Mother of All Myths

Women are criticized for abandoning their traditional duties, while the truth is that women today carry a greater part of the burden of caring for children than ever before, with no corresponding policy changes to support them. Our urban, post-industrial lifestyles have removed grandchildren from the proximity of their grandparents, nieces and nephews from their uncles and aunts and cousins from each other. Divorce – 40 per cent of marriages – has frighteningly eroded the role of fathers in the lives of their children. In England and Wales alone in 1994, 164,834 children saw their parents divorce.⁸ The mother-centric philosophy of the motherhood myth has contributed to the growth in numbers of single mothers. Many children start off in life without any kind of paternal commitment at all.

What do women get instead of real solutions to coping with the dual role? Companies which market pagers so that children can reach their working mothers in an emergency, and surveillance specialists who offer to film the babysitter secretly to check whether she is abusing your child. ‘A woman’s place is in the house’, asserts an advertisement for Knorr stock cubes, which depicts a female MP rushing home to cook for her children. Women continue to be responsible for the domestic sphere. The child has merely substituted the husband as the person for whom she must continue to carry out those tasks. The work is the same, but now women do that work as mothers not as wives.

Nothing provokes the fear that motherhood, as we know it, is under threat more than the new reproductive technologies that have made mothers of older women, lesbians, even virgins. Such births, because they appear neither ‘natural’ nor ‘traditional’, are a blatant challenge to an accepted view of what motherhood should be. The policy-makers’ answer, which is to try to limit these women’s access to the science, says it all. Technology has dramatically challenged the most basic assumptions around mothering. Take the simple verbs ‘to mother’ and ‘to father’. How they are defined reveals an abundance of meaning. ‘To father’ just means to beget, an act of procreation; but ‘to mother’ means to nurture, to rear, to feed, to soothe and to protect. Today, techniques enabling human egg retrieval and donation mean that women, just like men, can be the biological parents of children they never see and to whom they do not give birth.

At the same time, growing numbers of women are rejecting motherhood altogether. Women individually now have fewer children and fertility levels are at an all-time low; women leave starting a family until as late as possible, often into their thirties; and many have opted not to have children at all. A 1993 survey published in the British Medical Journal stated that 12 per cent of a group of women now in their forties had remained childless.⁹ An OPCS survey put the figure of 20 per cent on women who are young now and will elect not to become mothers, compared to 1 per cent in 1976.¹⁰

Much has been read into such statistics by parties with a stake in the debate. Some feminists greet them with delight; other people are sceptical and smugly assert that young women who say they don’t want children will almost certainly change their minds; still others argue that these women are not childless out of choice but because they can’t find a suitable partner or have trouble conceiving. I say there’s a modicum of truth in all these points. After many conversations with mothers and non-mothers, I have found that most women are not rejecting babies as such (although some certainly are), they are repudiating motherhood as an institution and much of what goes with it. I have spoken to many women who, in conversation, will state that they don’t like children; but what they then go on to talk about in detail is in fact motherhood, the changes to their lives. the sacrifices, the compromises. They don’t talk about children. Essentially, some of these women may want children but not that much, and that in itself contradicts many popularly-held assumptions about women and biology. ‘In pain thou shalt bring forth children,’ says the Bible. Motherhood is supposed to be its own reward. Our society has always imagined that it could ask any sacrifice, be as exacting, as demanding and as controlling of mothers as it wished because women’s hormonal impetus would impel them towards motherhood despite themselves. Not so, it would seem.

Perhaps this very blatant threat to fundamental assumptions about women’s character is what has fuelled the growing interest in socio-biology, and the opportunity it offers to reassert what are considered traditional mores, as well as removing the obligation to reform something once it has been deemed ‘natural’ and inevitable. In the 1990s, ideas based on Social Darwinism have found a ready audience among intellectuals and the general public alike as an explanation of why, for example, poor people are poor. It is because, so the theory of ‘survival of the fittest’ goes, the cream of society rises to the top leaving the less able at the bottom. The poor are not adaptive, talented or motivated, that is why they are poor. It is nobody’s fault and no amount of welfare or educational programmes will help because this state of affairs is natural and unavoidable – quod erat demonstrandum the continued existence of the poor despite fifty years of welfare. The poor will be with us always.

