Memories

Our girl appears to be learning to read. 

Well, to put it more accurately, she is in the early pre-reading stages. That is, she is learning to remember the stories that she hears over and over and can remember what lines go with which picture in which book. She has taken to sitting still - for a few minutes only, mind - open book on her lap saying to herself something like ‘On Monday he ate through one apple’ or "‘Don’t worry,’ cried Stickman. ‘I’ll soon set you free.”. She appears to remember things that happened in the previous days and weeks, but needs prompting for any longer time-period.

She is also approaching the age where she may well remember things that happen to her now in later life, particularly if they were outstanding or traumatic for some reason. Autobiographical memories sustained over a long time-period, though, are not thought to develop until around pre-school-age. Memory is not just one process, then, but a range. Various types of memory include declarative memory (such as facts or knowledge that can be consciously recalled), procedural memory (unconsciously retained skills such as holding a fork, drinking from a cup, getting dressed, going to the toilet), and episodic memory (specific personal memories organised cohesively into a narrative). Children are thought to have a dense amnesia for the first few years of life, and then a period of relatively sparse memories for a few years after that.

Some of the multiple explanations for the development - and, importantly, the retention - of memories include the development of fluent language skills and the development of a concept of self-hood. Of course, these processes are inter-linked. Subjectivity - a person’s sense of self - is defined in language. A subject is a person who speaks and says ‘I’, inhabiting that ‘I’ as their own real and discrete self. At the moment, our girl uses the variants of her name, ‘me’ and ‘my’ to describe herself. She is increasingly starting to use the pronoun ‘I’ now too, notably in the phrase ‘I want it.’ 

Very young children do remember things, then, but the things they remember don’t often become memories. What they forget - a process called childhood amnesia - also becomes part of the process of creating subjectivity. One of the processes that they forget - or, rather, it becomes unconscious to the point of seeming natural - is the process of becoming gendered.  This is why what children learn and experience when they are very young is so important to their subsequent development, as neuroscientist Lise Eliot has identified.

Memories can also be unreliable. Neuroscientist Karim Nader think this may be due to something called ‘reconsolidation’ or the recasting of early memories in the light of everything that has happened since. Editing in this way is part of the process of learning life lessons: remembering a difficult time in the past is tempered by the knowledge that things worked out all right in the end, for example. 

Memories are not only individual, but also collective. ‘Collective memory’ is sometimes used as another name for history, giving the later a sheen of naturalism. Collective memory becomes ‘common knowledge’, by which individuals - some individuals, at any rate - create social bonds and a sense of shared identity. Conventional histories, for example, have focussed on ‘great men’ and significant political events, rendering, for example, the domestic lives of ordinary people little more than a backdrop to the great concerns of the age. 

Since the middle of the twentieth century,  however, in response to the political concerns of a wide range of previously marginalised groups, historians (including feminist and post-colonial historians) started to dig deeper into these lives. One technique used to uncover previously excluded lives and pre-occupations is called ‘memory-work’. Memory-work actively seeks to question established narratives of the past, often by employing non-traditional methods, particularly oral histories, to re-establish the voices of those who have been excluded from traditional histories. Sue Kedgley’s account of the lives of Pākehā mothers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is one example of making visible the concerns and preoccupations of white settler colonialism from the point of view of women in the family.

As our girl increasingly displays her rapidly expanding feats of memory, she is consolidating her self-hood, a self that is anchored in a particular place in a particular time, with a particular cultural, linguistic, and historical inheritance. It is a self that is already gendered, and, as she becomes increasingly aware of how other people differ from herself, this process of becoming-feminine will intensify. The desire of other little girls in her class at kindergarten or school to exclusively dress in pink, for example, could well erase the memories that currently constitute her sense of self: that her favourite T-shirt is a grey one with a picture of a mountain on it, and that one of her favourite toys is a Thomas train set.  

