I feel like I have been reading this book forever.
Perhaps it seems like a long time because The Myths of Motherhood: How Culture Reinvents the Good Mother (1994) by psychologist Shari L. Thurer ranges across thousands of years of Western history: from ‘cavemother’, feared and respected for her generative power, to ‘twentieth-century’ mom torn between the home and the office. Not being a professional historian, Thurer doesn’t let things like detail and nuance get in the way of her romp through the past (can you tell I may have had some issues with this book?). And I use the word ‘romp’ advisedly: the mode of address is light-hearted and occasionally wry. All of which makes for a good read, particularly if you are a bit on the tired side after running around after a toddler and trying to get back into work at the same time.
Don’t get me wrong, I think there is much that is good in this book, not least its premise: that our ideas about good motherhood are not natural, but cultural, and if we look back through history we can see that what a given society thinks of mothers and ‘good’ mothering is not the same as another’s. Thurer even begins by saying:
The briefest glance at history will dispel any notion that there is but one correct way to mother. Your grandmother may have bottle-fed your father on a rigid schedule and started his toilet-training when he was but the tender age of three months ... Yet he managed to grow up. Youngsters tend to survive their parents’ bungled efforts on their behalf. (xii)
I like that Thurer doesn’t shy away from some of the upsetting things that that historical journey tells us: that until the nineteenth century, for example, infanticide was a means of (post-) birth control to a greater or lesser degree in many societies ... and it was frequently women who practised it.
I like that she interrogates the idea that certain societies held up as golden ages - classical Greece and Renaissance Europe, for example - are less so seen from the point of view of mothers. In early modern Europe, for example, women who did not conform to prevailing ideals of the good mother were at risk of being persecuted for witchcraft or, if unmarried, punished as adulterers.
I like too that, with her pyschologist’s hat on, she embraces the ambivalence of motherhood: both the joy and wonder, and the fears, self-righteousness or disinterest. Arguing that ‘maternal altruism is difficult to sustain’ and that there is conspiracy of silence around any negative feelings that mothers might experience, Thurer wants to let mothers off the collective hook. She argues:
We work at enjoying it. We try hard to improve our attitude, to bury unacceptable feelings, or at least to disguise them ... This turbulent inner war is not only unwinnable; it will, ironically, make casualties of those we are trying to save .... It sends out bad signals to our children: that anger is shameful (why else hide it?); that they should deny their own hostilities (that’s what mommy does); that to think of violence, even subconsciously, is to commit it; that negative feelings cancel out positive ones, as if emotions were like arithmetic.
Truth in mothering is a far better policy. After all, criticism of the role of mother is not the same thing as disapproval of children or lack of love for a particular child. (xv)
What I didn’t like so much was her attempts to psychoanalyse women in a given society based on the often patchy historical record of it. So, for example, with Classical Greek mom, who is a shadowy figure at best, Thurer speculates:
I suspect that Greek women were less repressed than they were self-centred and needy (because of their own upbringing). Their frustration, in my view, was due not so much to their husbands’ absence ... but to their husbands’ disdain. It was the rampant misogyny that rendered these women unable to love empathically. (77)
Say what?
Where do I even start with what’s wrong with this? What there is of the historical record of ancient Greece - and it is not exhaustive - shows that women in parts of it were marginalised (we know all about those Athenian men and who they really preferred, nudge, nudge, wink, wink), but lack of participation in public life seems a long way from being ‘self-centred and needy’. And since when are women a monolith to be analysed as if they were one person? And how on earth can we possibly know whether or how they loved their children when there is so precious little around to tell us how they felt themselves?
I’m aware that having a historical training myself makes me somewhat resistant to these sweeping characterisations of Classical mom and, later in the book, Medieval mom. But I don’t think gaping holes in the historical record are best served by just making stuff up. There’s no actual individual on the couch here, and I fail to see how applying modern psychoanalysis to ‘diagnose’ these women advances her arguments. Why not just say that, as far as we know, Greek women were not well-treated or respected in their homes, and public life was almost exclusively a male domain?
The book does, however, get stronger as Thurer comes closer to the present. As she brings us from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, Thurer leaves the sweeping generalisations behind too. She traces how industrialisation sharpened and exaggerated the sexual division of labour: where fathers in agrarian households were seen as primarily responsible for children’s upbringing (at least in the moral sense), mothers now became the sole ‘angels of the house.’ And, even in the early twenty-first century, these angels are still in thrall to it.
In these chapters, Thurer more fully engages with her own disciplines of psychology and psychoanalysis, and traces the ways in which Freud and those who came after him have also left their mark on mothering in Western culture. She is careful to note that Freud’s theories actually had precious little to say about mothers: the prime mover in a child’s Oedipal conflict is its father, its mother benign and ineffectual. But, after the second world war, Freud’s followers turned their attention to mother. And how. Now, she becomes a powerful, potentially malevolent force, epitomised in the Hollywood imaginary as Mrs Bates in Psycho. This mother had the ability to do some serious pyschological damage to her kids - even, in the case of Norman Bates, after she was dead.
Thurer asks forcefully why the research on the psychological effects of particular styles of mothering (working outside the home or staying at home, for example) are all designed to test for negative effects. She notes:
Child expert advice flies in the face of two decades of exhaustive research, which has failed to demonstrate the negative consequences of daycare. This is not for lack of effort. The pyschological research to date continually looks for bad outcomes from maternal employment and other-than-mother-care instead of looking for bad outcomes from the lack of societal supports to mothers. In other words, the way psychologists have been framing their research questions reflects the culture’s idealized myth of motherhood. (291)
Even though research on the effects of daycare has been inconclusive, there is little to no evidence on the effects of not having daycare. And yet the latter is the default policy setting for a (contemporary US) society that doesn't fund daycare: this reflects a lack of informed consensus on what is actually best for children.
Thurer’s overall argument - that mothers are not myths, but human beings - serves to remind women that their apparent failings are generally not down to defects in their character, but are symptomatic of wider cultural failings to properly support mothers and children.
If only that were history.