Much the same ideas have frequently been applied to the debate around motherhood. Today, finally freed from the overpowering constraints of a decade or so of political correctness, or so advocates of the science would have us believe, notions that women’s role and behaviour are biologically derived are now being discussed as the obvious truths they are. Observations on motherhood based on the behaviour of goats or rats, plus a burgeoning fashion in the new science of genetics, are reaffirming old ideas about the naturalness of motherhood.

Ideas about ‘maternal instinct’ have resurfaced with a new vigour. While most scientists will give a cautious nod to the notion that some form of instinct is at work within all of us, few would venture to try to describe precisely how instincts manifest themselves in behaviour in any predictable way. The real question is, why is it so important to label these feelings instinctual? A clue to the agenda that lies behind the enthusiasm for notions of ‘instinct’ is evidenced by the delight and satisfaction which greet the news that a woman previously considered a ‘career woman’ (particularly a high-profile woman) has given up her job to have children. The departure of Penny Hughes from a high-profile job at Coca-Cola, and the stories it sparked, is one example I deal with in a later chapter. Such a woman is perceived as having bowed to the inevitable, given way to nature and fulfilled her true destiny. In short, women are made to be mothers not managers and here is the proof.

The facts are that a great many policy decisions rest on our accepted views of motherhood. The new determinism offers a neat solution to complicated policy issues relating to the family and women’s position within and outside of it and the flexibility of the workplace. If it is accepted that women are biologically programmed for motherhood, some would argue, many things follow. Social commentator and columnist Melanie Phillips, for example, has argued that the biological differences between men and women mean that men should have first call on jobs. In The End of Order, Professor Francis Fukuyama argues that women’s entry into the workplace (and dereliction of the duties of good motherhood) is responsible for the breakdown of the social fabric. For both Phillips and Fukuyama, motherhood means stay-at-home motherhood.

Where the fundamentalists’ view of maternal instinct as a single, compelling force really goes askew is in relation to mothering styles. What is ‘natural’ is almost always presumed to be a 1950s model of motherhood. To back up this scenario, which supporters trace back to a time when males went out to hunt while females nested, advocates turn to the natural world, picking and choosing from what nature has to offer in order to advance their arguments. They ignore lionesses, hunters for their entire pride, who skilfully combine work and motherhood while the lion babysits. They also ignore the matriarchal hyena who, as dominant female, banishes males from the pack and is succeeded by her daughter. Nor do they consider the many species of birds who parent together as male and female and whose mating and pairing rituals biologists often compare to those of humans. There is also an assumption that everything that comes from nature is necessarily good. Anyone who has ever witnessed the sight of a caged rabbit eating her newborn might beg to differ.

It can be argued much more convincingly that women, like the caged rabbit, are not supposed to rear their children alone in their homes; nothing could be more unnatural than the mother alone in the highrise block or the suburban home with her children. You could say that, like lions and cheetahs, it is a natural function of motherhood to go out into the world to provide for offspring. Or, if you take the view that in prehistoric times men were hunters and women were gatherers, you might think, in that respect, that women’s skills are better suited to the modern world of work, with its emphasis on communication, information, negotiation and research, than are men who excel at mammoth-hunting or tribal fights.

There is another school of scholarship quietly growing, away from the spotlight. Psychologists such as Susie Orbach, Ann Dally and Diane Eyer argue that ‘traditional’ ideas about motherhood are neither natural nor helpful to children or women. Indeed, the narrow, exclusive mothering style can even be harmful. Eyer and Dally argue that the relationship between mothers and their children has palpably failed to thrive in the artificially claustrophobic world of the private, nuclear family. Nor are children or women helped that such an immensely important task as childrearing (which today requires almost superhuman capabilities) is placed principally on the shoulders of just one person. No one person can do it all; no one person was ever meant to.

