Mother of All Myths. Aminatta Forna
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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