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. 

'no mummy mine'

My baby is learning to talk.

Her vocabulary is growing every day, and is now roughly about 60-80 words, with the odd phrase thrown in. Fairly predictably, her first few words related to words and things she has heard a lot about: ‘mummy’, ‘daddy’, ‘birdie’ .... ‘no!’ It’s both funny and slightly depressing that her emphatic ‘nos’ both imitate the frequent injunctions she hears concerning she can and can’t do - ‘no, don’t jump up and down in your high chair’, ‘no, don’t eat that weird thing you found on the ground’ - and signal a sense of burgeoning independence. If you offer her some food she doesn’t want, she’ll say no. If you ask her if she’d like to read a story and she doesn’t want to, she’ll say no. Bartleby the Scrivener has nothing on this girl. 

Language - or languages, if a child is fortunate enough to be growing up in a multi-lingual environment - precedes subjectivity. The meanings of words, and the connections between them, exist long before a baby starts moving from babble to recognisable speech and a consciousness of self. And even babble is inflected with language. One of the babies we know has a father who is a native speaker of another language. The baby’s mother told me that he thought the baby’s pre-linguistic sounds were English sounds, not those of his own language. 

Even before she can self-consciously articulate herself - and, at the moment, she’s articulating mainly simple nouns - language is speaking her.  She learns words and meanings from those closest to her, who speak a specific language (English) in a specific context (early 21st century New Zealand) that generates specific meanings.

The idea of language speaking her might seem unusual, as it's the opposite of what we'd normally think would happen. So what does it mean? 

In Through the Looking Glass, Humpty Dumpty lectures Alice about what words mean in the context of the difference between birthday and un-birthday presents. He says:

‘There are three hundred and sixty-four days when you might get un-birthday presents —'

'Certainly,' said Alice.

'And only one for birthday presents, you know. There's glory for you!'

'I don't know what you mean by "glory",' Alice said.

Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. 'Of course you don't — till I tell you. I meant "there's a nice knock-down argument for you!"'

'But "glory" doesn't mean "a nice knock-down argument",' Alice objected.

'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.'

'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things.'

'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master — that's all.'

Alice and Humpty Dumpty are talking at cross-purposes. Alice is coming from the point of view that meanings are agreed: speakers of a language learn shared meanings in order to communicate with each other. Humpty Dumpty is coming from Planet Humpty when he alone has the power to decide what words mean. As cultural critic Catherine Belsey observes:

Language makes dialogue possible, but only on condition we use it properly, subscribing to the meanings already given in the language that always precedes our familiarity with it. As this exchange demonstrates, there is no such thing as a private language. Humpty Dumpty has to ‘translate’ his before he can communicate with Alice. (Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction, p 3)

To learn the ‘correct’ meanings of words is also, however, to affirm the values inscribed in those words. In the case of gendered language, dominant cultural values accrue to the meanings of the words ‘boy’ and ‘girl’, and ‘masculine’ (or ‘boyish’) and ‘feminine’ (or ‘girly’). In order to challenge those values, it becomes necessary to challenge the connections that make the meaning of these words seem natural.

Already, my little girl has been described by others using gendered language, words to which I’m becoming increasingly sensitive as she starts to learn what culture determines that words mean. So far, she is both ‘a tomboy’ and ‘a girly girl’, ‘happy and chatty’ and ‘serious and thoughtful’, ‘independent’ and ‘bossy’.  I’m not particularly bothered by most of these words, although I note that they are gendered - it’s not exactly a compliment to call a little girl ‘serious’, for example.  

My pet peeve, however, is ‘bossy’. This is in no way a compliment, and is not a word that tends to be used to describe the behaviour of boys and men. It is, rather, a term that polices the behaviour of girls and women. ‘Bossy’ conventionally means ‘to order others around’ or ‘to be domineering’; in short, to be a like a boss. Now, of course, we all know that being a boss is not particularly becoming to women; women that do becomes bosses are somehow un-feminine: it violates the ‘natural’ patriarchal order if it’s women who are calling the shots. Words are powerful; as Humpty Dumpty acutely observes, ‘the question is which is to be master - that’s all.’

I’ve also noticed that ‘bossy’ can be used even when a girl or women is not particularly domineering at all, but rather determined or independent. So even in conventional usage, people don’t deploy this word for what it means, but rather for censure (however unconsciously).  