But the memory process of reconsolidation means that she will also likely outgrow and revise her own past: in their turn, pink fairy princesses will become passé and baby-dolls will only be fit for babies. Memories might be the things that we remember from our pasts, but, in recasting them, they also might be what keeps us from living in the past, both individually and collectively.

Gottfried, Mrs Schischka, and me

This impressive-looking matron is my great-great-grandmother, Rosalie Schischka. She was one of a small group of immigrants from Bohemia in the Austrian Empire (now part of the Czech Republic) to the small village of Puhoi, north of Auckland, New Zealand. Along with the French settlement of Akaroa in the South Island, Puhoi is one of only a few distinctively European communities in New Zealand.

She appears here in a portrait painted of her by the world-famous-in-New Zealand nineteenth-century artist, Gottfried Lindauer. Like Mrs Schischka, Gottfried was a Bohemian immigrant to New Zealand, coming from the same area, Plzen (Pilsen). Both Gottfried and Rosalie, like their fellow travellers, were attracted by dreams of a better life, and, as it turned out, the tall tales of others who had already settled here. Like the similarly well-known paintings of Charles Frederick Goldie, Lindauer’s paintings are appreciated in the New Zealand art circles more for their historical and ethnographic value - though even that is apparently sketchy - than their artistic merit.

I only learned of the existence of this painting this past Christmas.  My father told me that his great grandmother had been painted by Lindauer - apparently news to him also - and that she had recently been sold for an undisclosed sum. The date of sale was 10 November 2011, my daughter’s first birthday. Intrigued, I Googled her as soon as I got home. Now in the Fletcher Trust Collection, Rosalie features on their website. Having never seen a photograph of her, I was curious to see what she looked like. Not to mention find out more about how a humble Bohemian immigrant was transformed into a semi-famous artwork.

With a click of a mouse button, there she was. My great-great-grandmother. Rosalie Schischka (née Schindlerova. Given that this is the feminine form of Schindler, are we, I wonder, any relation?). 

It’s hard to put into words what coming face to face with an unknown, and unseen, ancestress is like. It’s certainly not the same feeling as dispassionately appraising the work of a ‘journeyman painter’ who specialised in ‘romanticised images’, particularly of Mãori subjects, and portraits of people of substance (as Lindauer has been described).  It’s an uncanny sensation, of someone walking over your grave ... or out of theirs.  

Noting her age at the time of the painting - 73, and already widowed for 16 years - my first thought was the rather inconsequential ‘she must have had a good brand of hair-dye.’  Her tresses are still so improbably dark brown that they blend into the dim background. She wears mourning, adorned with two intricate pieces of gold jewellery, with dancing sparkles scattered around the top. Seed pearls, I guessed.

I searched her faces for traces of my own, but aside from the dark hair and eyes, I can’t see it. Putting my head to one side, and closing one eye, she maybe looks a bit like my dad, her great-grandson. Her face is fleshy and lined, but, for all that, she looks a youthful 73. While there are hints of impatience and not-suffering-fools around her mouth and eyes - perhaps there is a resemblance after all - there is also a slightly-raised left eyebrow. It’s as if she’s not at her ease, simultaneously thinking ‘hurry up and paint the picture already,’ and feeling tickled that she’s having her picture painted at all.

The blurb on the website - a little snidely, I think - says ‘this is a portrait of a woman of substance who went to some pains to ensure that her painted image reflected her status in the community.’ Hmmm, because it’s kind of crazy to get dressed up if someone’s going to paint your picture, right? Nor do the use of the tentative ‘probably’ and ‘probable’ suggest much knowledge of Rosalie’s life, nor of the community in which she lived. Most of the male immigrants from Bohemia were farm labourers, coal miners or town-labourers. Their wives cared for large families, while the single women were domestic servants and lace makers. And there are a couple of basic incorrect facts: the Schischkas arrived in Auckland in 1866, for example, not 1864, as stated. 

