AMINATTA FORNA

MOTHER OF ALL MYTHS

How Society Moulds

and Constrains Mothers

To Simon

Contents

Cover

Title Page

1 Introduction: The Motherhood Myth

2 A Brief History of Motherhood

3 Pygmalion Mother: The Making of the Modern Myth

4 Motherhood in Popular Culture

5 Future Perfect

6 Persecuting Mothers: Motherhood and the Law

7 Other Mothers: Cross-cultural Motherhood

8 Left Holding the Baby: How Politicians Manipulate Mothers

9 Conclusion: Relinquishing the Myth

Notes

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

chapter 1 Introduction: The Motherhood Myth

There have been a few key public moments during the research and writing of this book which serve as good illustrations of what it is all about. On a daytime chat show about teenage rebellion, a woman seeking desperately to explain the behaviour of her adoptive daughter apologized over and over again: ‘I know I’m not her real mother, but…¹ During the O. J. Simpson trial in 1995, prosecutor Marcia Clark fought simultaneous battles to win a conviction in the trial of the decade and to keep her children. Her ex-husband was trying to win custody on the grounds that she was working too hard to be a good mother. When the toddler Jamie Bulger was murdered, I recall reading that his mother had received hate-mail blaming her for looking away for an instant! After the second royal divorce, on what did the press blame the British royal family’s misfortunes? Not their own constant intrusion but on the notion that the Queen was a cold and distant mother. Then there was the firestorm of criticism that greeted the announcement of Madonna’s pregnancy. Comment on her unsuitability as a mother led to the dismissal of the child’s father as a ‘sperm donor’, followed, naturally, by speculation after the birth that the state of motherhood would change the singer, a woman who is herself the mistress of image manipulation.

The most public humiliation any mother has ever been forced to undergo was reserved for Deborah Eappen. She was the mother of Matthew Eappen, the small child whose death was at the centre of the murder trial of British au-pair Louise Woodward. For many people, from the very beginning, she was the person who was on trial and not Woodward, because she chose to work three days a week as an ophthalmologist instead of being a full-time mother, because she was married to a doctor and did not ‘need’ to work, because she left her children to be cared for by someone else. A woman grieving the loss of her child was being torn apart instead of comforted, derided instead of consoled. In the fervour of the lynch-mob mentality, little Matthew was all but forgotten as people carried placards in front of the court bearing the words ‘Don’t Blame the Nanny. Blame the Mother!’ They called television and radio phone-ins to scream how she deserved to lose her baby, and vented their hatred of her in a specially-created Internet website. People ignored the fact that Deborah Eappen came home to breastfeed at lunchtime and that she had halved her workload. People ignored the fact that Matthew had another parent who was also a doctor. It was left to Sunil Eappen to defend his wife, because she could not defend herself and because he, merely the father, was not seen to be at fault. The baby died because she wasn’t there.

A great deal has been said and written about motherhood. The only purpose of the bulk of what has already been published is to tell women how to do the job better. You could fill the Augean stables with past volumes of advice to mothers. This book purports to do none of that. I hope it will be many things to many people, mothers and non-mothers, but it is absolutely not a childcare manual.

The rhetoric of motherhood has remained unchallenged for so long that it has become woven into the fabric of our consciousness. For once let’s turn the searchlight on those who presume to tell mothers what to do; to analyse their actions, unpick their motives and judge their handiwork, just as they have done not only to mothers but to all women because they have the potential to be mothers. Once held up to the light, the agendas behind many of our assumptions and beliefs about contemporary mothering are exposed, whether their roots are in popular culture, so-called scientific findings, historically accepted fact or the legacy of tradition. First you find the flaws in what are presented as crystal-clear truths and then you see how the flaws form patterns. Finally, you begin to realize that myths have been created about motherhood and see how those myths refract through the many prisms of our culture and through time itself.

The motherhood myth is the myth of the ‘Perfect Mother’. She must be completely devoted not just to her children, but to her role. She must be the mother who understands her children, who is all-loving and, even more importantly, all-giving. She must be capable of enormous sacrifice. She must be fertile and possess maternal drives, unless she is unmarried and/or poor, in which case she will be vilified for precisely the same things. We believe that she alone is the best caretaker for her children and they require her continual and exclusive presence. She must embody all the qualities traditionally associated with femininity such as nurturing, intimacy and softness. That’s how we want her to be. That’s how we intend to make her.

The ideology which accompanies the myth of the perfect mother can only conceive of one way to mother, one style of exclusive, bonded, full-time mothering. Despite the changes in the working and family lives of millions of women, despite the talk of an age of ‘post-feminism’, attitudes towards mothers are stuck in the dark ages. Thirty years on from the start of the second wave of the feminist movement, we are still debating the effects of daycare on the children of working mothers and blaming never-married or divorced mothers for their children’s problems. This vision of idealized motherhood still permeates every aspect of life from the division of labour at home, to our employment laws, policies and legal rulings, and it drips down continually through popular culture, books, television, films and newspapers.

The ideal mother is also the ‘natural’ mother, hence the stereotype of the wicked stepmother. The maternal ideal is based on a belief in what is natural, on notions of maternal instinct. Today there is a renewed reverence for ideas about maternal instinct, which has been prompted by the fear that motherhood, one of the two pillars upholding the institution of the family alongside marriage, is being threatened. It stands to reason, then, that if maternal qualities are natural, all women must have them. The growing number of women who choose to delay or avoid motherhood altogether fascinate and alarm the myth-makers because they defy the myth. For them, new mini-myths are invented to try to co-opt them into the maternal state.

There’s a moment in the popular film When Harry Met Sally in which the main character, played by Meg Ryan, is discussing man problems with her best friend. ‘You’re thirty-one. The clock is ticking!’ warns her chum. ‘No it isn’t,’ she replies. ‘I read it doesn’t start until you’re thirty-six.’ The notion of the so-called ‘biological clock’ is a great example of contemporary mythmaking. The clock has two hands. On the one hand there’s the fact that a woman’s fertility declines over time, which is true and which is being shamelessly exploited to make women anxious about the decision when to have a child. On the other hand, there’s the notion, as expressed by the character Sally in the film, that the urge to have a child strikes all women at a particular time, without warning and independent of all intellectual thought processes, which is palpable rubbish and has no scientific basis whatsoever. Those women who say they have experienced a natural urge or need to have a child do so at different times of their lives and in different ways; plenty of women never do. Nevertheless, these two ideas are rolled into one and delivered as gospel in such a way as effectively to browbeat women (including those who may feel ambivalent about having children) into the institution of motherhood. Listen to your heart not your head, is the message.

