Nature baby, Natural baby, Organic Baby, Natural Organic Bio baby: from natural birth to Only Organic pureed vegetable baby food, raising babies is as natural as it gets.
Or so culture would have us believe.
Practically everywhere you look - proliferating the higher up the socio-economic ladder you go - are shops, websites and products galore dedicated to the cult of nature. Birth without drugs followed by breastfeeding on demand for as long as possible is the natural and best course presented to new mothers. Wrapping your baby’s bottom in organic cotton re-usable nappies is the best way to go too: this is not only best for baby, but also best for the planet. Not living up to these ideals - a highly-interventionist birth, a guilty trip to the formula aisle in the supermarket, frustration with being chained to the washing machine - can leave women feeling like failures.
I don’t want to dismiss these products and positions entirely. I attempted a natural birth (failing dismally due to my ... um ... body and baby’s desire to not conform to hospital schedules), breastfed for a little over a year (I was physically able to and was also able to take a year-plus off from my job to enable continued breastfeeding), and have mostly opted for the make-your-own-babyfood option (occasionally feeling somewhat disheartened when the baby refused my all-natural pureed veges and opted instead for a jar of baby-food). I’m sitting on a ‘B’ then so far on the ‘nature is best’ report card. Where my grade-point-average drops way down, however, is in the nappy department. I have to confess we didn’t even try re-usable nappies. I know, I know, bad for baby (although she’s never had nappy rash) and worse for the environment (hmmm ... although we live in a country that has implemented a cap and trade emissions scheme - without a cap! - and giving the worst polluters - the dairy industry - the opportunity to delay entry into it). I’m not trying to tell anyone what they should or shouldn’t be doing with their babies when it comes to using natural products or not. Instead, I want to take a step back and ask, more broadly, what this turn to nature means.
Like the Romantic painters and poets of the early nineteenth century, contemporary culture idealises and sentimentalises nature. As French feminist Elisabeth Badinter points out, ‘rather than mastering and using nature to address human needs and wants, humans are instead called to submit to the laws of nature ... This call to love and respect the natural environment came hand in hand with warnings of catastrophe and revenge: if we damaged the earth, we would pay dearly. Sooner or later, Mother Nature would severely punish her children’ (The Conflict, p 34) Beginning in the 1970s, and gathering momentum in the 1980s, Badinter identifies three areas in which naturalism has gained ascendancy, specifically to the detriment of mothers: ecology, behavioural sciences based on ethology (the scientific study of animal behaviour), and a new essentialist feminism (The Conflict, p 33). To this list, I add the following:
- intensive mothering, which remains the dominant ideology of motherhood. Ideally, mothers are expected to devote their every waking - and many sleeping - hours to the care of their young children. Pureeing carrots and rinsing pooey cloth nappies are just parts of this mothering agenda.
- neurosexism, which expounds the natural differences between boys and girls. As the fantastic Cordelia Fine has shown in Delusions of Gender, we’re also in a moment where the supposedly hard-wired differences between boys and girls are informing everything from product development to the school curriculum.
- environmentalism. While climate change is real and serious, and directly concerns our children’s future, the choices that mothers make over a few years at best seem to earn more column inches than serial industrial polluters, climate change deniers, and politicians implementing short-sighted policies. Mothers are already at risk of screwing their children up psychologically, so why not just add the guilty burden of screwing up their futures and the whole planet as well? And it’s probably the fault of their mothers that people deny climate change, institute bad environmental policy and pollute waterways anyway. A recent article I read on disposable nappies was so venomous in its polemic against selfish mothers (yep, them again) that I felt a little concerned about the writer’s state of mind. But I digress.
In the 1970s, cultural anthropologist Sherry B. Ortner asked why women were continually positioned as closer to nature than culture and what it meant. In still-pertinent observations, she said:
Woman is being identified with – or, if you will, seems to be a symbol of – something that every culture devalues, something that every culture defines as being of a lower order of existence than itself. Now it seems that there is only one thing that would fit that description, and that is “nature” in the most generalized sense. Every culture, or, generically, “culture,” is engaged in the process of generating and sustaining systems of meaningful forms (symbols, artifacts, etc.) by means of which humanity transcends the givens of natural existence, bends them to its purposes, controls them in its interest. We may thus broadly equate culture with the notion of human consciousness, or with the products of human consciousness (i.e., systems of thought and technology), by means of which humanity attempts to assert control over nature. Now the categories of “nature” and “culture” are of course conceptual categories – one can find no boundary out in the actual world between the two states or realms of being. ('Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?' p 72)
So while we we are in a moment of continuous and increasing reliance on the technological, we also reify nature and the natural. We may say nature is best - but we don’t hesitate to intervene when we think it necessary. My attempted natural birth is one such example. Neither my body nor my baby decided that time was up on pain-free labour and that artificial induction should begin, and, eventually, that the forceps should be produced. But, by the same token, I don’t want to suggest that the use of technology in my case - however botched - wasn’t instrumental in saving either mine or my baby’s life. We are mistaken if we think that Nature cares one way or another. It simply is. It is humans - with our capacity for culture or ‘human consciousness’ - that make nature mean anything at all.
To paraphrase Michel Foucault in his discussion of the ‘author-function’ in literature, when something is represented in a way that inverts its historical function then it is likely to be ideological - that is, it is a concept produced by social power relations (‘What is an author?’ p 3). In the case of literature, the truth of a text is conventionally thought to be what the author meant. This may may seem like ‘natural’ common sense; however, there are in fact many ways one could read a text: using a historical lens, a feminist one, a Marxist one and so on. These might generate meanings of which the author had no awareness and with which he or she might heartily disagree - yet they are still valid readings of the words on the page. When it comes to mothers, the idea of Nature operates in a similar way, constraining the possible meanings of motherhood. Mothers are exalted as both natural and good - as long as they follow the cultural script set for them. By contrast, women who don’t become mothers or mothers who defy cultural convention, intentionally or not, are unnatural. Nature therefore defines all women.
But the way we think about motherhood doesn’t have to be this binary: either / or, good / bad, natural / unnatural. As beings endowed with consciousness, women, like men, are able to draw on culture as well as nature and make meanings from both. In a 2012 article for the Huffington Post, Elisabeth Badinter concluded that a cultural response is necessary to combat the return to naturalism:
Women ... are endowed with consciousness, personal histories, desires and differing ambitions. What some do well and with pleasure, others do badly or out of duty. By failing to take account of women's diversity, by imposing a single ideal of motherhood, by pursuing the notion of a perfect mother -- one who has the exclusive responsibility of making or breaking her children -- we fall into a trap. We neglect the other business of modern women: the unfinished assault on the glass ceiling, the fight to close the salary gap, the struggle for equality at home. We overlook women's need for financial independence at a moment when one marriage in two ends in divorce.
Women might begin to reverse the trend by rallying behind the breadth of their aspirations -- personal, maternal, and professional. We might begin by affirming that whether mothers give birth by epidural or in a hydrotherapy tub, breast-feed or mix formula, co-sleep or opt for a crib, stay at home or enroll in daycare, their children will be fine. In our developed world, both sets of children will thrive. In their effect on our children, the differences in approach are marginal. By losing sight of this truth, we lose sight of another: that the choices we make as mothers have no small bearing on our status as women. ('A Philosopher's Case Against Modern Motherhood')
Paying a little less attention to what culture says nature means, and beating ourselves up when we inevitably fall short, seems like a good place to start. Because, contrary to what culture tells us, motherhood doesn’t come naturally.