Think about how obsessed we are with our mothers. They have the capacity to disappoint us, anger us, frustrate us and burden us in a way no one else does. The entire discipline of psychoanalysis was built on the back of the mother-child relationship. Today, people enter analysis, seek therapy and attend re-parenting classes because of their relationship with their mothers. In sitcoms, relationships with mothers are a source of humour. In Mad About You Jamie develops a facial tic every time her mother visits; Roseanne cannot abide her mother; the humour in Absolutely Fabulous wittily confounds mother stereotypes. There are innumerable books, films and plays containing the same theme: Psycho, Postcards from the Edge, the Debbie Reynolds satire Mother (which, despite a sympathetic portrayal of the mother figure, nevertheless confirms its own thesis that she is to blame for her son’s problems). During the writing of this book I asked a group of friends gathered at my home one evening how many of them had problems with their mothers. Everyone raised a hand. Every single one! One claimed his mother was too domineering; another was angry at his mother spending so much time at work; a third felt her mother favoured her elder sister and the lack of encouragement she received was the reason why her career was stagnant; a fourth rejected the imposition of his mother’s values; and a fifth felt that now she was an adult, her mother had forgotten her. For a group of normal, intelligent, functioning people to have so many grievances towards their mothers is not at all natural, nor is it desirable, however common it may have become.

Motherhood is in crisis because it has been set into conflict with itself. The legacy of past modes of thinking has been to emphasize the primacy of mothers to the exclusion of everyone else. Women are primarily responsible for children in 96 per cent of families.¹¹ Most of them also work, yet after three decades of female emancipation, work and motherhood have still not been reconciled. Women make up half the workforce and therefore half the taxpaying citizens of the country, but to date there are absolutely no serious political proposals on the table to provide universal, affordable childcare. In a straightforward cost/benefit analysis it is no surprise that women, whether or not they decide to become mothers, feel a growing ambivalence about entering an institution so full of evident hazards and somewhat vague rewards.

Fifteen years ago we imagined that new family structures and an acceptance of women’s work meant that fathers would step into the light after years in the background. That has spectacularly failed to happen on any significant scale, though is it any surprise within a culture which mythologizes motherhood and condemns fathers to be eternally and irrevocably seen as second-best?

In every society there is a tendency to assume that there is only one way to look after children, and that is the way it is done in that culture. Anthropologists and sociologists, however, have demonstrated that motherhood is a social and cultural construct which decides how children are raised and who is responsible for raising them. There are places in this world where motherhood has been differently forged; where a mother is not alone in her responsibility to her child and no one would expect her to be so; where men are far more involved in the lives of their children; where there is no conflict for women between having children and going to work; and where mothers are not made to feel guilty for the personal choices they make.

So far, feminist attempts to deconstruct the myths around motherhood – from the historical perspective (Elizabeth Badinter, Shari Thurer); from the psychoanalytic perspective (Nancy Chodorow, Dorothy Dinnerstein); from the journalistic perspective (Jane Bartlett, Will You be Mother?, Melissa Benn, Madonna and Child) – have concentrated exclusively on Western women as mothers and the Western concept of motherhood. They have omitted, or chosen not to look at, the experience of women who are mothers in other cultures where a different ideology may be in place or where there is no constraining ideology at all. They have largely ignored women who belong to ‘minority’ cultures in the West for whom the dominant ideology has little relevance.

In the West we often dismiss the experience of other cultures, particularly those seen as ‘less developed’ than our own. Or we tend to the romantic, ascribing to other people a simple wisdom which is in its way greater than our own because it is free from modern technological clutter. When it comes to motherhood, there are lessons to be learned from looking at others and the first and most vital is that there are many different ways to mother. Motherhood is fashioned by culture, it can be adaptive and it can be flexible. Not until we understand and accept that will we be able to liberate ourselves from a collective tunnel vision which prevents us from looking beyond the boundaries of our mythologized version of motherhood to realities and new solutions.

