Mother of All Myths

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.

Maternal instinct versus maternal reality

Childhood up until and including the eighteenth century was short and sharp. The mother-child relationship, so exalted in modern times, barely existed. In Centuries of Childhood, the historian Philippe Aries talks of the ‘idea of childhood’ as something which simply did not exist, as a concept alien to early society. A child was born and, if she survived (and that was a big ‘if’), she received only as much sustenance as she was deemed to require, and very little attention. Once of a certain age she entered adult life, which meant for most people, being put to work. Childhood was not, as it is for us, a separate state of growth, vulnerability and innocence which requires special attention. Children were not merely ‘little people’, but worse. It was believed that man was born into sin, and the parents’ only duty towards their offspring was to (usually literally) beat a moral sense into them. Without childhood, it stands to reason that the interdependent state of motherhood did not exist either.

Aries and Edward Shorter, among others who have used records and accounts from the time, describe a style and manner of mothering characterized, at best one might say, by sheer indifference to their children on the part of women. Infants came last in the household hierarchy. Their needs were surpassed by almost everything and everyone else, from the requirements of running a household, obligations to husband and other family members, work and other duties. Eventually a child’s needs came to be put first as they are today, surpassing those of every other member of the family and providing the focus of the nuclear family. Matters were so very different in the past that many people find it difficult to accept what historians now know to be true, as Shorter himself observes: ‘The little band of scholars who for some time now have been arguing that in traditional society mothers didn’t love their children much has met with stark incredulity.’1

At the time Rousseau was writing, wet-nursing – that is, sending infants away to be breastfed by a woman paid to do the job – was common, in fact standard practice. Moments after the birth, the newborn was whisked away without even being fed once by its mother, and driven miles across the city, commonly to the outskirts or the countryside to the home of a woman of lower class. There the infant would stay for at least two but often three, four, five years before returning to his parents. It would be more accurate to call wet-nursing ‘boarding out’, for nannies rarely moved into the home to share the workload with the mother and provide an alternative source of comfort. To the child, she was it. Mothers very rarely even bothered to visit their infants. Elizabeth Badinter, the French historian who has chronicled maternal practice among the French between 1700 and 1900 (a period particularly rich in sources and from which much of our information comes) gives this account: ‘Once the baby was left in the nurse’s hands the parents lost interest in his fate. The case of Mme de Talleyrand, who not once in four years asked after her son, was not unusual, except that she, unlike many others, had every possible means for doing so had she cared to: she knew how to write and her son lived with a nurse in Paris.’2

Newborns were often shipped out in their dozens in the charge of one woman. If the child survived the journey, and many did not, either because they were too weak, or because – and there are instances aplenty of this – they fell out of the cart or were crushed under the weight of others, a grim reception awaited them. Most wet-nurses were women who lived in extreme poverty, who had made the choice to care for and feed another woman’s infant for a small fee, in the meantime depriving their own child. Frequently a woman took in several infants, more than she could possibly feed even if her milk supply was good. It was also clearly in her interests to wean each child as quickly as possible to make way for the next and there are innumerable accounts of nurses forcing babies on to solid foods well before their young digestive systems could take it.

Wet-nurses cared little for their charges, for this was hired labour not a labour of love. Conditions were generally poor, children were ignored for long periods of time, left bundled in swaddling clothes, silenced with alcohol or beaten out of frustration. Many wet-nurses were desperate women or downright charlatans, whose own breasts had stopped producing milk but who borrowed babies they passed off as their own. Some of the accounts given by Shorter and others, of infants left to starve, lying side by side on urine-soaked straw mattresses, are too harrowing to bear. As one can imagine, the death rate of babies in these circumstances was phenomenal, generally around double the normal rate rising, in one area around Rouen, to 90 per cent in the eighteenth century.

