the messes I cleaned and tantrums I soothed and illnesses I held them through. I don’t want to be in the picture when I am crying from sleep-deprivation and frustration at trying to tear myself in half so each child has enough of me. I mainly photograph the clean outfits, the happy mealtimes, the calm outings. In the process, I am erasing my own labor, and therefore, myself.

At first, I understood hidden mother photographs as metaphorically relevant to my own life. Motherhood makes it hard to access or identify our desires, needs, or identities separate from our children, and I have often felt like a ghost haunting my own life. This is the first thing I have written for publication since my second daughter was born last July, even though I have felt a constant thrumming desire to have a complete idea and have the space and energy to commit it to writing, as I always have.

In my darkest moments, I have fantasized about falling down the stairs and breaking a bone just to be able to spend a night alone in a hospital room, where I could read and sleep as much as I want. I think about a spontaneous night out, drinking wine with my husband, whose company I really enjoy, even though we can rarely do much these days besides pass the parenting and work baton back and forth. He practices parenting as a chance to be present with our children, whereas I often experience it as an endless series of tasks, things I have to buy and plan for well after they’ve gone to bed. The stereotype of fathers being praised for simply existing in public spaces with their children irks me precisely because it is one more way the mother is invisible.

It’s almost impossible for me to say what I would do with a whole day to myself. Or even a whole morning to myself. I have lost any ability to identify what would feel good or fulfilling. Any time alone I feel I must maximize by writing or folding laundry or grading student papers or meal prepping. I have erased my own desires so that I can still be productive, in other words, enough to keep my family and my career going. I, too, must vanish from the photograph, with only my hand gripping a child’s leg, keeping the toddler balanced on the chair. To let go would be disastrous, I have told myself.

It was only recently, as I put together a monthly photo book of my youngest daughter and realized I’m not in any of the photos, that  I understood them literally as well. The hidden mother portraits I kept coming back to were early precursors to modern day family photos, from which mothers are still often absent. When I asked my husband for a picture of me with the baby for the monthly photo book, he sent me one of her, with just my nose and foot visible in the frame. “Don’t you have one of my whole face or body?” I asked him. He did, but the baby wasn’t looking at the camera, so he didn’t think to send it. I’m not the one the family is trying to remember as I am. Like many mothers, I am often focused on capturing the child and the moment, but am hidden from the camera.

While the camera has advanced and the frequency of kid photos have increased, moms today are no more visible. The images I returned to the most laid bare the expectation that women, particularly mothers, were mainly embodied and supporting roles. I want to say to them, I see you, and I see the stillness you created by being present. I understand the loss of the body’s primacy because I have experienced it—early in my adult life, when I was unable to continue dancing ballet, as I was trained to do from childhood—and again as a mother, when other people’s needs necessarily superseded my own.

What makes these hidden mother portraits so fascinating compared to the family pictures of today, in which everyone is there except the mother, is that we have to willfully read the Victorian mothers as absent. Yet to read her as absent is absurd, when she is right there, covered in a blanket. To read ourselves as absent in the photo books we create might be willful too. After all, the photos exist because of a hidden mother. What does that mother want? What does she uphold? Who is still hiding her?