Women’s magazines and the women’s pages of newspapers are full of it. ‘The price of delaying pregnancy is high,’² warns a writer. ‘The brood instinct is a biological time-bomb with a dicky fuse,’³ postulates another. ‘What time is it by your biological clock?’⁴ asks a third. The logic goes like this: if you are over thirty you are running out of time to have a family; you may think you don’t want one, but you are wrong; the feeling will strike but by then it may be too late! This unpleasant and exploitative mind-game is played out over and over. Meanwhile no one never hears the flip side of the coin, from the women who have children mainly because they don’t quite dare not to, because they are afraid of losing out, and of ‘missing the boat’. Or from the woman in her mid-forties who preferred to tell people she was infertile rather than explain her decision not to become a mother. Nor do you hear from women, like the television director I spoke to, who cherished her children but regretted her decision to become a mother. There’s silence on that. In the language of the myth it is important to believe that all women come from one mould, with the same biologically programmed responses.

Beliefs about motherhood are passed off as ‘traditional’ and ‘natural’, as though the two words had the same meaning; and, as both traditional and natural, these beliefs have become unassailable. Yet, as any historian will tell you, the most enduring of these ideas is not more than a few hundred years old. There have been periods in history when women appeared not to care much for their children at all, routinely sending newborns away to wet-nurses and using infanticide as a means of family planning. There have been times, specifically the early years of colonial America, when fathers and not mothers were thought to be the best people to raise children. The current maternal ideal is simply the product of a particular time and place, and at its height lasted no more than a few years from the end of the Second World War until the early 1970s. It just happens to be the version that was in place when most of the people who are now running the country were born, and comes to us washed with the sentiment of nostalgia.

Today, caring for children is still virtually an exclusively female task. It is also harder than ever before. As the quantity of available information about childcare and child development has ballooned, so motherhood has become increasingly proactive and interventionist. The job now starts at conception. The mother-to-be is expected to give up tea and coffee, alcohol, cigarettes, including passive smoking, soft cheeses and other unpasteurized foods; she must avoid stress and too much aerobic exercise and take folic acid and multivitamins – and that is the very minimum. If she consults any of the several dozen contemporary advice manuals available she will find an unending list of do’s and don’ts, some doubtless valid but many irrelevant, perhaps even the product of the ‘expert’s’ own imagination. Throughout her pregnancy the growth of her child and every aspect of her own behaviour will be closely monitored by her doctor and hospital.

Once a mother fed, clothed and comforted her offspring, and there, for better or for worse, lay the limits of her obligations. Today her responsibilities have doubled. She is also in charge of her children’s emotional stability and psychological development. In the mid-twentieth century, Freud and the psychoanalysts who followed and developed his theories – John Bowlby and D. W. Winnicott in particular, who wrote in the 1940s and 1950s – emphasized the mother’s role and her competence in a way that had never been considered before. They issued dire warnings about children who would turn into retards or psychopaths if women failed in their duties as mothers. Since those days, added to her responsibility for her child’s mental well-being, mothers have also been given the third task of driving their offspring towards intellectual and academic achievement. Successful motherhood now means producing a high achiever as well as a well-balanced adult. Bookshops today sell volumes entitled Discovering Your Child’s True Genius and toys come from the Early Learning Centre.

Mothers are besieged with information, more than they can possibly absorb. The advice is always presented as ‘best for baby’ but masks any number of other agendas – professional, political and social. Careers are not made by agreeing with the findings of the last researcher; newspapers need stories to sell; and authors must have something new to say. So modern mothers find themselves faced with a plethora of often conflicting advice. One doctor might warn her not to gain weight; another might tell her to eat for two. Childbirth choices go in and out of fashion, mirroring power struggles in the hierarchy of hospitals: natural versus interventionist; home versus hospital; midwife versus consultant. One month a mother may hear that she should bring her new baby into her bed; the next she will be chided and told she risks smothering her baby, either literally or emotionally. In an era when delinquency and the breakdown of discipline are at the forefront of social and political debate, the mother who strikes her child is condemned.

Nothing exemplifies the paradox of motherhood as a state which is both revered and reviled, natural and yet policed, more clearly than the issue of breastfeeding. Bottle-feeding is frowned upon and the pressure on mothers to breastfeed is immense, yet there are still very many people in the UK who regard the sight of a breastfeeding woman as obscene. In August 1997 a woman breastfeeding her child in a courtyard had water thrown over her by a disgusted shopkeeper. She turned out to be an Express newspaper journalist and the story, which was carried on the front page of the next day’s newspaper, prompted a national discussion. Many people, including Anne Winterton MP, supported the shopkeeper’s view that women should breastfeed out of sight, but in Britain there are extremely few public breastfeeding facilities and the combined effect of public disapproval and lack of facilities keeps breastfeeding mothers virtually homebound. In Britain the Campaign for Rights in Breastfeeding lobbies MPs to prevent women being thrown out of restaurants, shops and public places for breastfeeding their babies. In the USA harassment of women feeding their babies in public has required twelve states to pass laws clarifying a mother’s right to do so.

This contradictory response to motherhood is evidenced in other ways, too. A woman announcing her pregnancy will be offered congratulations, will find herself treated as though she has done something very special, but the display of a pregnant body inspires a degree of repulsion which is not properly explained by the suggestion that such images are merely indecorous or inappropriate. When Demi Moore appeared on the front cover of Vanity Fair and exposed the curves of her pregnant body, some newsagents insisted the magazine be sold in an opaque wrapper. In 1997, when the new women’s magazine Frank ran a fashion layout using pregnant models, the magazines’s offices were deluged with complaints. Mothers should not be seen. Neither should they be heard.

One rarely hears mothers complain, and then never in public. Their compliance is bought or ensured in three ways: by glorifying aspects of motherhood; by making women who don’t feel or do what is required feel guilty; and finally, and as a last resort, by punishing mothers considered actually deviant (for example, women who leave their children inspire a moral wrath not visited on the thousands of fathers who do the same; legal sanctions are being levied on pregnant women who refuse medical treatment or abuse their own bodies).

The best-known image of the ideal mother has been with us for centuries in the form of the Madonna and Child, the most compelling depiction of pale, calm, benevolent motherhood. Whether sculpted by Pisano in 1300 or painted by Dali in the mid-twentieth century, she is always portrayed cradling her child in her arms and gazing at him in a moment of private pleasure, or looking outwards contemplating the viewer with a smile of peace and fulfilment playing upon her lips. Although Christianity did not, on its own, invent the motherhood myth, the Church has been highly efficient at marketing the maternal ideal. Mary is held up to Catholic women everywhere as an inspirational figure. In parts of Catholic Central and South America there exists even today a kind of cult of motherhood named after her: Marianisma. Poor women sacrifice and deny themselves everything for the sake of their children, especially their sons, in the hope that they will one day repay their mother’s love and loyalty when she is old. Motherhood in this instance is capable of delivering earthly salvation.

Baby Jesus is never painted with his head thrown back and bawling. His mother never looks testy or tired. No one paints her trying to prepare Baby Jesus’s food with one hand while jiggling him on her hip with the other. Or ignoring him while he screams his lungs out in the next room. No one has ever painted Mary going about the mundane tasks of motherhood: giving Jesus a bath, feeding him or dressing him. The Madonna and Child are frozen in eternity in a moment many mothers experience with their babies relatively infrequently.