I don’t have a huge amount of knowledge of Rosalie’s life, or that of the Puhoi community’s either. But I can try and imagine the life of the living, breathing woman represented in the painting. Rosalie travelled with her husband and seven children to the other side of the world, leaving familiarity, family and friends, on the strength of a handful of rosy-tinted letters. These letters glossed over the difficulty of the terrain, the lack of any facilities beyond what the earliest settlers had built themselves, the isolation of the community, and its almost exclusive initial dependence on the local Ngãti Rongo people. 

Rosalie’s youngest child was two when she arrived in Auckland. I find a long car-trip with one toddler stressful enough. I can only imagine how difficult it must’ve been to cope with a large family, limited space and food, and the threat of typhus and typhoid fever, which killed four people on board. On arrival in New Zealand, her husband was held in debtor’s prison for three weeks as a result of various ‘misunderstandings’ over an early land purchase. I imagine Rosalie wondered what on earth she’d let herself in for ... and why on earth she’d let Lorenz talk her into this in the first place. I imagined her worst fears were confirmed when, on arrival in Puhoi, the first Bohemian immigrants there asked them, ‘what has brought you to this terrible place?’ Quick with his wits, her husband is said to have retorted, ‘Your letters.’  

Like most early European immigrants to New Zealand, the Bohemians benefitted from the policies of settlement and alienation of Mãori land pursued by the Crown. The Schischkas received 220 acres - more land than they could ever have dreamed of owning in Bohemia - and established themselves as farmers. I suspect Rosalie’s later ‘status in the community’ was due to the hard work she and her family put in to making their farm a going concern, and, with others, helping to feed and provision the new community. Not long after they arrived, Rosalie had an eighth child. In addition to feeding, clothing, and educating her existing children, she now had to cope with pregnancy, birth and infancy in a new and unfamiliar place. 

If she is not entitled to a little pride and self-satisfaction at the end of a hard life, then when would she be?

As you can tell, I had a somewhat defensive reaction to the way this picture is described on the Fletcher Trust Collection's website. My response is to the person in the picture as the subject of the painting, rather than its object. She is not just some old woman in a gloomy picture, indicative of the limitations of early New Zealand art, she is my great-great-grandmother. I found myself not only fascinated by her, but also feeling protective of her and wanting to shield her from the the distancing analysis of art critics. At moments, I even entertained thoughts of buying the picture myself - like Claire Huxtable in this episode of the Cosby Show - but the rumoured price-tag stretching into the thousands quickly extinguished those plans. Also, I don’t think it would match the carpet.

Why am I posting this ‘meditation on an artwork’ in a blog about feminism and motherhood?  Because the unusual reaction I had to this painting reminded me of the marginalised histories of motherhood that various feminist writers have tried to uncover. It reminded me of the history of settlement in this country, where my ancestors and me are located in it and how we have benefitted from it. And it reminded me that portraiture, even the sentimentalised Victorian kind, can be a powerful means of engaging with the past, especially with our foremothers, without whom none of us would be here. 

review: Cinderella Ate My Daughter

My gender-myth-busting holiday reading this year was the entertaining Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Line of the New Girlie-Girl Culture (2011) by US author Peggy Orenstein. Orenstein not only questions the narrow, gendered nature of products aimed at young girls, but also the commodification of their nascent sexuality.

Perfect Christmas reading.

With a rapidly growing and increasingly independent daughter to guide, Orenstein navigates her way through literally thousands of gendered products that peddle narrow and confining definitions of girlhood. They seem to offer the pursuit of physical perfection (for later pursuit of a perfect prince) as virtually the only route to female empowerment. Mass commercialisation has spread that message faster and younger than ever before (or so I’m told in the book’s dust-jacket). Knowing all this - or, at least, fearing it - what do you do when you’re confronted with the reality of young daughters who want princess dresses, glittery make-up, Bratz dolls and Hannah Montana CDs?  

This book is Peggy Orenstein’s attempt to answer that question.