In the 1970s as a child I was raised in two different cultures by two women. The first, my own mother’s culture, was British. My other home was in Sierra Leone in West Africa with my African father and his second wife, my other mother. I spent my childhood between two homes until I grew up, went to university in London and made that city my home.

In Sierra Leone as a child, growing up with my brother and sister, I was loved by many people, who also had the authority to guide me, discipline me or advise me. As children we had many ‘mothers’ and many ‘fathers’. We also had many ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’, as sharing the physical care of other people’s children is common. Before taking on my siblings and myself, my African mother had already raised her young half-sister and to this day continues to share her home with the children of friends and relations. She has been mother to many. There, it mattered less whom we ‘belonged to’ biologically, because children belong to everyone. In contrast, within my Western family, everything. whether practical or emotional, rested on my mother. As an adult visiting West Africa, one is barely aware of the idealized image of motherhood so prevalent in the West.

So this book is written both from the perspective of an inquiring journalist and as the fortunate beneficiary of two kinds of mothering. In both these capacities and as a non-mother, throughout the process mothers have used me as a confessional, an objective sounding-board for their fears and perceived inadequacies. Indeed, while some people (mostly men) imagined it must be hard to write a book without being a mother myself, it would be a very hard book to write as a mother. The fear of criticism silences many women, as Adrienne Rich acknowledged when she wrote Of Woman Born. Certainly, this was the dread of the many mothers to whom I spoke. Entire social occasions could be given over to talking to a woman who thought she didn’t feel enough for her baby; or someone struggling with the fact that she cared less for one child than another. Too numerous to count were the guilt-ridden women who left their children with hired help while they went out to work. They confessed to me details of their lives they did not even dare tell other mothers, for women can be among the harshest critics of their own sex. They were desperate to discuss their feelings with someone, but terrified of being judged to be falling short of the standards, of being a less than perfect mother.

The insistence that a certain style of motherhood is ‘natural’ leads women to question every aspect of what they do, think and feel and to measure their own experience against an impossible and rigid standard. Every one of us assesses our own mother’s record, picking over her failures and all too easily forgetting her accomplishments. Collectively we judge the mothers around us personally and through our institutions. The myths around motherhood are seductive traps which set up women in the cruellest way. This book traces the origins of those myths and examines how they continue to control and manipulate women.

Perhaps by revealing the traps, and tracing how we have arrived at current ways of thinking about motherhood, we can blow the most destructive of these myths away altogether and move on to a new approach to raising children. One which is flexible and giving instead of rigid; one which is inclusive of other people, especially fathers, instead of exclusive; and one in which the model of motherhood embraces woman in all her roles instead of placing her needs and other interests in conflict with the function of parenting. By exposing the hidden agendas around motherhood we may place children where they really should be, at the very top of the agenda.

chapter 2 A Brief History of Motherhood

Motherhood was invented in 1762. That is to say, ‘motherhood’ as we now know it was formulated then. Jean-Jacques Rousseau came up with the idea and laid it down in his extraordinary book, Emile. Historians, as one might imagine, quibble over the date and the details. Some argue that Rousseau did not really succeed in changing ideas, that it was the Victorians who really refined and institutionalized motherhood, draping it in swathes of sentiment.

What most scholars of this period of European history agree on is that even if one can’t draw a perfect timeline of events, motherhood was a very different matter prior to 1762 and in the hundred years which followed. Before Emile, mothers appeared by and large indifferent to their children; in fact, on the evidence it is clear they did not much like them at all. They sent them away from birth, spent as little time with them as possible and apparently hardly cared if they died. But somehow a revolution was wrought, and at the beginning of the next century a mother’s love ruled and women were expected to be only too keen to sacrifice themselves in ways large and small for the well-being of their children. In between those two points there were changes in many aspects of human life: philosophy, discoveries in science, new family structures and ideas about marriage, a revolution in industry and the redefining of gender roles. And it is out of all this that the institution of motherhood was born.