The image of the maternal idyll is presumably so appealing because it reminds both those who paint such images and those who look at them of a time when they were children and found comfort in a mother’s embrace. It isn’t really a comment on women’s experience of motherhood, although it is often read as one. The power of the image is derived from what society wants from women.

The ideal mother is everywhere in art, poetry, fiction, film. She is the dream for whom Peter Pan searches, a beautiful memory to Cinderella and Snow White whose stepmothers are cruel to them. She is there on the cover of Good Housekeeping and Family Circle, in television programmes such as Happy Days and Little House on the Prairie. In more contemporary depictions like the Cosby Show, a nod to modernity has allowed her a job. She is such an archetype you sometimes don’t even notice her, but there she is in Hollywood action movies standing behind Mel Gibson or Harrison Ford, vulnerable, warm yet wistful, part of the hero’s home and family life that he must protect. And be sure she exists by design and not by accident. In 1997, when Disney again adapted Dodie Smith’s The Hundred and One Dalmatians for the screen, writer-producer John Hughes changed Smith’s original version in which Cruella DeVil is an old school chum of the dalmatians’ owner Anita. Instead, he made her Anita’s former boss and owner of a fashion design company, unmarried and childless, whose motive for wanting to kill the puppies is her fury at being deserted by Anita, who gives up her job when she becomes a mother. In the first version of the tale it was Snow White’s natural mother who was her adversary.

Mothers are stereotyped and so are women who choose not to become mothers. In 1995, researchers ascertained the attitudes of a group of college students towards motherhood.⁵ They showed that married mothers who stayed at home were seen in a positive even sentimental light, but stepmothers were held in poor regard, divorced mothers were viewed as failures, and single mothers as deviants and losers. Traditional mothers were even thought to be nicer people. Our beliefs about motherhood are pervasive and powerful. Whether Snow White and Cinderella helped to create the myth or simply perpetuated it, they illustrate its appeal. Marketing men use it to sell feel-good movies, baked goods and cold remedies. Today the same idealized image is even being used to sell motherhood itself, as a multi-million-pound market in reproductive technology flourishes using glossy brochures containing colour pictures of mothers and their babies to sell infertility treatment to childless couples.

In the 1960s feminists rejected an overly romantic vision of motherhood and identified its silken cords of oppression. Before the changes wrought in the 1960s only one line of promotion was available in the lives of most women: from perfect bride to perfect wife to perfect mother. An oversight on the part of the feminist movement as a whole has been to ignore motherhood from that point on, believing that if all the available political energy was devoted to increasing women’s career choices and achieving economic independence, motherhood would somehow take care of itself. At the same time, another school of popular feminism actually bolstered myths about motherhood by arguing women’s moral and social superiority in relation to men and laying claim on behalf of womanhood to qualities such as creativity and emotional sensitivity.

Even the so-called ‘power feminists’, such as Naomi Wolf, author of Fire with Fire, argue that there is nothing stopping women today except their own victim mentality. In her analysis Wolf overlooked motherhood, the one area of women’s lives feminism has barely acknowledged. The dated, unchanged, narrow institution of motherhood which obliges women to mother in a certain way is the Achilles’ heel of modern feminism. Despite Wolf’s exhortations to think positively, no woman manager can compete with her male colleagues on fair terms if she is also a mother. Yet the word ‘motherhood’ does not even appear in the index to Wolf’s book, and in the page and a half of text given to the subject the author merely repeats the old feminist adage that biology is not destiny. End of story. In fact, the story of how feminism must tackle the issues surrounding motherhood is only just beginning.

It is unrealistic to suppose that the majority of women will stop having children. Many women talk, in convincing terms, of a strong, biological impulse which produces the desire to have children; others simply love children and wish to raise them; others still value family and the links created through the generations by blood ties. This vital and valuable commitment to children nevertheless means that today, while the perfect bride is no more than a one-day fantasy and the perfect wife has been consigned to the waste disposal, the perfect mother as an instrument through which women’s actions and choices can be controlled and manipulated has survived, because while men can be left to look after themselves, children cannot. And while a woman might rightly walk out on an aggressive, incompetent or uncaring man, few women would wish to forsake their children.

Working alongside the idealized depiction of motherhood is the second tool of enforcement: guilt. Guilt has become so strongly associated with motherhood that it is often considered to be a natural emotion. It is not. Guilt is not a biological, hormonally-driven response. Women feel guilty because they are made to. Mothers are told that every failure, every neglected task, every dereliction of their growing duties, every refusal to sacrifice will be seared upon their child’s psyche, will mar his or her future, and damage not only the mother-child relationship but every subsequent relationship in the child’s life. That is, if the mother who is found to be wanting doesn’t create a juvenile delinquent or a fully-fledged criminal.

A culture of mother-blaming, by everyone including children, has become so deeply entrenched in our society that bad mothering is considered to be a contributory cause in an astonishing array of contemporary problems. In America, when the Unabomber was arrested, a leading news magazine hypothesized that the rage which had caused him to wage a twenty-year bombing campaign might have been provoked by an early episode when his mother left him. The desecration of inner-city communities is laid at the door of single mothers instead of economic policies or even absent fathers. A psychologist assessing a child’s bed-wetting, or a teenager’s use of recreational drugs, will often look first to the mother – does she work, how much time does she spend at home? Maternal guilt can be elicited directly in newspaper headlines (‘What kind of mother are you?’) or indirectly, as in the advert for a company selling home-office products: ‘When I finally got home, John was waiting.⁶ Half asleep he asked the question he’d been saving all day: Mom, can we play now?’ In 1997 the BBC programme Panorama produced new ‘evidence’ showing how children fared badly when their mothers worked.⁷ All this time, the responsibility of fathers has gone unquestioned.

In the 1990s the accumulated result of the hailstorm of advice and threats is a hyperconsciousness about mothering, particularly among middle-class women, many of whom work and have children in their thirties. The current pressures on mothers mean that such women embark on motherhood with guilt built in from the start, and they approach the role with an enormous degree of anxiety, determined to do it right, determined not to be criticized. A lack of support from the wider polity means they are like trapeze artists, flying without a safety net, unable to afford the luxury of a single mistake. They become control freaks. Everything is sublimated to the needs and wishes of the child. There is a rigidity about the running of the household, which has become totally child-centred: the telephone is switched off during afternoon naps; bedtimes, bathtimes and mealtimes take precedence even over the appearance of visitors, and certainly over entertainment and other social events; there’s a baby intercom in every room and a planner on the kitchen wall with every activity from ‘Water Babies’ to music play carefully timetabled. Because the buck stops with her, the mother sees herself as absolutely indispensable and no one else, except perhaps a carefully-vetted nanny, is entirely trusted to take care of her child. To non-mothers she appears ridiculous, but she is driven by guilt and fear, and cannot see how excessive her own actions are. In this lie the makings of a tragedy.

