Mother of All Myths

The lives of women were transformed. The family became a separate entity, a private sphere with fierce loyalties and impermeable defences. Sex roles became exaggerated so that instead of women being mostly in charge of children and the domestic sphere, and men being mostly in charge of earning but with duties in the home too, women became responsible for all that lay within the walls of the home and men all that was on the outside. Home became an enclave away from the sweat and filth of daily toil on the railroads, in the factories or down the mines (for the working classes) or the office (for the middle class). It was the woman’s job to create that place of sanctuary, to become the ‘hearth angel’ who created a nest for her children and a refuge for her husband. Gradually, men’s involvement with children tailed off entirely until the responsibility for moral teaching was taken away from them and placed in the hands of women. The metamorphosis from the indifferent mother, absorbed in politics and culture, of whom Rousseau wrote, into the Victorian maternal ideal, the good woman at home with her brood, her piano and her principles, was complete.

The split between the private and public worlds saw an end to the political aspirations of upper-class women. Instead of aspiring to active engagement in decision making, women became ‘the hand that rocks the cradle’ and ‘the power behind the throne’. And men encouraged women to find contentment in their new sphere of influence by assuring them of the power of this uniquely feminine role. By being convinced of this inimitable, maternal role women were, and are still, discouraged from encroaching on external male domains where the real political, social and economic gains are to be made.

Women of the bourgeoisie took on a decorative role not seen since the heyday of the Italian Renaissance. Victorian writers, clergy, politicians and poets, especially the Romantics such as John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold and Alfred Lord Tennyson, were quick to eulogize women, especially mothers, and place them on a pedestal from which they have collectively never quite succeeded in descending. The matriarch, in the form of Queen Victoria, rose to prominence. Among the burgeoning middle class the measure of a woman became her ability to master the feminine arts – quiet conversation, needlepoint, dancing – rather than the speed with which she could milk a cow. Nurturing skills, not household budget management, became the qualities a man sought in a wife. Women wore crinolines and hoops, fainted at swear words, covered up the legs of pianos and became prone to mysterious fits of hysteria, a condition some modern psychologists consider to have been produced by the tight stays, the isolation and the emotional constraints of their circumscribed lives. As women and mothers, their ability to sacrifice themselves apparently knew no bounds, as one particularly ghastly offering from the period testifies:

There was a young man loved a maid

Who taunted him. ‘Are you afraid,’

She asked, ‘to bring me today

Your mother’s head upon a tray?’

He went and slew his mother dead

Tore from her breast her heart so red

Then towards his lady love he raced

But tripped and fell in all his haste

As the heart rolled on the ground

It gave forth a plaintive sound

And it spoke, in accents mild:

‘Did you hurt yourself, my child?’16

Not the kind of sentiment inspired by Christopher Hibbert’s story of Lady Abergavenny, one imagines.

Of course, this was a deeply hypocritical period. Upper-class women still left most of the physical care of their children to paid servants. Men revelled in uxoriousness and treated women (of their own class and race) like delicate vessels while satisfying their more earthly needs with women from the lower orders. It is extremely important to remember that the saintliness of motherhood was only accorded to women of a certain class. In England, although the crimes of Jack the Ripper (thought by many to be a nobleman) dominate our memory of the period, many working-class women on their way home at night were kicked to death by gangs of men in one of the vilest expressions of the misogyny of the culture of that period. In America the glorious days of the antebellum bore witness to the savage treatment of black women who worked in the cane fields up until the onset of labour pains, gave birth to their masters’ bastard offspring only to have them taken away. Sojourner Truth, the abolitionist and feminist who was born a slave, saw her own thirteen children sold into slavery. The contrast in the experience of womanhood from the perspectives of black and white is the theme of her most famous speech, in which she asks the question ‘ar’n’t I a woman?’

The cult of the ‘good mother’ depended (and still does) on money, and on a male wage that was sufficient to support a wife and children, which was (and is) frequently not the case. The many women who continued to work during the Industrial Revolution found themselves caught in the trap, now so familiar to working women, of trying to match the requirements of work and motherhood. Many tried to limit their families or to stop having children altogether because pregnancy posed such a threat to the family’s income and survival. Accampo’s studies of specific communities during the period show that, among the poor, the rates of abortion and infanticide soared. Children of the poorer classes were sent out to work as soon as possible and usually were ruthlessly exploited, as described in the work of Dickens, Wordsworth and William Blake, author of ‘The Chimney Sweep’.