Wet-nursing was practised widely throughout Europe as well as in America. In Paris in 1780, of 21,000 children born in the city that year all but 1,000 were sent away. Elizabeth Badinter observes that boarding-out began with the aristocracy in the sixteenth century, was taken up by the bourgeoisie in the seventeenth century, and a century later anyone who could afford to have someone else rear their child did so. Why? For some women, such as the wives of artisans, work had to take priority over childcare. Other women who could have looked after their own children chose not to. According to Badinter and Shorter, they simply didn’t want to. Elizabeth Badinter’s detailed account of the lives of upper-class women of the period shows them to have been interested and engaged in matters of state, the intrigues of court, and their own ‘salons’ devoted to the pursuit of intellectual and artistic matters. They failed what Shorter calls ‘the sacrifice test’, which is a golden requirement of contemporary parenting. People in those days found children irritating and time-consuming, and their mothers found they had better things to do than nurse a child. ‘Do they know, these gentle mothers who, delivered from their children devote themselves gaily to the entertainments of the city, what kind of treatment the swaddled child is getting in the meantime in the village?’ asks Rousseau.3

From the perspective of the late twentieth century, the behaviour of the women of this era towards their offspring seems extraordinary. Were these women as truly indifferent as their manner suggests? History tends to record actions and not sentiments, and the actions appear to speak for themselves. If parents had feelings for their children, they were not thought worthy of comment. There are historians who interpret the evidence more generously. Olwen Hufton, in her account of three centuries of women’s lives in Western Europe,4 maintains that a knowledge of the beliefs held about childrearing at the time is essential to understanding a custom like wet-nursing. The milk of aristocratic women was considered weak and lacking in nutrients, compared to the healthy fare which could be provided by a farmer’s wife. And the city, quite rightly, was thought to be an unhealthy, disease-ridden environment for youngsters. Women believed that they were sending their babies away for their own good. Mothers, says Hufton, did care for their children.

But there is also a great deal of evidence of maternal practice that is immensely hard to justify as springing from real concern. Elizabeth Badinter uses her considerable findings to cast doubts on maternal instinct, particularly the idea that it includes automatic love for a child on the part of a mother. Maternal love, she argues, grows out of the mother-child relationship and is an expression of free will. The enormous love most women feel for their children is nurtured and supported by the environment and social values which exist today. The responses of the women of the eighteenth century were underscored by the mores and conditions of the time. The mother-child relationship did not only fail to flourish, it barely thrived at all. Numerous women may have felt immense regret at giving up their newborns, may have preferred to keep them close by, but they were part of a culture in which it was accepted and expected that a mother give up her child for the first few years. ‘At the very least,’ writes Badinter, ‘the maternal instinct must be considered malleable, able to be shaped and molded and modified, and perhaps even subject to sudden disappearances, retreats into civilization’s shadows.’5

In the context of the period, the behaviour of women was by no means out of keeping with the norm. What passed as standard childcare practice in those days would be classified as child abuse today. ‘The history of childhood is a nightmare from which we have only recently begun to awaken,’ writes Lloyd de Mause in the opening pages of The History of Childhood.6 The book is subtitled ‘The Untold Story of Child Abuse’ and recounts many of the horrors to which infants have been subjected in the name of care. From birth babies were wrapped tightly in swaddling clothes and often hung up on a peg. The rationale was that it kept babies from harming themselves and made their limbs grow straight, but in reality de Mause argues it had far more to do with keeping them out of the way altogether. Red in the face from the pressure, overheated and steeped in their own urine and faeces, babies were left in this way for days. Then there was the popular method of getting babies to sleep by ‘rocking’ them, in actual fact shaking them literally insensible in the name of peace. It goes almost without saying that children (‘the Devil’s seed’) were frequently beaten and bullied, when they weren’t left alone to cry for hours or burn themselves in the open hearth while their peasant mothers worked in the fields.

The death of a child was a commonplace event and merited little in the way of mourning or even grief. Parents, including mothers, rarely bothered to attend the funeral if there was one. Infants were regarded as eminently replaceable. Michel de Montaigne, writing between 1580 and 1590, famously observed: ‘I lost two or three children during their stay with the wet nurse – not without regret, mind you, but without great vexation.’7 Madame de Sévigné, a French noblewoman who left numerous letters and other records, remarks in passing of a friend’s distress upon hearing the news of her daughter’s death: ‘She is very much upset and says that she will never again have one so pretty.’8 An observation which neatly captures the pitiful extent of a child’s worth in the eyes of even her own mother.