On the flip side of the coin are those mothers society views as so wicked and unnatural that they have to be forced into taking responsibility. The rhyme about the little girl who had a little curl could just as well have been written for mothers, certainly in terms of the way they are seen by society. ‘When she was good she was very, very good and when she was bad she was horrid.’ In America women are being prosecuted and imprisoned for taking illegal drugs while they are pregnant; forced into having caesarean sections against their wishes; or hospitalized by court order for failing to follow a doctor’s orders. The notion of ‘foetal rights’, which underlies many of these convictions, is burgeoning and is rapidly being exported to the UK. In contrast to the over-anxious mother who is generally white and middle-class, these ‘unnatural’ mothers are usually poor. In Britain women are being charged and imprisoned for leaving their children at home alone. For those women who deliberately harm their children, society reserves a strength of hatred unequalled for any male killer.

Women, because of their ability to bear children and also because society assigns them the task of raising children, have a set of uniquely different responsibilities and therefore liabilities. For some women, who might find themselves accidentally pregnant, these responsibilities are not even asked for. There is a complicated set of moral and legal issues to be answered over how far a woman can be held accountable for what she does to her own body which also affects an unborn child. These are questions which are presently being dealt with through the entirely inappropriate medium of the criminal courts.

Recent events amount to nothing less than a legally sanctioned witch-hunt against mothers, an extraordinary vilification of women as mothers unparalleled at any time in history. It is no coincidence that such events, representing the extreme tip of a general contemporary culture of victimizing mothers, are taking place at this time. Society has always turned its critical eye upon mothers at key moments: in the nineteenth century during the Industrial Revolution, when women’s role as home-maker was born, and after the Second World War when women had to be encouraged back into domesticity to give men their factory jobs back. And so it is now. The prosecutions mentioned above come in an era of perceived instability and uncertainty, during which the placebo of family values has been placed at the top of the political and social agenda by politicians and lawmakers under pressure to provide solutions. Mothers in general, and mothers who are actually or perceived to be deviant in particular, are taking the brunt of our fear and despair over a collective failure towards the next generation. All this mother-blaming is a displacement activity for all the problems we can do nothing about, from corporation downsizing, to urban decay, to the emergence of new world economic powers which disrupt domestic economies and employment patterns.

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.

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

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).

The legacy of the first gurus lives on both in ideas about what constitutes good mothering as well as in the continued reliance of Western societies on the words of experts and their personal philosophies. Winnicott’s lectures broadcast on the BBC were replaced by Dr Spock’s Common Sense Book of Baby and Childcare with which generations of babyboomers were reared. When they became parents, they turned to Penelope Leach’s Baby and Child. It’s a rare woman today who embarks upon motherhood without a manual in her hand, like an instruction leaflet for a new computer. Despite the fact that every mother knows that the theory and practice of raising children frequently do not coincide, there are few who dare to go it alone. The experts create and feed their own market by issuing dire and prophetic warnings of the untold damage inflicted upon children by uninformed parents who may think they know what is good for their own child. Of all the many ways guilt has been induced and exploited in mothers, the childcare gurus must rank high on the list.

A famous author, who is the mother of several children, once told me that she had each of her children in a different decade and raised each on the popular method of the moment, with a different and conflicting set of rules every time. If after every birth, as she embarked on motherhood anew, she had believed the words of the fashionable, new expert she would only have been able to conclude that she had utterly ruined her preceding child. Truby King, who influenced many generations of mothers up until the Second World War, warned mothers against touching, petting or ‘spoiling’ their children and decreed a four-hour feeding schedule. A Truby King baby would have had a very different infancy from that of his younger sibling born in 1950 and brought up with Spock’s enthusiasm for displays of maternal affection and feeding on demand. From early on, experts emerged from various and often competing fields whose disciplines placed the emphasis on different aspects of the child’s well-being. Some were doctors whose main concern was with exercise and nutrition; others were ethologists keen to apply their observations on animal behaviour to human subjects; still others were psychologists and psychoanalysts who were far more interested in the dynamics of the relationship between mother and child.

Early in the twentieth century, Sigmund Freud was expanding his theories of human behaviour and the development of personality. The resulting discipline of psychoanalysis has, at its core, the belief that early experiences in childhood set in place events and behaviour in later life. It is this idea, which was built upon and developed by Freud’s disciples, that is central to the tendency, which later became endemic, to blame mothers for their children’s misfortunes and to scrutinize the relationship between mothers and their children.

Freud, however, was actually far more interested in the relationship between boys and their fathers and the resolution of the Oedipal conflict which was the foundation stone of all his theories. He did not actually delve deeply into the personality or behaviour of the mother, nor was he concerned with specific childrearing practices, believing instead that babies are driven by powerful instincts and love their mothers who are the people who feed, warm and comfort them. But he did explicitly point to the direction in which psychoanalysis was to progress by describing the mother-child relationship as ‘unique, without parallel, established unalterably for a whole lifetime as the first and strongest love-object and the prototype of all later love-relations – for both sexes’.

Freud’s sexism is notorious and has been the subject of criticism both from within psychoanalysis as well as outside. He saw women as castrated men and wrote of their ‘sense of inferiority’ and of the blame young girls place on their mothers for their lack of a penis which has left them for ever ‘insufficiently equipped’.¹ Motherhood was women’s salvation and compensation for being without a penis, particularly if they bore a male child equipped with the prized piece of anatomy.

Only in relatively recent times, with the advent of feminist thinking in all disciplines including psychoanalysis, have Freud’s theories about women been properly addressed. In the 1970s Kate Millett, the American feminist, accused Freud and his followers of overlooking in their entirety existing social structures and notions of femininity which, rather than biology, might account for women’s social status. In other words, Millet argued that nurture rather than nature might account for gender differences.

From within the therapy movement, psychologists Dorothy Dinnerstein and Nancy Chodorow have both powerfully reinterpreted Freud’s theories on motherhood. In The Mermaid and the Minotaur, published in 1977, Dinnerstein presents the idea that small children develop a rage against their mothers (which is never properly overcome) as the person who alone has the power to grant or withhold what the child desires. Chodorow says it is the girl’s unconscious identification with her mother, while boys see themselves as different and separate, that endlessly reproduces gendered divisions of labour and women’s exclusive responsibility for nurturing children: girls copy their mothers mothering. Both women argue that society and the position of women and mothers will improve only when men take on their share of responsibility for their children.

So, in the first three decades of the century, while Freud was producing his theories, the essential elements which would eventually produce our modern maternal ideology were coming together. The medicalization of motherhood – the result of an increased scientific understanding – removed childcare from the hands of women and placed it in the hands of experts. Soon most babies in Britain would be born in hospital and this, added to the creation of the welfare state in the post-war period, dramatically decreased the infant mortality rate. For the first time in history, parents did not need to fear the death of their children.

Concern for the physical health of children was immediately replaced by new considerations for their mental health and psychological well-being. The psychoanalyst John Bowlby highlighted this concern with his theory of ‘attachment’; in other words, the biological bonds between mother and child urgently required that, in the post-war period, women should return en masse from the world of work to their rightful place, as he saw it, in the home. Between them these men – and with very few exceptions they were all men – created the ideal of the 1950s stay-at-home, full-time mother.

