Mother of All Myths. Aminatta Forna
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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