Boys are not off the hook, either. Arguably the words that police the gender of boys and men are even more censorious than those meant for girls and women. ‘Cissy’, for example, means ‘to have unsuitable feminine qualities’.  Unsuitable, that is, for people who should be suitably masculine i.e. boys and men. ‘Bossy’ can be interpreted as a back-handed compliment, with ‘cissy’ it’s much harder to find the positive.

The good news is that the meanings - and the values that shape them - are not fixed for all time: words acquire new meanings that may supersede their former ones (‘gay’ is one example that springs to mind). Those who are familiar with Through the Looking Glass might well know that one of the meanings of ‘there’s glory for you’ is ‘a nice knock-down argument.’ Linguistic innovation can create new norms.

Not only can words acquire new meanings, but words that were formerly terms of abuse - e.g ‘queer’ - can be re-appropriated by those subject to that abuse. In my view, however, re-appropriation can be a limited strategy: while inverting the abusive meaning, it still relies on the abuse to define one’s self in the first place. I might be able to tell my daughter in the future that someone calling her ‘bossy’ is really saying she’s a smart, strong, independent girl and that’s a good thing. 

But I’d rather they said she was a smart, strong, independent girl like they thought it was a good thing.

review: shattered

British TV journalist and producer Rebecca Asher seems to be borrowing my shtick: the pithy one-word title and the harried-looking 1950s-style housewife on the cover seem eerily reminiscent of my first few blog-posts. I am not making accusations of plagiarism, however, more pointing out that something's going on. The more books I read for this blog and my own general interest in matters maternal, the more I am convinced that we are in a moment that needs to be seized.

Asher’s target in Shattered: Modern Motherhood and the Illusion of Equality (2012) are the structural inequities between mothers and fathers. The disproportionate sharing of early parenting between women and men, in particular, supported by laws, workplace policies and cultural norms, ensure that women’s gains in the workplace over the past few decades are being eroded on the home-front. Modern mothers are not so much knocking on the glass ceiling as being kneecapped by the Winnie-the-Pooh safety-gate.  


Given the lack of balance in parental leave - in the UK, men have access to two weeks’ paid parental leave, women six months’; patchy take-up of flexible working arrangements - women ask for them, men don’t; and the general lag in equal pay - women still routinely earn less then men even for the same positions - mothers, no matter how successful in their pre-child careers, are still overwhelmingly the primary care-givers of their children. And they literally pay for it in lost earnings and lost career advancement: given that women are tending to have children later they can miss out on the crucial career decade in a person’s mid-thirties to mid-forties. Quoting the British figures, Asher states: ‘women may plan to return to the workforce when their children get older but for every year they are out of work their future earning capacity falls by 4 per cent.’ (111)

But it doesn’t have to be this way. 

Asher looks to alternative models in Sweden and Norway, Iceland, Germany and the United States (hmm - believe it or not she does find some positives in the only OECD country that has no paid parental leave whatsoever) to draw up a wish-list for contemporary Britain. A key one is ring-fenced paid parental leave (at 80% of earnings and capped for the highest earners) that only fathers can take. Several of the Nordic countries have variations of this. The mother might take the first six-nine months of paid leave, and then the father has to take the next few months, otherwise the family loses the right to that extra leave altogether. This has the effect of creating public early childhood spaces - parks, playgrounds and early learning centres - that are much more populated by men. Asher argues that this early parenting experience is crucial for fathers: what they perceive as ‘natural’ in women, is the result of learning to get over your fears and spend day after day looking after a helpless baby who is totally dependent on you for its care.  

Asher doesn’t forget about non-nuclear families either: mothers and fathers who don’t live together could access the leave arrangements, or the ‘fathers’ leave could be transferred to a nominated relative or other carer (say, a grandparent or a same-sex partner).  Where the US provides some leadership is in its gender neutrality in the paltry leave it does offer: leave is not inequitably distributed between men and women, both have access to the pitiful amount available.

Lest you think this all sounds like unattainable nirvana especially in light of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), Asher has pre-empted some of her critics. For those exclusively breast-feeding, she argues, the first six months would be ‘ring-fenced’ for the mother, then the father would come in. For those who argue that countries simply can’t afford it - as New Zealand’s current government seems to have done - Asher asks whether the lost economic contribution of working women is worth it. Far harder to shift, of course, are cultural norms about who should do the child-rearing. One positive aspect of more men being out of work, or working reduced hours due to the GFC, is that more men are taking a hands-on role in raising their young children.