The gurus rose fast in their respective fields, amassing tremendous fame and influence, but one by one their theories have been reconsidered by subsequent generations and either debunked or rethought. Today, no one would dream of leaving a young baby to sleep outside on a cold night, as Truby King once advised. Bowlby’s ideas have been revisited and watered down. In modern times, Marshall Klaus and John Kennell, two Bowlby followers, presented their theory of bonding to a receptive public, only to have their methods criticized and their findings overturned by their peers. Few were unmasked as spectacularly as Bruno Bettelheim, a world-famous psychoanalyst and expert on autism. Bettelheim’s theory that autism, now recognized to have an organic genesis, was caused by extremely brutal treatment at the hands of the children’s mothers gained wide acceptance, despite the protests of the accused women. Bettelheim’s solution was to separate mother and child and allow no contact between them. Only after his death by his own hand in 1990, when an American investigative journalist Richard Pollack (whose own mother had been blamed for his brother’s autism by the doctor) delved into Bettelheim’s background, did the truth emerge.² Bettelheim had fabricated his credentials including his training as a psychoanalyst, faked research and claimed to have cured children he never even treated. In all, he was a fraud who tormented and vilified mothers, and influenced the way emotionally disturbed children were treated for decades.

Frederick Truby King

Most of the childcare gurus make one unequivocally positive contribution to childcare and with Truby King it was the revival of breastfeeding, which at that time had become thoroughly unfashionable. ‘Breast is best’ was his saying and his achievements, including halving the infant mortality rate in New Zealand, are undoubtedly due to that single premise. Otherwise posterity has not judged Truby King kindly. His approach to childrearing was strict, forceful and unyielding. He bullied, cajoled and threatened mothers whom he appeared to regard as the weak link in the entire process (he once commented in exasperation that if men had the capacity to breastfeed they would have the sense to do what he said) and he advocated for the care of small babies a regime of almost military harshness.

Babies were to be fed only every four hours and at no other time, regardless of how much they cried or however apparent their distress. He also forbade mothers to feed at night at all, urging them to let their babies ‘cry it out’ rather than give in. To do so would have been to spoil the child. The Truby King method also discouraged physical contact between mother and child, including kissing or cuddling which was considered unnecessary as well as unhealthy and highly likely to pass on germs. Playing with babies would only overexcite them and for that reason was frowned upon. Of course, many women broke the rules and hugged or played with their babies only to berate themselves about it afterwards.

A flick through his most famous book, Care and Feeding of Baby, reveals what has become the standard style for babycare books even today: the only two characters are Mother and Baby (fathers have no role except to earn money); baby is always a boy; the family arrangements are nuclear. The prose is classic ‘carrot and stick’. The author uses his professional status to back up his mixture of inducements and warnings. Mothers would achieve peace and perfection if they followed his advice.

Breaking the rules resulted in indiscipline, a ruined child or even death as the eminent paediatrician remarked in speeches which were sometimes little more than rants against the failings of mothers: ‘much wastage of infant life in our midst is due to self-indulgence and shirking of duties.’³ Mothers frustrated Sir Frederick who would have much preferred that the care of infants was entirely taken over by specially trained nurses.

Despite a firm belief in gender roles and the place of women, Truby King did not appear to believe in the idea of maternal instinct. He considered motherhood a calling for which women had to be trained, because left to their own devices they would ruin the lives of their children. The closest he ever came to recognizing any kind of natural emotions was a reference to the additional advantage of promoting bonds between mother and child when breastfeeding. In general he regarded mothers as inadequate, ignorant and lacking in discipline. A mother was all that stood between him and the creation of the perfect child.

When Truby King died in 1938 in New Zealand, his long and distinguished career had earned him international recognition. His ideas lived on until the war years and just beyond; many of today’s fifty-, sixty- and seventy-year-olds were Truby King babies, and many grandmothers still regard silence, solitude and timed feeds as the definition of a good baby.

The aftermath of the Second World War produced a new set of circumstances and a different agenda. Women, too, were ready to give up this gruelling and often heartbreaking regime. By the 1950s, Truby King’s ideas were swept aside as a new era of motherhood rolled in.

John Bowlby

No other theorist had as powerful and as radical an effect on thinking about motherhood as Edward John Mostyn Bowlby who died in 1990 and whose ideas on ‘attachment’ and the effects of maternal deprivation form the cornerstone of modern maternal ideology. Unlike the other great ‘gurus’, Bowlby was not so much a popular writer as an academic and theorist. Nevertheless, his first book. Child Care and the Growth of Love, sold hundreds of thousands of copies around the world. It was a seminal work.

Bowlby came from somewhat elevated beginnings. He was distinctly upper class, the heir to a baronet who was raised by a nanny, followed by boarding-school and Cambridge. As with Freud, there has been speculation over whether it was Bowlby’s early experience of being raised by a somewhat distant mother, who preferred to leave the children’s care to a hired nanny, that established Bowlby’s later fascination with mother-child relationships.

The 1940s were a critical period for Europe and for Bowlby, and most of his ideas were the fruit of this thoroughly atypical period. The Second World War bore witness to the large-scale evacuation of children from the cities to the relative safety of the countryside and sometimes abroad to other countries, such as Canada. Children were separated from their families for months, even years, often boarded with strangers and lived unfamiliar lives.

War changed the lives of women. In the previous decades women’s work outside the home had been declining steadily, but conscription and the call to arms reversed the trend sharply. Women staffed the munitions factories, went to the countryside to work the fields and bring in the harvests, volunteered as nurses, raised funds for the war effort and joined the Wrens. For the first (and last) time in the history of the country, the government both condoned women working outside the home and provided extensive, state-funded nursery and daycare so that they could do so.

Britain and the world had undergone massive social shifts, the long-term effects of which remained unclear. Six years of fighting a war had resulted in population shifts and decimated communities in the countryside and the city. Eventually, terraced homes, with their narrow streets and facing backyards, would be pulled down and replaced by modern tower blocks and prefabs. While that was still to come, the social effects were already felt, particularly by mothers who lost their support networks of kin and neighbours in one fell swoop. Women from the upper classes no longer had servants to administer to their children’s needs and for the first time became wholly responsible for their own offspring.

This is the context within which Bowlby produced his studies of institutionalized childcare and his twin theories of the instinctual bond between mother and child which should never be broken, and the effect upon children if the bond is broken.

