home sweet home

We moved house last weekend - hence the blog silence (‘woohoo’ go the distant cheers!)

It’s a fun job at the best of times, but this time round it was even more fun with a toddler to wrangle, as well as boxes to pack and houses to clean. Luckily, we were able to call on the kindness of friends to mind the baby while we got to work. Our new house - which is still stacked up with boxes yet to be unpacked - is, for the first time, actually ‘ours’.  After renting for too many years - and way too many landlords - we have finally bought a house. An unearthed old piece of law suggests we own this house to the centre of the earth (or at least my husband does; Blackstone only refers to ‘a man’ in his Commentaries ). 

Or do we?  

Having a background in both postcolonial criticism, and Treaty history and settlement work, an uneasiness - an unhomeliness, if you like - reminds me that this little bit of land we now ‘own’ is part of a larger bit of land with which people have a connection that predates the settlement of New Zealand by Europeans. The area in which we now live was not extensively occupied at the time of settlement, but it lies very close to the central city, which certainly was. Shonky purchases, promises of reserves that were not properly met, forced clearances, and political marginalisation soon followed the arrival of settlers from Britain (as the Waitangi Tribunal described in its Wellington report).  These early settlers, some of whose names still mark the streets, were given sight-unseen plots of land to ‘own’ in a lottery held in London before they even set foot on a ship, let alone a new land. When they eventually disembarked, making their new home meant taking someone else’s. We owe our newly minted certificate of title to that process, whether it directly occurred on this patch of land or not. It gives the term ‘owner-occupier’ a whole different meaning.

Creating homes on the land was not the only way New Zealand settlers began to stamp their power and authority on the new colony. Once women settlers started arriving in great numbers, the race to populate the nation with white babies was on. And woe betide a settler woman who did not do her racial duty (and, for real, this was how it was described). The story of the control of women’s fertility in New Zealand - Pakeha women, at least - is part of the story of colonisation. 

In Mum’s the Word, journalist Sue Kedgley traces how the birthrate fell dramatically between 1880 and 1901, as women tried to limit the children they bore by drawing on their imported knowledge of contraception, contraceptive devices and abortions (5): 

Colonial officials and politicians were worried that the falling birthrate and shrinking size of the European family, from six to three children within a generation, was threatening the future of the colony. They wanted women to continue to produce large families to build up New Zealand’s white population as fast as possible, and make it as productive as possible. (38) 

The 1904 Royal Commission set up to inquire into the falling birthrate blamed - of course - women’s ‘selfishness’ both in limiting their families and sharing with each other the knowledge about how to do so. 

Naturally, when both patriarchy and white privilege feel threatened they fight back. Cue male experts who started campaigning to keep (white) women at home, out of the workplace, and committed to their one true vocation: motherhood. And guess who was one of these ardent battlers? Take a bow, Dr Truby King, founder of Plunket, who apparently believed that the status of motherhood needed to be raised to a ‘national calling for the salvation of the white race’, and motherhood itself transformed into a ‘science‘ or craft that could be taught to all women (41).

Flash forward to the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, and we hear similar hand-wringing about falling birth-rates and mothers wanting to work outside the home. This time, however, we don’t hear - explicitly, at least - about saving the white race. Instead, we get the flipside: strident voices - usually male - dictating who shouldn’t be breeding.  And guess who they are? The ‘underclass’, ‘child abusers’, ‘beneficiaries’, ‘drug addicts’, ‘gangs’ and  ‘criminals’ ... all of which is usually code for Maori and Pacific Islanders. 

The effects and after-effects of colonisation might seem a long way from moving house. But, as we unpack our things into a house that has changed hands now about ten times, and start thinking about making it into a home, I can’t help thinking about my wider home, and the way in which it came to be, the way it is now, and how I might play a role in - I hope - changing it for the better. It is now not only my home, but also that of my husband - a recent immigrant - and my daughter.

I’ve spent many years living overseas, partly because I didn’t ever quite feel at home in my home country. I’ve been back home now for over half a decade, and while that unhomely feeling sometimes persists, and there are things about it that drive me nuts, there is, as Dorothy might say, ‘no place like home.’ 

Click, click.

review: Mum's the Word

Most of the books I have been reading on motherhood and feminism have been from writers in the metropolitan centres of the UK and USA. I have French feminist Elizabeth Badinter’s book in my reading pile too, but this review is about a book from little old Aotearoa New Zealand: Sue Kedgley’s 1996 book Mum’s the Word: The Untold Story of Motherhood in New Zealand.

Kedgley, who has had an interesting and varied career as a TV journalist, writer, director, councillor, feminist and Green MP, was inspired to research and write Mum’s the Word following the birth of her son at age 42. Both transformed and bewildered by the experience - not least from all the conflicting advice she received - Kedgley started wondering how women had managed in the past:

Since motherhood is such a fundamentally important part of women’s lives (and of the procreation of the species) the invisibility of motherhood in our history seemed odd, and I found myself wondering, how did my mother, and my mother’s mother manage? Was it easier or more difficult for them? ... It occurred to me that if the history of mothering was pieced together from these [written] sources it would provide an invaluable historical perspective to many of the issues about motherhood that are being debated today. (MTW, p vi)

Kedgley traces the history of New Zealand motherhood - or, more specifically, Pakeha motherhood - back to the nineteenth century and chronicles the changing trends that have defined birth and mothering for women. Although there are many similarities with (white) women in the UK and USA, there are specific differences about the situation for New Zealand women. 