Orenstein’s mode of address is intriguing in its mix of the confessional and investigative. She opens by confiding to the reader ‘why she wanted a boy’. As a noted public commentator on raising girls in a number of earlier works, she was suddenly stricken at the thought of having to put her money where her mouth was. Or, as she puts it, ‘What if, after all, I was not up to the challenge myself? What if I couldn’t raise the ideal daughter? With a boy, I figured, I would be off the hook (pp 1-2).’ In an earlier post, I blogged  about how I had had similar, if temporary, misgivings.

The more personal parts of this book are tales of her ‘trial-and-error’ approach and rueful admissions of what appears to be failure (e.g. finding out that her three-year- old daughter was fully conversant with the story of Snow White - when Orenstein herself had never told her the story - and was able to use it to manipulate other kids to find her ‘the right princes’ among the little boys present pp 11-12). As the review in the New York Times noted, she argues with herself, questions her assumptions, attempts a answer and then has second thoughts. It’s as if you’re right there in the consciousness of a another parent, not a detached ‘expert’ of the kind I’ve discussed in a previous post.

Orenstein traverses a number of topics in this book: 

• the pinkification of a little girl’s world as represented in an annual industry toy fair displaying thousands of pink products (‘why has girlhood become so monochromatic?’ p 35); 
• the craze for princess-everything (considered by a number of parents to be a ‘safe’ outlet that ‘fends off premature sexualisation’ p 24); 
• the development of Disney Princesses from 2000 onwards (ever noticed how they never look at each other when they’re pictured together? Disney Princesses are emphatically not about friendship and female solidarity p 23); 
• fairy tales (including the ways in which their narrative tropes recur - particularly, as the title makes clear, that of Cinderella, who is swept off her feet by a handsome prince. Twilight, anyone?)
• child beauty pageants - admittedly well-trodden ground but Orenstein takes a different angle: reality programmes like Toddlers and Tiaras offer audiences a voyeuristic experience: ‘They also reassure parents of their own comparative superiority by smugly ignoring the harder questions: even if you agree that pageant moms are over the line in their sexualisation of little girls - way  over the line - where, exactly, is the line, and who draws it and how? (p 76)
• and, bringing the book right up to date, electronic media including the gendered use of virtual worlds and social media (which can lead to increased bullying - and studies have shown that girls are more subject to online victimisation than boys)

Adding up all these things, Orenstein (and the reader) can’t help but conclude that conventional cultural scripts concerning femininity for girls are ambivalent at best, and an impediment to healthy development at worst.

But, having identified all that, what is a parent to do? Lock her daughter up like a latter-day Rapunzel? Be the parent who says ‘no’ to everything? Or makes her daughter into a figure of fun - or, worse, a target for bullies - amongst her peers?  Orenstein doesn’t offer firm or glib answers, but a narrative of her own attempts to answer those questions.

One example of Orenstein’s confusion is when she learns of a friend’s 14-year old son’s nonchalant response to a topless photo from one of his female classmates (and not even one he knew well). Orenstein was initially torn between amazement at the girl’s bravado and apparent body confidence but also a nagging suspicion that ‘something didn’t sit right’ and that this might be old-fashioned sexual objectification dressed up in the more modern guise of Facebook and (pseudo-)empowerment. An expert in human sexuality studies helped her articulate what was behind her mixed feelings:

Girls like the one I have described are not connected more deeply to their feelings, needs or desires. Instead, sexual entitlement itself has become objectified; like identity, like femininity too, it, too, has become a performance, something to ‘do’ rather than to ‘experience.’ Teasing and turning boys on might give girls a certain thrill, even a fleeting sense of power, but it will not help them understand their own pleasure ... [or] allow them to assert themselves in intimate (let along casual) relationships. (pp 170-171)

I enjoyed this book a lot, although it had some limits. It sometimes spoke a little too much of its own bubble - a privileged, Californian, liberal enclave - to be totally relatable. It also focussed almost exclusively on the gendered experience of girls, something Orenstein acknowledges at the outset. This is largely because she has a daughter and not a son, so the issues are more personally pressing for her in a way that those affecting boys aren’t. I’d be interested to read a similar account that focussed on boys. 

