Mother of All Myths. Aminatta Forna
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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