Bowlby had been following with interest the work of Rene Spitz who had made a study of institutionalized babies. Spitz’s findings then mirror the situation documented in state orphanages in China in the 1990s: children deprived of human contact and isolated for long periods will fail to thrive, rocking themselves back and forth, hitting their heads repeatedly against the sides of their cot, or staring in dull passivity for hours on end. Bowlby carried out his own study of forty-four child thieves, noting that seventeen of them had been separated from their mothers for a period as infants. Struck by this fact he ascribed their later problems to this single event, famously writing: ‘changes of mother-figure can have very destructive effects in producing the development of an affectionless psychopathic character given to persistent juvenile conduct.’⁴

In 1950 the World Health Organization commissioned a study from Bowlby on children orphaned or separated from their parents as a result of the war in France, the Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland. The report, which was published in 1951, immediately caused an international sensation. In its pages Bowlby condemned the cruelty of all institutional care, arguing that children needed and were entitled to the love and care of a mother. Anything less amounted to ‘maternal deprivation’, the effects of which would be seared on the child’s psyche eternally and irrevocably.

Bowlby desperately wanted to close down or at least reform the system of large orphanages which were incapable of meeting the needs of individual children. In this he succeeded and he can be thanked for current social welfare policies which try to place a child with foster parents or in a family environment instead of in children’s homes. But for women, for mothers, Bowlby’s views, his high ideals and exacting standards as well as the way his work has since been interpreted, spelled disaster.

In Child Care and the Growth of Love, Bowlby declares that the mental health of a child absolutely requires ‘a warm, intimate, and continuous relationship with his mother…in which both find satisfaction and enjoyment’.⁵ No small order by anyone’s standards, but that is the very least of it. He continues: ‘we must recognise that leaving any child of under three years of age is a major operation only to be undertaken for sufficient and good reason.’⁶

In Bowlby’s terms, not only should a mother be her child’s constant companion, but she should find her fulfilment in the role, too. If she fails to do so, the whole exercise is useless. ‘The mother needs to feel an expansion of her own personality in the personality of the child’ – note needs to feel. ‘The provision of mothering’, he argued, ‘cannot be considered in terms of hours per day, but only in terms of the enjoyment of each other’s company which mother and child obtain.’ Any woman who hesitated received admonishment in the very next paragraph. ‘The provision of constant attention day and night, seven days a week and 365 days in the year, is possible only for a woman who derives profound satisfaction from seeing her child grow from babyhood, through the many phases of childhood, to become an independent man or woman, and knows it is her care which has made this possible.’⁷ Of course, there weren’t, and aren’t, many women who would have dared to declare themselves anything less than absolutely committed to the healthy progress of their children.

Bowlby elaborated all kinds of emotional, psychological and character disorders which could result from maternal deprivation, from the creation of full-blown psychopaths to adults unable to function properly in their own relationships. Deprivation had many causes, including a child’s stay in hospital. Ignoring a crying child counted as partial deprivation, this last much to the consternation of a generation of women who had followed the diktats of Truby King with their own children.

All the attention mothers were required to lavish upon their children facilitated their proper ‘attachment’ to each other. Bowlby was an early fan of ethology and from his readings on the behaviour of birds and monkeys, specifically ideas about imprinting (the way newborn animals automatically follow their mother), he concluded that an infant’s attachment to its mother was both natural and instinctive.

Fathers, it will be no surprise to hear, once again had no significant role, save as earners. By placing so much emphasis on mothers and arguing that attachment was instinctive and natural, Bowlby left little for fathers who have struggled to find a place in their children’s lives ever since. Bowlby himself was a father of four who, by all accounts, left the care of his children entirely up to his wife Ursula.

Bowlby’s theories were seized upon and his conclusions, based on extreme situations, were glibly applied to the everyday. It is clear, too, that Bowlby himself, in his zeal, overstated his case. An immediate consequence was panic among women terrified they had already damaged children – an anxiety he was obliged to quell by softening his message slightly in later writings.

Another far more serious consequence was Bowlby’s success in achieving the closure of not only the orphanages he loathed, but the vast proportion of nurseries and daycare centres which had opened up, with government approval and funding, during the war. In 1944 there were 1,559 nurseries in Britain catering to tens of thousands of children, but after the war the nurseries became an expensive wartime legacy for the government, which was also under pressure to provide jobs for thousands of returned soldiers. In 1951, in response to Bowlby’s commissioned report, a WHO report claimed that nurseries and daycare ‘cause permanent damage to the emotional health of a generation’.⁸ Bowlby’s findings swiftly became official policy. By the early 1950s virtually all the wartime nurseries had gone. It became accepted wisdom among health professionals, social workers and teachers that working mothers ran the risk of damaging their children.

It has been suggested by some historians and writers that more than a whiff of conspiracy surrounds what appears to be the remarkably fortuitous timing of mutually expedient concerns. From the point of view of the government, there does appear to be some truth in the suggestion that they had more in mind than the happiness of infants when they embraced Bowlby’s theories so readily. But Bowlby probably also imagined he was elevating the status of mothers by bestowing on their task so much importance, rather than simply driving women back into the home. It is easy to see how his theories could have been a soft sell to plenty of women. Many had witnessed or experienced the wartime shattering of their families. They wanted time to re-establish relationships with their children and their husbands. These were the babyboom years when not only cities and economies were being rebuilt, but families too. Postwar prosperity in Britain, helped by billions of dollars of Marshall Plan aid from America, meant that even blue-collar workers could earn enough to keep a wife and family.

It is illuminating to see how certain of Bowlby’s recommendations were taken up, while others were ignored. Bowlby was opposed to mothers with young children going out to work at all. Previously most nurseries were perfectly prepared to accept two-year-olds, but soon, thanks to Bowlby’s warnings, they would only take children from the age of five. Bowlby, however, did recognize that most women who worked did so because they needed the money. By way of compensation he suggested a wage for housework to be paid by the government to mothers, to encourage and enable them to stay at home – a proposal that never made it to the statute books.

The train Bowlby set on track gathered pace in the years that followed. In time, researchers began to focus not just on the mother’s relationship with her child, but even on her competence. Selma Fraiberg, a Bowlby devotee, invented a method for measuring a child’s attachment to the mother and declared that children whose mothers were not sufficiently skilled or attentive were poorly attached and would grow up insecure. In her immensely popular 1959 book The Magic Years, she argued that nothing less than twenty-four-hour devotion would do, and that being cared for by persons other than their mother was actually harmful to infants. Notably, her calls for financial support for mothers to stay at home also went unheeded.

So the 1950s mother was actually Pygmalion mum, the result of one man’s vision of the perfect mother. For a mixture of social and economic reasons, Bowlby’s ideal of the loving, selfless, stay-at-home supermum became, and still is to this day, the established view of what constitutes ‘normal’ mothering. Motherhood became transformed into a rigid, rule-laden process, governed by dogma produced by so-called experts whose views were always framed in terms of what was best for baby, placing them beyond debate. By being so inflexible and so extreme in the application of ideas which had started as guiding principles, the new professionals put the interests of mothers and their children into conflict.