With the infant mortality rate much higher than it is today, it is perhaps not all that surprising that both mothers and fathers took such news in their stride. Edward Shorter, though, concludes that their behaviour had less to do with stoicism than with indifference. Women frequently were unable to remember their children’s names and ages, referred to infants as ‘it’, and, most remarkably, could not even remember how many babies they had given birth to. Nor, as he indicates, did they have the excuse of ignorance in matters of hygiene and basic childcare:

Now by the late 18th century, parents knew, at least in a sort of abstract way, that letting newborn children stew in their own excrement or feeding them pap from the second month onwards were harmful practices. For the network of medical personnel in Europe had by this time extended sufficiently to put interested mothers within earshot of sensible advice. The point is that these mothers did not care, that is why their children vanished in the ghastly slaughter of innocents that was traditional child-rearing.9

In addition, infanticide, often by exposure, was a common method of ‘family planning’. It was the sight of dead and dying infants heaped in the gutters of London that led Thomas Coram to establish a foundlings hospital in the eighteenth century. (In Macbeth, one of a range of objects the three witches throw into their pot is the finger of a strangled infant.) Not all these children could have been the offspring of the poor; descriptions of their clothes indicate that some clearly came from wealthy families.

The attitude of women towards their offspring in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries could not be more different from approaches to motherhood today, which view children with enormous sentiment and place immense value on them. Seen from a historical perspective, women’s behaviour in the eighteenth century must cast doubt on current theories of biological motherhood such as Richard Dawkins’s ‘selfish gene’ theory, which posits that women are more committed than men as parents because they have already invested much more in a child whom they have carried for nine months and then laboured to bring into the world. What we now know is that, for several centuries in Europe, mothers like everybody else frequently saw children as, at best, amusing but more likely as enervating and time-consuming and, at worst, unwanted. What is particularly hard to comprehend is that these attitudes, although generally held, were not fostered or forced on women by men. Among the very poor and those unwed mothers who left their children to die, perhaps the instinct to survive outweighed maternal instincts, but there is no such rationale for the attitudes of middle-class and upper-class women.

All this information is tremendously uncomfortable, and the ramifications of historical knowledge are not always clear. One thing is certain: motherhood has worn very different guises at different times. The politics of maternalism which later flourished in Britain and in America in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries could never have taken seed, or indeed made any kind of sense at all, at a time when motherhood was linked with negative and not positive qualities. Fairytales told during the period, such as Snow White, indicate how mothers were generally seen, for in the original tale Snow White was persecuted by her natural mother. It was the Brothers Grimm in the nineteenth century (by which time the cult of motherhood was at its height) who later changed the character to a stepmother.

Much of the research on wet-nursing and childcare has been undertaken by French historians, but that does not mean that their findings do not apply to England, where Puritan dogma urged parents to eradicate sin from children by beating the devil out of them, and where an infant’s cries were interpreted as expressions of anger rather than distress. Wet-nursing was endemic here as well, as was cruelty. In The English, Christopher Hibbert recounts this story of an upper-class mother: ‘Lady Abergavenny whipped her daughter so savagely for so long that her husband was drawn into the room of punishment by the child’s shrieks, whereupon the mother threw the girl to the ground with such force that she broke her skull and killed her.’10 According to Hibbert, it is only towards the end of the eighteenth century, due to the eventual spread of the humanitarian ideas of John Locke, that children came to be treated a little better as evidenced by, for example, the appearance of toys for the first time and of books specially written for children.

Motherhood came with no special status, duties or assumptions. A woman gave birth and that was the fact of the matter. She was not presumed to love the child, unless she chose to. It wasn’t even assumed that she would take care of the baby. Indeed, in instances of divorce in England, France and America it was usually the father who kept custody of the child, often at the mother’s behest. In colonial America it was fathers, not mothers, who were in charge of the children, not just in matters relating to discipline and moral rectitude as one might imagine, but they were also the parent who got up in the night to comfort a crying child.11 Women were considered too amoral, too inferior and too weak to be given such responsibilities. In this context, given the task of building a nation, children were valuable and regarded as too important to be entrusted to mothers. In Europe the opposite was true. Children had no value and therefore nobody, including women, could be persuaded to care for them. That view was set to undergo a radical change in the course of the next century.