During World War Two, for example, women entered the workforce as they did in the UK, USA and Australia. Unlike these countries, however, working mothers did not have access to widely-available, good-quality State-run childcare for their children. The debate in New Zealand instead revolved around keeping women at home with their children, but paying them a wage to do it. Established in 1939 - and abolished in 1991 as the welfare state was eroded in the face of free market reforms - the Family Benefit, a small amount of money per child paid directly to the mother, was a direct outcome of demands from women that the value of their work as mothers be taken seriously by the State. 

Kedgley traces the ways in which the introduction of labour-saving devices and the smaller numbers of children women had in the mid-twentieth century led to similar patterns of isolation, boredom, and depression experienced by women overseas. Early second-wave feminist Betty Friedan described this as ‘the feminine mystique’ in the US, and helped spark a political movement to improve women’s situation. In New Zealand, the debate around this issue was defined by experts: Kingseat psychiatrist Dr Fraser MacDonald pathologised mothers’ marginalisation as ‘suburban neurosis’ after treating large numbers of mothers suffering from depression. He described it thus:

Women are fed with the dogma that marriage will be the most fulfilling thing in the world - all endless joy and happiness ... [but] She’s trapped with her children who reduce her intellectual stimulation - trapped with them seven days a week, 24 hours a day. She often has virtually no contact with the neighbours and nobody to confide in. She probably sees very little of her husband ... So here she is, with this feeling of failure and inadequacy, of being trapped. She has no control over her life. She starts hating herself so much she may start attempting suicide or, to her horror, beating her children. (cited in MTW, p 221)

When MacDonald’s views made it into the mainstream media, however, they were somewhat distorted: one prominent article compared women at home to cabbages and talked about ‘cabbage patch syndrome’. While some mothers ignored the insult in the article and responded positively instead to MacDonald’s description of the ‘problem with no name’, other mothers were rightly insulted that the work they put in at home was being demeaned and further marginalised. It is a great shame that the identification of a problem that sparked second-wave feminism, and politicised women’s experience elsewhere, was used to divided and insult women further in New Zealand. Nonetheless, the identification of ‘suburban neurosis’ and the desire of women to do something about it played a role in igniting the women’s liberation movement in New Zealand. 

There are a great many things that I would like to comment on in this book - the marginalisation of mothers in favour of experts (particularly Truby King, the founder of Plunket), and the development of women-centred initiatives from Playcentre to the DPB Action Group - that I don’t have the room to do here. Instead, I would just like to offer a few observations about my enjoyment of the book:

1. Unlike Shari L. Thurer’s overview of the Western history of motherhood that I have previously reviewed, this history is much more specific and detailed. It charts change over a relatively short space of time - just over a century - and also allows room for women’s voices, and the things they have done to improve their own and other women’s experience of motherhood. The emphasis on women’s agency is a really important aspect of this book.
2. The more detailed and personalised history - which allowed space for women’s different voices (not all mothers agree about motherhood after all!) - made me think about my mother, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers. How did they manage with Plunket routines, and, particularly, with the Great Depression and war? These are experiences that my grandmother never talked about, nor, while she was alive, did I think to specifically ask her. My mother’s recollection of her experience of birth and early motherhood is hazy and, from what little I can gather, not a bed of roses with three children under five.  Kedgley’s work of excavating the history of motherhood in New Zealand bring women’s untold experiences to light.
3. It reminded me that progressive stuff doesn’t happen by itself. Changes to the way births take place - removing the routine humiliations and impossible positions - occurred because women demanded change. The Family Benefit was introduced because women said they deserved it for all the work they put in to raising the next generation. Parental leave was introduced because working mothers wanted to return to work.
4. And, related to the last point, positive progressive change doesn’t stick without  continued  vigilance and pressure. The Family Benefit was removed in 1991, and other benefits, such as the Domestic Purposes Benefit (or DPB) for single mothers, are constantly under threat. Women and children, while routinely sentimentalised in the media, are easy political targets - particularly if they are poor and have little political clout.

Notwithstanding the positives, it did seem to be a missed opportunity that this book only focussed on the experiences of Pakeha women. Kedgley acknowledges this at the outset, and explains that material had been gathered to include a chapter (!) on the experience of Maori women, but she could not find a suitable writer for it. The experience of migrant women from non-European ethnic groups doesn’t even get a look-in. I don’t know for sure - and I will certainly investigate further - if a more recent book on New Zealand motherhood has been published, which captures the experiences of different groups of New Zealand women.  

As it stands, the book left me wondering things like, if middle-class Pakeha women found Plunket regimes difficult and alienating, what was the experience like for other women? Or, perhaps having greater access to extended family / whanau for much of the twentieth century, were they able to more comfortably ignore ‘expert’ advice and draw on the wisdom of previous generations of women?  Was their experience of childbirth better or worse than that of Pakeha women?  Did they also experience ‘suburban neurosis’ or were other issues more pressing? How did colonisation or migration from outside Europe affect their experiences?

Within the book, mothers’ voices ranged from those who felt validated as working mothers despite the criticisms they received about being ‘bad’ mothers, to those who wanted to stay at home and felt the work of full-time mothers was under-valued and demeaned even by other women. This split echoes those I have heard myself from other women, and it still makes me sad. The ultimate goal is surely happy healthy children, and it seems self-evident to me that happy mums (and dads!) are the key to ensuring this. Depending on what women either want or have to do, that means both supporting mothers to rejoin the workforce - through decent paid parental leave provisions and the provision of affordable high-quality childcare - AND supporting mothers to stay at home - by paying a family wage directly to them in recognition of the work they already do. 

After all, it takes a village - or, in this case, a nation - to raise a child.

'who's a clever girl?'

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.