Finally, the motherhood mantle de-sexed women. If Queen Victoria refused to believe that sex between two women was a possibility (and so refused to outlaw what did not exist), Victorian men simply could not tolerate the idea of mothers, perhaps even their own mothers, having sex. Whereas there are depictions of women of earlier generations enjoying hearty sexual appetites – from Chaucer’s tales through to James Boswell’s accounts of his sexual exploits with women of all classes in London in the 1760s – women were now stripped of their sexuality. From henceforth only men were to have a sex drive. Women were given maternal instinct instead, and in no time at all Sigmund Freud would give that view all the authority of science.

Scientific motherhood

It is no surprise to discover that, even among those women who benefited from all the changes so far, it took very little time for a downside to the new status of mothers to appear. The impetus was provided by science, which served to provide apparently objective justification for the social repression that was already taking place.

Childbirth was gradually being taken out of the hands of female midwives and delivered into the hands of male physicians, who previously had regarded such work as beneath their dignity. Now there was money to be made in attending births, particularly where they involved middle-class women, and the invention of forceps brought wealth to the men who devised them. At first, though, doctors killed more women and children than they saved by passing on diseases from their other patients. They also used unsterilized equipment and caused the horrific deaths of many women from puerperal fever, or childbed as it was then called. Gradually, with the discovery of bacteria, the development of inoculations and the introduction of standards of hygiene, doctors secured and held steady their power in the birth chamber.

At the same time, in the Western European countries, an understanding of demography led to a parallel fear that nations were effectively disappearing; an idea, as we have already seen, promoted by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Philosophes who blamed an apparently declining French population on bad mothers. Census-taking had started in the eighteenth century and a growing awareness of economics linked population size with national wealth.17 Governments began to embrace pronatalist politics and to elevate women’s calling as mothers. In Britain, horror at the waste of infant life prompted the opening of hospitals and homes for foundlings, which were soon inundated. By the 1900s women who practised birth control were accused of racial suicide, but only women of a certain class, of course, for poor people were no more encouraged to procreate then than they are now.

Alongside these new ideas came a trend which has proved to have enormous longevity – that of publishing manuals for women telling them how to be better mothers.18 Most of the earliest pamphlets were reasonably well-intentioned, aiming to bring to an end some of the most misguided childrearing practices and to save infant lives, but even Rousseau, whose stated aim with Emile was to improve the lives of children, couldn’t help throwing in a few side swipes at mothers and women in general. He believed women needed an education only to make them better wives and mothers, which he regarded as their true calling, and not to encourage them in intellectual pursuits in which they persisted. To prove his thesis he pointed to the natural tendency among little girls to play the coquette and to display a fondness for dolls; an observation later rubbished by Mary Wollstonecraft who commented that little girls, who could not share in their brothers’ education and with nothing else to do, would obviously entertain themselves in whatever way they could and with whatever they were given.19

Voices of reason were few and far between, however, as men lined up to give their tuppence-worth on the proper role of women, couched in the guise of maternal advice. By the nineteenth century, badgering mothers had become a popular sport. William Buchan, a Yorkshireman and supporter of Rousseau, published several immensely successful books: Domestic Medicine (1769), Offices and Duties of Mothers (1800), and Advice to Mothers (1803). Domestic Medicine was enormously popular, reprinted many times and published throughout Europe and in America. In it he warned women of the importance of remaining calm and ladylike at all times, and gave the instance of a woman who flew into a rage while pregnant and gave birth to a child with its bowels burst open.20 Andrew Combe’s Treatise on the Physiological and Moral Management of Infancy issued the same advice on the importance of emotional tranquillity to Victorian women, whose children’s physical and mental health he warned would be ‘a legible transcript of the mother’s condition and feelings during pregnancy’.21 And the famous Beeton’s Housewife’s Treasury cautioned women that ill-temper would sour their milk, turning babies’ food into ‘draughts of poison’.22

From that day to this, advice to mothers and mothers-to-be has proliferated, but the warning tone remains the same from Donald Winnicott in the 1950s to Penelope Leach in the 1980s. Indeed, many of the same old chestnuts – for example, putting pressure on women to breastfeed, the idea that unborn children react to their mothers’ emotions, or that motherhood is women’s true calling above and beyond other roles – appear time and time again.

Conclusion

So, in brief, that is how motherhood came to be as it is today: one of the most natural human states and yet one of the most policed; the sole responsibility of women; not simply a duty but a highly idealized calling surrounded by sentiment. Matters were bad enough for Victorian mothers, but they were set to become even worse during the twentieth century as science, psychology, politics and debates surrounding gender pushed the motherhood myth to its limits and beyond.