I enjoyed the policy-focussed aspects of Asher’s book very much: there are clearly working models out there where early childhood care is much more evenly distributed and we should be looking at them. In the New Zealand context, sharing and supporting early childhood care so it is not the sole responsibility of one parent all the time could do wonders for the more alarming of our social statistics.

Where I was less convinced was partly on the attitudinal level. The first part of Asher’s books takes aim at maternity services and how they are currently women-centred. This has the effect, she argues, of marginalising men and making them feel like they are not really part of the birth process. While I took her point about fathers needing to be more involved from the get-go and that paternal health is important in conception and pregnancy too, I couldn’t help feeling that the men she quoted to support her arguments just didn’t like not being the centre of attention for once. Call me a crazy - or conservative, if you like - but till men start actually physically having babies, then keeping childbirth women-centred seems to me to be appropriate and right. Do we really want a return to the days when men called all the shots?  For me, being ‘women-centred’ means that women expect that their partners will be in the room with them (if they want them to be there, that is) rather than smoking outside, and attending classes and preparing for the birth with them too. Perhaps, Asher’s arguments here are more an indictment of the stretched resources of the British health system rather than a philosophical problem with women-centred services per se.

Her comments about systemic impediments to more equally-shared parenting meaning that fathers just weren’t as involved, also made me wonder if the New Zealand experience is a little different. In resorting to anecdote here - and the systemic figures may tell a different story - I am aware of a number of  couples where the father is either the primary care-giver or has alternated periods of leave with the mother, or where fathers have felt comfortable asking for flexible working arrangements - days working at home, or early finishes to do the school-run, for example - to at least assist more actively with day-to-day childcare.

To be honest, I’m not sure what the right answer to all this is. I agreed with what a lot of Asher said, but I also found myself mentally saying ‘yes, but ....’ a lot too.  Which brings me back to my starting point: I am more and more convinced that motherhood should be one of the central issues of contemporary feminism. This is not to downgrade in any way feminist concern with violence, pay equity and reproductive rights. But how can we have pay equity if it’s only practically achievable for women who don’t have children?  How can we access reproductive rights and the right to control our fertility, if we don’t talk about the flipside, the desire of many women to have children (and, let’s not forget, reproductive justice doesn’t mean the same thing for all groups of women)? How can we deal with violence if we don’t also examine familial supports for women and children as well (bearing in mind that a large proportion of physical and sexual abuse takes place in the home)?

Clearly, I’m not the only one asking these questions at the moment. The real question, though, is how best to answer them.

Happy Mothers' Day!

So what are you doing for your mother this Mother’s Day, which is fast approaching on Sunday 13 May?

Watching television last night, I felt slightly nauseated by the sentimental advertising around Mother’s Day - and nearly every advertisement in the programme I was watching (okay, it was the final of Project Runway) was either overtly or covertly targeted at it. A national booksellers chain, for example, sang the praises of ‘mum, the chef’, ‘mum, the chauffeur’, and ‘mum, the peacemaker’ - apparently ‘mum, the brain surgeon’ and ‘mum, the roughneck oil rig worker’ don’t get a look in - before urging us to buy trashy sentimental paperbacks in tribute to her. Frankly, if my child gave me a Lesley Pearce novel as a small token of all the things I do for her every single day, I’d start thinking about adoption. 

I’m joking, of course. But this sentimental claptrap was soon followed by something even more insidious.

Next up was an advertisement for a hand-held blender. In it, a model, who looked like a 1950s housewife - blond set hair, full makeup, pearls and elegant clothing - looks thoroughly overjoyed to be holding up a magical, amazing stick blender, which is apparently the answer to her dreams. Call me crazy, but I thought this kind of thing disappeared, well, with the 1950s. Apparently, it’s now okay to revert back to these images, because it’s ironic. After all, we all know that women don’t really go crazy over kitchen appliances, don’t we? And if you don’t think it’s funny and a bit clever, well then you either have no sense of humour or you just don’t get irony.