Typically, far more attention is paid to a controversial or radical new theory than to the subsequent critiques. If Bowlby and his followers were accepted uncritically by the general public, within his profession his views prompted no small degree of controversy. Many other critics came from fields outside psychoanalysis such as ethology, sociology and anthropology. One of his critics was the world-famous anthropologist Margaret Mead who had spent years chronicling childrearing methods in Samoa, Bali and the United States and elsewhere. She dismissed his ideas on the need for exclusive mothering and his ideas about attachment. Others pointed to aspects of Bowlby’s research, in particular the methods he used, which would never meet the standards required of scientific studies today. He rarely, for example, used control groups to measure his findings or looked for other possible causes.

Perhaps the main and most constant criticism is that while Bowlby claimed to be making a study of the effects of ‘maternal deprivation’ on children, what he was really looking at were the results of institutionalization. The children whose case histories make up the bulk of his work were deprived of everything, including ordinary human contact and any kind of affection. They were placed in huge orphanages and had dozens of carers who often provided poor care. Many had suffered some kind of distress in the form of family conflict, or wartime loss, others had been abused. Simply put, these were deeply unhappy children.

The British psychiatrist Michael Rutter has significantly revised and rethought many of Bowlby’s ideas. In his 1972 book Maternal Deprivation Reassessed, he shows that some of the symptoms of ‘maternal deprivation’ which Bowlby described, in particular stunted growth and poor speech development, had far more mundane roots. The children did not grow properly because of their meagre, vitamin-depleted orphanage diet, not because they lacked a mother’s love. Similarly, they had poor vocabularies because of their environment, not their parenting. Indeed, children in large families often display the same problem. As for maternal deprivation creating ‘affectionless psychopaths’, Rutter showed that children whose mothers had died did not become delinquents. The root causes of criminal behaviour in children lay elsewhere.

The popular appeal of Bowlby’s theory of uninterrupted mothering lay in the fact that it seemed to explain something mothers already recognized – that children can be clingy. Bowlby took that premise several stages further and insisted that separating mother and child was actually wrong because it was damaging. Many psychologists now agree, however, that separation per se does not equal damage, even if the child cries when the mother leaves and even if the mother misses her child when she is apart from her. A child is not harmed by his mother working or by being left with other carers.

In his assessment of all the research since Bowlby, Rutter argued that attachment was neither exclusive nor irreversible, but rather a child could be attached to more people than just the mother and attachments could strengthen or weaken during the child’s life. As far as the mother was concerned, it was not the quantity of time but rather the intensity of interaction during the time she spent with her child: ‘mothers who play with their child and give him a great deal of attention have a more strongly attached child than those who interact with the child only when giving him routine care.’⁹ Rutter still talked in terms of the duties of mothers as opposed to fathers and so did little to shift the weight of responsibility, although he did lessen the load slightly. One unanticipated result was to start the 1980s vogue for ‘quality time’ with which modern working mothers tried to assuage their feelings of guilt towards their children.

Neither Bowlby nor his supporters paused to consider the individual characteristics or needs of mothers. It was as though they regarded women as coming from some kind of mould like Stepford Wives, willing and able to accept all the many requirements of their role. Perhaps they believed that ‘instinct’ would somehow subsume every other personality trait and mothers would express towards their children only a bland, ideal type of love. But it seems evident that an aggressive, competitive woman will make a very different kind of mother from a bookish, withdrawn one; an exuberant, cheerful woman will approach her role unlike an anxious woman; a woman whose interests consist solely of classical music and intellectual discourse will doubtless find less pleasure in the company of a three-year-old than someone who prefers board games and walking in the park. When it comes to ideas about motherhood, common sense can sometimes appear to go out of the window. Women have their share of all mankind’s imperfections, and yet to this day we expect to create perfect mothers out of imperfect humans.

Nancy Chodorow, a powerful psychoanalytical thinker, has taken the debate about attachment one stage further by saying that forcing mothers to spend all their time with their children, and to carry the entire emotional burden, guarantees the failure of the very relationship which Bowlby was trying to promote. Ann Dally, a psychiatrist, also points out that although mothers staying at home with their children remains a popular ideal, ‘there is no scientific evidence to justify it on psychological grounds and…if one wanted to look for evidence one might even come up with the suspicion that the era of unbroken and exclusive maternal care has produced the most neurotic, disjointed, alienated and drug-addicted generation ever known.’¹⁰

What’s more, the ideology of motherhood which Bowlby helped to create is almost entirely middle class in its aspirations, as well as being culturally specific. Although exclusive maternal care is often deemed to be natural – proponents of the idea usually point to baby monkeys clinging to their mothers’ backs in the animal world – it seems as though, among humans at least, this way of raising children is not actually standard. A study carried out in the late 1970s of 186 non-industrial cultures by two anthropologists. Weisner and Gallimore, found only five societies where the mother did not share the care of her children with other people.¹¹ Similar conclusions were noted in the seminal study Mothers of Six Cultures by a team of American anthropologists carried out over almost two decades from the 1950s to the 1970s. They observed that the American mother was unique among the cultures they studied in having sole responsibility for her children.

Many of the greatest minds of child development and mothering, including Michael Rutter, Nancy Chodorow, Ann Dally and the eminent British psychologist Barbara Tizard, have all surmised that shared parenting or shared mothering is just as good for children. Some even consider it to be preferable.

Dally provides a closing thought on the theory of attachment and how it has become a self-fulfilling prophecy:

Over the last forty years we…have been trying to condition babies to become attached to their mothers exclusively and, having done that, we…proceed to do research which reveals the undoubted distress caused when an infant who has been conditioned in this way is suddenly separated from his mother…This research is then used by academics and politicians to ‘prove’ that young children should be tied even more totally and exclusively to their mothers.¹²

Psychology has succeeded in creating what it originally set out to describe.

Towards a child-centred philosophy of childcare

Since Bowlby published his theories, childcare has become increasingly focused on the child whose needs now take centre-stage. Throughout the 1950s, the man who defined ‘motherhood’ was the British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott who elaborated and built on Bowlby’s themes of attachment and interdependence. Winnicott’s influence gave way in the 1960s to America’s Dr Benjamin Spock, who was regarded at the time as outrageously permissive in his ‘let the child decide’ approach to raising children. If greatness were measured in book sales and popular appeal alone, then Spock would stand head and shoulders above the rest of the gurus. Sales of his original volume Baby and Child Care reached 40 million and Spock continued to write until he died aged ninety-four in 1998.

Freudian ideas influenced both theorists. Spock and Winnicott emphasized the mother’s unique and (as far as Winnicott was concerned) irreplaceable role in the emotional growth of the child.

Donald Winnicott made his name at a time when mothers were still reeling from the extremes required by Truby King in the name of discipline and training. Mothers neither trusted their own judgement nor did they have any faith in the advice of their own mothers who still believed in the value of four-hour feeds. Indeed, the ‘gurus’ of the twentieth century have been almost solely responsible for breaking down the time-honoured passing of wisdom and knowledge about childcare from mothers to daughters. Winnicott won women over with his sympathetic approach which stressed maternal warmth and love instead of rules, rations and timetables.