Viewing motherhood through the lens of time reveals details that are lost up close. Let’s take the current debate over whether it is psychologically damaging for children to be placed in daycare, specifically the idea that work and good mothering are incompatible. During the Industrial Revolution changes to the system of work meant that women could not work outside the home easily as well as being responsible for family life within it. After the Second World War, when the government needed women to give up the jobs they had held during the war period for the men returning from fighting, it was said that women should not combine work and motherhood; the justification for that, as we shall see, was provided by psychologists in the second half of the twentieth century who claimed (and continue to claim) that children are damaged by their mothers’ absence, even for a few hours, at work.

Rousseau, who incidentally put five of his own children into foundling homes, thought that caring for children was solely the job of women and blamed them alone for the plight of eighteenth-century French children. He argued that education and ambition distracted women from their basic function. So did the Victorians. Today, the legacy of those ideas continues to be reflected in attitudes to ‘career women’ who choose not to have children and mothers who work.

An historical perspective makes us redefine our most basic assumptions about human nature and motherhood. What seems ‘natural’ in one period appears unnatural in another. We would never want to return to treating children as they were treated in the eighteenth century, but it is interesting to speculate how those mothers who had so little time for or interest in their offspring, and who regarded breastfeeding as unpleasant and motherhood an unavoidable bore, would view the Victorian woman to whom motherhood was (expected to be) everything? Elizabeth Badinter remarks:

Mother love has been discussed as a kind of instinct for so long that a ‘maternal instinct’ has come to seem rooted in women’s very nature, regardless of the time or place in which she has lived. In the common view, every woman fulfills her destiny once she becomes a mother, finding within herself all the required responses, as if they were automatic and inevitable, held in reserve to await the right moment.23

After her Odyssey into motherhood in times past, Badinter casts doubt on the notion of any kind of universal, predictable and long-term ‘maternal instinct’ at all. Indeed, the term has now fallen out of use among professionals, be they psychologists or scientists, but presumptions about the biological make-up of women are nevertheless central to the discussions about how women carry out the duties of motherhood and what those duties actually are. A popular view of maternal behaviour includes a woman’s sole responsibility for an infant right through to adulthood, and that is an idea that historical evidence simply does not sustain.

In the past many people knew, or thought they knew, why they had children. It may have been because they could not prevent conception, or because they needed extra hands to work the looms, or to care for them when they grew old, or because they had been instructed to ‘go forth and multiply’. Nowadays those reasons appear redundant. In the context of modern times, children are as likely to be the product of our emotions – desire. passion, altruism, selfishness, love, boredom and vanity – as much as any deeply-rooted, biologically-impelled compulsion. Fuelling the modern obsession with motherhood are our efforts to construct a new rationale for it. Until we find one that is complex and subtle enough to satisfy us, we will continue to build myths around motherhood.

The final lesson of history, on which this chapter must conclude, is that mothering has varied over time. The style of mothering which we have inherited today, with its roots in the nuclear family, was fashioned in a particular way at a specific time in history out of necessity and expediency. The separate elements consist variously of genuine concern at the abandonment of children, a less wholesome view of the nature and the place of women (and of men) and a specific economic context. By coincidence and by design these elements intertwined to produce what we now think of as ‘traditional’ motherhood. The emphasis on romantic motherhood in the Victorian era would eventually give way to the new century and suffragist demands for the vote and women’s liberation. For women, that sense of freedom would prove short-lived with the massive revitalization of the motherhood myth as the twentieth century moved forwards.

chapter 3 Pygmalion Mother: The Making of the Modern Myth

Testimony: Barbara

Barbara is forty-one years old, married, with two sons. A trained lawyer, she currently works for a charitable trust.

My mother stayed home with us, me and my two brothers – one a year and a half younger, one five years younger. My mother was always at home with us. Once I got into secondary school she began to do some volunteer work and she was always involved in activities in our school. My father was a surgeon and not at home very much. He was very involved in his practice, so my mother was pretty much on her own in terms of looking after us. She came from a big Catholic family, six brothers and six sisters. Her sisters would help out. Three sisters lived nearby, as well as her sisters-in-law who were happy and willing to help out from time to time. Other than that, I don’t even remember her employing a cleaner to do the housework. She did it all herself.

I can’t remember a single one of her friends who worked at that time. There were two women who had law degrees and didn’t practise. I remember being so impressed that they had these degrees, but I wasn’t surprised that they didn’t work because they were mothers, and mothers stayed home. My father would not let my mother work. That’s the way she put it. He just said no.

I never really gave children or motherhood much thought. I didn’t have much empathy for the few women that I knew who had children before I did. I didn’t have a sense of how overwhelming the responsibility and the time commitment would be. In recent years I’ve regretted that I didn’t provide more support to my friends who had children. But I didn’t get it. I didn’t realize what a great thing it would have been for me to say, ‘I’ll take the kids for a day,’ which I easily could have done, but I didn’t. I just didn’t get it. I would go and visit them, but I never suggested doing anything.