This kind of thing - ironic sexism, ‘cause that’s what it actually is - sits alongside ironic or hipster racism as the re-emergence of conservative rhetoric that not so long ago was interrogated, criticised and marginalised from public discourse because it was incredibly offensive and demeaning to the group on the receiving end. It also helped normalise the idea that women were lesser human beings. Ironising it may have the effect of offering a mild critical distance for comic effect, but, at the same time, it re-introduces it back into mainstream discourse and renders it acceptable. For the record, I did not find Stick Blender woman amusing, I felt demeaned and a bit depressed.

How’s this for ironic instead?  Mother’s Day - at least the day recognised as Mother’s day in North America, Australia and New Zealand - has its origins in the first wave of feminism. Far from being a sentimental celebration of ‘mum, the hero’ who has few aspirations beyond trashy novels and blending soups, Mother’s Day was a rallying point for women, particularly in the anti-war movement. In 1870, Julia Ward Howe, the famous writer, poet, and suffragist,  made her famous Mother’s Day Proclamation in response to the US Civil War: 

Arise, then, women of this day! Arise all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be of water or of tears! Say firmly: ‘We will not have questions decided by irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us reeking of carnage for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy, and patience. We women of one country will be too tender to those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.

From the bosom of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with our own. It says ‘Disarm! Disarm!’ The sword of murder is not the balance of justice. Blood does not wipe out dishonor, nor violence indicate possession.

You don’t find that kind of sentiment in Hallmark cards much these days, huh?

Although Ward Howe campaigned for a national mothers’ day and an international women’s peace congress, the day didn’t catch on until 1905 when another woman, Anna Jarvis, who had lost her mother, called for a day where adult children showed gratitude to their mothers. As with so many things, the more palatable option literally won the day. Interestingly, Jarvis’s mother seems to have shared Ward Howe’s vision: she founded Mothers' Day Work Clubs in five cities to improve sanitary and health conditions, as well as feeding, clothing and treating the wounds of both Union and Confederate soldiers with neutrality.

Looking into the political origins of Mothers’ Day got me thinking about what things mothers might want that stretched beyond perfume and breakfast in bed. In the 1970s, feminists in Vancouver, Canada, protested to demand their reproductive rights on Mothers Day, while elsewhere others demanded ‘Wages for Housework’. More recently, Mothers’ Day protests against Wal-Mart, family court corruption and, in the UK on their Mothers’ Day which has a different genealogy, cuts to the NHS. These women know that protesting on Mothers’ Day gives protests an extra moral and emotional heft, a positive side to sentimentalism about mothers. 

And, just for fun, let’s not forget the Cleveland branch of WITCH (which awesomely stands for ‘Women’s International Conspiracy From Hell’) who in 1969 handed out flyers saying ‘Bury Mothers’ day’, which read:

Today, one day of the year, America is celebrating Motherhood, in home, church, restaurant ... candy shop ... flower store. The other 364 days she preserves the apple pie of family life and togetherness, and protects the sanctity of the male ego and profit. She lives through her husband and children. She is sacrificed on the altar of reproduction ... she is damned to the dreary world of domesticity by day, and legal rape by night ... She is convinced that happiness and her lost identity can be recovered by buying - more and more and more. (cited in Douglas and Michaels, The Mommy Myth, p 28)

As you can imagine, Hallmark wasn’t exactly knocking down their doors either.

Returning to the present, the campaign Mothers Day Every Day seeks not to ensure that mothers eat their breakfast in bed and have massages every day but that mothers and newborns survive childbirth in good health. Their message is stark:

Childbirth remains the leading killer of young women worldwide taking a woman's life nearly every minute of every day. Almost always, their lives could be saved with access to quality health care. To accelerate progress toward safe pregnancy and healthy childbirth for all, Mothers Day Every Day is raising awareness and calling for greater U.S. leadership to strengthen health systems and increase skilled health workers in communities where women die for lack of care. Mothers play a fundamental role in the physical, social and economic health of their families, communities and nations. Their health before, during and after childbirth is critical to the health and well-being of the child, and to the long-term security and economic stability of their nations and the global community at large. 

Speaking as someone who survived childbirth due to high quality health care, I can’t think of a better way to celebrate Mothers’ Day than promoting this campaign.

Although, if you’re asking, I am partial to dark chocolate and red wine.

review: The Myths of Motherhood

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.