Most people in the 1950s came to know of Winnicott through his immensely successful BBC radio lectures on childcare. For Winnicott, just like Bowlby, a woman could not be with her baby enough and anything less than total devotion to the role of mother was an absolute dereliction of a duty bestowed by nature. Perhaps his most famous contribution to twentieth-century ideas about motherhood was to say that there is no such thing as a baby, only a mother-baby unit.

Winnicott praised women’s efforts and their contribution repeatedly and self-consciously: ‘I am trying to draw attention to the immense contribution to the individual and to society that the ordinary good mother…makes at the beginning, and which she does simply through being devoted to her infant.’¹³ And he set himself apart from other professionals who sought to tell mothers what to do and interfered with the natural process of mothering which, according to him, women knew best. Women warmed to him. At last it seemed, here was someone who thought about mothers and not just children.

Winnicott was just as frequently patronizing, though, and the accolades came mixed with condescension. In his essay ‘A Man Looks at Motherhood’ he remarks: ‘you do not even have to be clever, and you don’t even have to think if you do not want to. You may have been hopeless at arithmetic at school, or perhaps all your friends got scholarships, but you didn’t like the sight of a history book and so failed and left school early.’¹⁴ The man who invented the notion of the ‘good enough mother’ concludes the paragraph with this observation intended to reassure his readers: ‘Isn’t it strange that such a tremendously important thing should depend so little on exceptional intelligence.’

Being a ‘good enough mother’ on Winnicott’s terms wasn’t so easy. A woman needed a saint-like capacity for patience, devotion, self-sacrifice and the ability to find fulfilment in even the most mundane tasks of motherhood. She had to delight in every filled nappy, every burp or fart or night-time wakening. ‘All you need is love’ might have been Winnicott’s refrain, and that wasn’t asking much because, according to him, women were like that anyway, it was simply part of female nature. The role of fathers, who were otherwise never mentioned, was simply to make baby love his mother all the more by being ‘hard and strict and unrelenting, intransigent, indestructible’.¹⁵ Trying to help the mother out would just interfere with his proper function.

In case any woman found her capacity to give waning, Winnicott backed up his sweet refrain with a few well-placed threats, promising stunted emotional development and psychological malfunction in the child if the mother failed. This is what happens when a mother doesn’t pay attention and picks her child up without supporting the infant’s head: ‘There are very subtle things here,’ listeners to the broadcast were warned:

If you have got a child’s body and head in your hands and do not think of that as unity and reach for a handkerchief or something, then the head has gone back and the child is in two pieces – head and body; the child screams and never forgets it. The awful thing is that nothing is ever forgotten. Then the child goes around with an absence of confidence in things.¹⁶

The Winnicott child was a fragile bloom who, without showers of love and constant nurturing, would wither and fail.

Of course, everyone in Winnicott’s world was white, middle class and lived in a nuclear family. With his emphasis on raising children in the correct environment, in his extraordinarily prescriptive world there was no room (and, one presumes, no hope either) for children with different family arrangements.

Winnicott also introduced the idea that, in addition to their mothers’ continual presence, what babies needed most of all was familiarity in their environment. In other words, once a routine had been established it should not be changed, nor should the child be moved from location to location. So the woman who put her faith in Winnicott could expect to spend her time isolated at home with her child, unable and unwilling to do much more than make a trip to the shops for fear of playing havoc with her child’s psyche. One wonders what he would have made of, say, Tuareg children who from the moment of their birth are on the move and do not see the same spot from year to year, whose tented homes are pitched in a different place week by week and who are cared for by several women and not just their mothers. Although Winnicott claimed that most mothers were ‘good enough’ mothers, the tone of his writing and lectures was every bit as rigid and moralistic as Truby King’s.

In contrast, Dr Benjamin Spock’s Common Sense Book of Baby and Childcare was cleverly titled and almost certainly struck a chord with women who were tired of the perfectionism demanded of them by men who had never looked after a child for a day in their lives. Spock’s name became closely associated with 1960s’ ideas of freedom from constraints and tolerance and at one point he was held almost solely responsible for the student riots of that decade, which his critics maintained were provoked by youngsters raised according to his permissive ideas. Right or wrong, the accusation nevertheless shows the extent of his influence.

Spock was himself raised on the standards of Emmett Holt (the American Truby King) but his own approach to childcare was just the opposite: sleep when the baby felt like it; potty training in her own time; feeding on demand and then as much or as little as the baby wanted; he didn’t even insist on breastfeeding. While earlier approaches to childcare insisted babies fit in with adult schedules, Spock had it the other way around, but his relaxed approach meant that mothers had to be on hand twenty-four hours a day while baby did things in his own time.

The quantities of information from every quarter, the sea-changes in expert-led opinion, and most of all the apparently dire consequences of getting it wrong have placed mothers in a state of utter dependency on outside sources of information. Although Spock often urged women to trust their own instincts, as social historian Shari Thurer remarked in her historical account of motherhood: ‘If a mother knew which of her impulses to trust, why would she have cracked the cover of these books in the first place?’¹⁷

Spock’s era was a time of changing ideas and Spock, perhaps a little unfairly since he was scarcely the worst offender, took the brunt of feminist ire. Spock’s assumption that parenting was women’s work, backed up with remarks such as, ‘Of course, I don’t mean that the father has to give just as many bottles or change just as many diapers as the mother. But it’s fine for him to do so occasionally’,¹⁸ inflamed the emerging ranks of sisterhood.

Like all good Freudian-influence theorists, he was also unhappy about the idea of women leaving their children to work and countered his recognition that some women may need or want to work with the guilt-inducing words: ‘If a mother realizes clearly how vital this kind of care is to a small child, it may make it easier for her to decide that the extra money she might earn, or the satisfaction she might receive from an outside job, is not so important, after all.’¹⁹ That was in 1958, five years before Betty Friedan awakened the consciousness of millions of women with The Feminine Mystique in which she challenged Freudian ideas of gender. Her ‘problem with no name’ was the mind-numbing routine of home and family life in which women were expected to find contentment, but which buried women alive. This state of affairs, she argued, was good for neither women or children: ‘Strange new problems are being reported in the growing generations of children whose mothers were always there, driving them around, helping with their homework – an inability to endure pain or discipline or pursue any self-sustained goal of any sort, a devastating boredom with life.’²⁰

Adrienne Rich’s problem had a name and its name was motherhood. She wrote with extraordinary candour about her experience of motherhood and her feelings for her children whom she confessed, from time to time, she had the urge to kill. She made it clear that the problem for her was the ‘institution’ of motherhood, ‘the chaining of women in links of love and guilt’.²¹

A poet and academic. Rich, for a while, tried to become the archetypal perfect wife and mother. When she wrote of the experience she lit a charge:

I only knew that I had lived through something which was considered central to the lives of women, fulfilling even in its sorrows, a key to the meaning of life; and that I could remember little except anxiety, physical weariness, anger, self-blame, boredom, and division within myself; a division made more acute by the moments of passionate love, delight in my children’s spirited bodies and minds, amazement at how they went on loving me in spite of my failures to love them wholly and selflessly.²²

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