With my own kids, I planned to hire someone to come in, but then I decided I couldn’t trust anyone. I couldn’t monitor them. I was very protective. First I put him into daycare and I went back to work at five and a half months. Then I took him away from there, because I didn’t think the woman was giving him the kind of stimulation I wanted him to have. So I put him in another daycare situation. Then when I had my second son I stopped working and stayed at home for two and a half years. Any help I had I got through agencies, or they were contacts through friends.

The worst thing was leaving my first son in daycare. I don’t think he was hurt by it, but it was traumatic for me. I felt very guilty. I also hated not being able to find childcare people who have the same approach as I do to raising my children, which is constant stimulation. I always read to them, talk to them, tell them what we are doing. I say, ‘Now we are going to go and open the window’, ‘Now we’re walking across the room’. I felt tremendous frustration with my husband. I guess it wasn’t his fault. I wouldn’t say he was an uninvolved father. He was in career mode. But I guess I should not have expected too much. I think men are just not really conditioned to be that kind of parent. I think there really is a difference between mothering a child and fathering a child. Mothers are primarily responsible for the caring of the children. I feel it is and I guess I feel it ought to be, should be, the mother’s responsibility. I know a child who lost his mother and was raised by his father. There is a difference in the way that child has come out.

An ideal father to me would be willing to step in and handle the everyday stuff, knowing what to do without being told. Is there a conflict in saying the mother is the primary parent and expecting men to take responsibility? I suppose so. I like things done the way I want them done, and I suppose that can have a chilling effect on my husband when he tries to do things, for fear of being criticized. The best way would be for women to be able to let them do things their way, but it’s frustrating. If he does the lunches, he doesn’t put the right things in, he puts yoghurt in they don’t like and it ends up coming back.

An ideal mother for me stays at home with the children. Deep down I do think it’s the man’s responsibility to earn the money. Ideally a mother would be at home – always. She bakes cakes, she picks them up at the end of school, not later. She has two or three children, she has her first in her twenties and, yes, she is married. She’s my mother, actually.

Why am I not like that? Well, I work because I always want to have the ability to earn money. My background and skills are such that now I could always find work if I needed to. I also have much more to give than just being a mother. I spent a lot of time becoming educated and becoming prepared to be a person who made a difference in the world and I’m really uncomfortable about giving that up. I define myself a lot by what I am in the community. I am a role model and a leader in some respects, I sit on a lot of boards, for example. This is a difficult world and I feel it’s my obligation to do what I can. I try to strike a balance. When I’m at home I try to live up to my image of the stay-at-home mum. I bake, I make my children’s birthday cakes. I never talk about work. I’m as calm and housewifey as I can be. I cook dinner every night. Some people can’t believe I do that. So that’s the way my boys see me when I’m at home. I’m never on the phone doing business. And that makes me feel better. I try to do that because I want them to remember mum that way.

Yes, there is a tremendous emotional cost to me in being a working person and trying to be a calm, patient wife and mother as well. It’s very hard. It was worse when I was working as a lawyer. That was an even bigger shift. There’s another cost, in that – I’m sure you’ve heard this from other people – I never have any time for myself.

I have thought so hard about what I would tell a daughter, if I had one. It’s difficult because you always want your daughter to be independent and self-reliant if she needed to be. On the other hand I would want her to be a loving wife and mother, and create the kind of home for a family that I have done. And it’s very hard to do. I’m not sure what to say. I think I’d advise her to think about her goals very hard. My life is a paradox…I know that.

By the start of the twentieth century, the major historical and economic structures were in place to create the background for the modern motherhood myth. Changes to work which swept in with the Industrial Revolution had left women holding the baby at home while men went to work in the new factories, mines and metal works. At the same time a burgeoning fascination with scientific discovery had begun to exercise people’s minds. In 1861 Pasteur had published his theory of germs and the spread of disease was by now beginning to be clearly understood and controlled. In only twenty years’ time Alexander Fleming would notice changes taking place in his petri dish and give the world penicillin. These developments had a radical effect upon childcare and the raising of children. If romance had characterized motherhood in the previous century, then the twentieth century gave rise to the scientific mother.

Childcare became the subject of study, analysis and theory and was taken out of the hands of mothers and placed in the hands of men, who henceforth would tell mothers what to do. These were the childcare gurus. Suddenly babies became a matter for the experts. Popular writers emerged such as Frederic Truby (later Sir Truby) King and D. W. Winnicott in Britain; and in America John B. Watson and Luther Emmett Holt. Between them they moulded modern motherhood in their own vision, dictating every detail from the emotional relationship between mother and child down to mastering the fine art of burping or winding (a practice which, incidentally, is virtually unknown in many parts of the world).