The creation of maternal love

Europe in the eighteenth century underwent a massive shift in the way that people thought. It was the most significant change since Martin Luther jettisoned notions of Original Sin during the Reformation and the Italian Renaissance elevated art, music, poetry and the finer human sensibilities. These served as the background to another smaller, yet in its own way (certainly as regards the history of motherhood) equally important, change in values. This was a ‘revolution in sentiment’12 for which one catalyst was the Enlightenment movement, a school of philosophy which emphasized man’s right to happiness, his true noble character, romantic love, freedom and nature. This change would eventually lead to love (rather than status or social obligation) becoming the principal reason for marriage and children being regarded as the fruit or gift of that love. Maternal love arose out of all of this.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a leading light in the world of philosophy and already a darling of French intellectual life, published Émile in 1762. It is a fictional account of the education of a young boy and it projected a new vision of childhood and of children themselves. To Rousseau, children were naturally good, not the sinful little monsters they were generally presumed to be. Many of his ideas echoed those of England’s John Locke who, in the 1690s, spoke of children as ‘tabulae rasae’, blank slates upon whom parents and educators could write. Unlike Locke’s, Rousseau’s ideas spread like wildfire and attracted a popular following. He urged parents to give their children freedom – first and foremost from swaddling clothes – and education, as well as encouraging self-expression in which he anticipated Maria Montessori by two hundred or so years.

Most importantly, Rousseau took issue with mothers who sent their infants away. He told them to breastfeed and to care for their children, and he chastised them for preferring to pursue other interests. ‘Not satisfied with having given up nursing their children, women give up wanting to have them,’ he wrote.13 ‘The result is natural. As soon as the condition of motherhood becomes burdensome, the means to deliver oneself from it completely is found.’ It was Rousseau who made, and elaborated upon, the vital link between motherhood and morality which has been a cornerstone of maternal ideology ever since: ‘But let mothers deign to nurse their children, morals will reform themselves, nature’s sentiments will be awakened in every heart, the state will be repeopled. This first point, this point alone, will bring everything back together. The attraction of domestic life is the best counterpoison for bad morals.’14 His comment about the state being ‘repeopled’ is a reference to a nascent interest in demography and the view held during the Enlightenment that the European races were in danger of dying out. With the perspective of hindsight, Rousseau’s words are prophetic, for, as we shall see, ideas about ‘motherhood’ are wheeled out every time there is a perceived social crisis, whether in eighteenth-century France or Thatcher’s Britain in the 1980s.

Against a backdrop of such extraordinary cruelty towards and neglect of children, almost any kind of change would have been for the better. French women began to breastfeed and to find a renewed interest in their children and Rousseau’s ideas became popular in England too, although it must be said that wet-nursing continued in France until the 1920s and breastfeeding continues to go in and out of fashion. The next man to make a career out of taking issue with women who did not breastfeed would be Truby King in the 1920s. Nevertheless and overall, attitudes towards children began to change from the beginning of the 1800s, according to Edward Shorter. It would still take some time for mothers to become totally responsible for childcare. Most early tracts were aimed at men. The ‘good mother’ as we know her, with her natural propensity for self-sacrifice, her universal and automatic love for her children and her total fulfilment in the tasks of mothering, had not yet been invented but she was well on her way.

From the Reformation onwards, Europe had been undergoing almost continual political shifts. A new middle class began to emerge which no longer owed loyalty to the clan, but directly to the king. They spent their new-found wealth on the immediate family, the home and their lives. By the time of the Industrial Revolution in England, followed by France, Germany and the post-Civil War United States, the nuclear family comprising a man, his wife and their offspring had emerged as the central family unit. It is interesting to note that while the ‘traditional’ nuclear family is today seen as the basis and seed-bed of values such as sharing and community responsibility, there are historians who now regard its evolution as arising out of exactly the opposite disposition: the wish to lessen commitments and to restrict the benefit of new gains and profits to a small number of people.

The revolution in industry in the first half of the nineteenth century is commonly agreed to have set in motion massive social shifts, the aftershocks of which we are still feeling today. There are many excellent and detailed accounts of that period, but what concerns us here is what happened to home life and the family, and the effect of such changes upon women’s lives. In a short space of time, a rural way of life which had persisted for centuries and in which the home was the centre of production with the entire family participating in yarn-spinning, cheese-making, the sowing and reaping, ribbon-weaving – or whatever occupation the family derived its income from – was wiped out. In its place came factories which fed on human labour – preferably adult, male labour but often child labour and that of women, too – and forced a reliance on wages determining the fate of entire communities. Home life could no longer be combined with working life, and this schism between public and private took its toll, mainly upon mothers. Elinor Accampo, a family historian, writes:

It put women in a particularly difficult bind because they could not combine household responsibilities with wage earning activities in the same manner as they had in the past. Even if they continued to perform productive labour in the home, this labour brought such meager compensation that they had to work long hours. Men’s absence from the home, furthermore, meant that fathers had a much reduced role in the socialization of their children.15