In addition to talking, my baby is currently learning to sort shapes, draw, build with blocks, and do jigsaw puzzles. ‘Clever girl,’ we say automatically to encourage and praise her. Well, she is a girl, and it seems like she’s growing her brain in order to be able to do these things, so ‘clever’ seems okay too.
But she’s not the only one that’s been called a clever girl recently.
Not so long ago, someone congratulated me on having had a baby, by saying ‘clever girl.’ I’ve heard other new mothers being congratulated in the same way: ‘aren’t you a clever girl?’ they say kindly. The people who say it seem to have been older women who are mothers themselves. Perhaps they are reverting to that automatic ‘clever girl’ response they gave when their own children were learning new skills. That might help explain too why they are calling grown women, who have had children themselves, ‘girls’.
I remember bristling when I first heard it said to someone else. ‘What’s so clever about having a baby?’ I thought to myself. Not that I thought that the woman in question wasn’t clever, or that it wasn’t a big deal to have had a baby. Just, why ‘clever girl?‘ I mean, it’s not like patriarchal culture is so kind to actual clever girls what with a ways to go before glass ceilings are smashed and pay equity is achieved and all. Recent furores over girls out-performing boys at school also indicate that ‘clever girls’ are some kind of threat to ‘normal’ way of doing things.
When someone called me a ‘clever girl’ after I had had my baby, I didn’t quite know how to respond. After all, they were being nice and didn’t mean any offence. It’s just one of those things that some people seem to say, an automatic response like the kind I give to my daughter as she learns her new skills. Taking the compliment at face value, I smiled and said thanks.
But, unlike my daughter, I’m not 18 months’ old.
So even though the verbal pat on the head was meant kindly, I did feel both patronised and a bit perplexed by it. Carrying and then pushing the baby out called for a lot on my part: stamina, strength, calm, endurance, and reliance on other people, among them. But I was rarely asked to solve quadratic equations or write an essay about Finnegan’s Wake. Come to think of it, I didn’t even have to sort shapes, do jigsaw puzzles, or build blocks. Cleverness, meaning ‘mentally bright; a quick or sharp intelligence’, didn’t really much come into it.
In fact, mid-twentieth-century childbirth experts were quite emphatic that cleverness didn’t come into motherhood at all. Donald Winnicott wrote, for example:
You do not even have to be clever, and you don’t even have to think if you don’t 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 ... Isn’t it strange that such an important thing should depend so little on exceptional intelligence? (quoted in Forna, The Mother of All Myths, p 67)
Thanks, dude.
This attitude, of course, takes patronising to a whole new level. And it got me thinking about the phrase ‘clever girl’ all over again. Why clever, why not ‘smart’ or ‘bright’? Could that word actually carry some other meanings that might be more appropriate to the challenging demands of motherhood?
The word ‘clever’ appears to have been first recorded around 1590 from an East Anglian dialect word ‘cliver’ meaning "expert at seizing". It is thought that this derives from a Norse word meaning ‘ready or skillful’, perhaps with an influence from the old English word which referred to a ‘claw or hand’. In any case, early usage appears to refer to manual dexterity, while the shift in meaning to intellectual dexterity is first recorded in 1704.
Unlike ‘smart’ or ‘bright’, clever can also mean ‘cunning’, in the sense of relying on your wits. There’s also a slight pejorative meaning too - as in the phrases ‘too clever by half’ and ‘don’t get clever’ - referring to slyness, being a smart-arse, and perhaps being a bit superficial. Clever, after all, is not wise. But, on the positive side, it does have a sense of inventiveness, originality and quickness about it.
There are other older meanings of clever too, ones that have fallen out of common usage: suitable, satisfactory, good-natured and in good health.
So perhaps ‘cleverness’ is a better word to describe motherhood than I first thought. Certainly being skilled with your hands comes into it: supporting those fragile little necks as you bathe a newborn and try not to drop them in the water is one example. Relying on your wits to respond to unexpected situations is a must: on one early occasion while my hands were full, I managed to open the fridge door and take out the milk with my foot. Originality and inventiveness are key skills both for playing with toddlers and trying not to go out of your mind with boredom during the day. And being good-natured and keeping good health are certainly helpful too: looking after my baby while I was sick last year was no picnic at all.
Perhaps we can make ‘clever girl’ less of a patronising pat on the head, and more a riposte to the Winnicotts of the world, who clearly think girls - or more particularly, mothers - don’t need to be clever at all.