When it comes to talking about the construction of gender, however, focussing on girls is not an intrinsic weakness. The process of gendering girls and boys is linked. In her landmark 1990 book Gender Trouble, theorist Judith Butler describes gender not only as performative but also as productive: it forms part of a heterosexual matrix, which juxtaposes ‘approved’ heterosexuality with ‘subversive’ homosexuality. In the normative view of the relationship between sex, gender and sexuality, conventionally masculine males are meant to desire conventionally feminine females. Masculinity and femininity - which comprise the 'gender ' part of the matrix - are most heavily policed as the visible signifiers of sexuality. A feminine male therefore becomes suspect, as does a masculine female. This is called the shaming and policing of gender, and it affects boys and men as much as girls and women. Orenstein’s book might focus on the gendered world of little girls, but this also impacts little boys, not least in how they will perceive their female family members and friends, and, later, potential partners (well, if they’ve got the script ‘right’, that is ...)

On the plus side, I appreciated Orenstein’s wit and self-awareness: in ‘It’s All About the Cape,’ she lamented the dearth of female super-heroes who could provide alternatives to the mania for princesses. Looking back with nostalgia on her own Wonder Woman phase, Orenstein wanted her daughter to experience a similar sense of invincibility, freedom and power. A little later, however, she admits: ‘I did a little digging about Wonder Woman. It turns out her real name was Diana, daughter of Hera, queen of the Amazons. That makes her, of all things ... a princess.’ (p 158)

What I most appreciated about this book, however, is that Orenstein put herself out there: her ideals, her rude awakenings, her daughter’s (sometimes unwitting) challenges to her deeply-held beliefs. She doesn’t advocate total abstinence from a gendered, consumerist culture - as if that were possible - but rather taking an informed and aware approach (advertisers are not your friend). She closes by sharing the insight she has gained along the way:

Our role is not to keep the world at bay but to prepare our daughters so that they can thrive within it. That involves staying close but not crowding them, standing firm in one’s values, while remaining flexible ... I’m not saying we can and will do everything ‘right’, only that there is power - magic - in awareness. If we start with that, with wanting girls to see themselves from the inside out rather than the outside in, we will go a long way toward helping them find their own happily-ever-afters. (p 192)

Let's see how it works out ....

on conspiracy theories

Happy New Year 2013 - according to the Gregorian calendar at least! I’ve been struggling to think of a suitably innovative post that would reflect ‘new year’s resolutions’ or ‘turning over a new leaf’ in some way to kick off the blog for the year, but it’s just not happening. So, in a new twist on the new leaf cliché I’m going to leave it un-turned and jump right back into blogging as usual.

Which brings me to conspiracy theories.

‘Gosh, that was a big jump,’ you might think. Or, if you were less charitable (and also well-read), ‘that was a complete non sequitur.’

Why conspiracy theories?

Well ... it all started when I was eating my lunch at work last week. One of my colleagues is seven months’ pregnant, so, naturally, the subject turned to babies, bibs and ... giving birth. Luckily, my colleague had attended births before - something she described as the best form of contraception there is - and had some idea what to expect. In good spirits, she was pretty clear that she would have an epidural as there was no way she wanted to go through the kind of pain that her sister experienced (and she witnessed). She did, however, ask me the dreaded question ‘what was it like for you?’

Now, as I’ve blogged previously, my birth experience is not really something you’d want to share to rally and support an expectant mother. While a traumatic birth is certainly a possibility, what I experienced was far from routine. I have therefore struggled on a number of occasions to think of what the best response would be to someone about to give birth who asked me this very question.

It's tricky. You don’t want to to sugar-coat, but you don’t want to scare the bejesus out of someone either - especially, as in this case, at seven months pregnant, the die is pretty much cast. Not to mention the fact that women are different, their babies are different, and their experiences will be different. ‘Telling the truth’ about childbirth might be the catch-cry of any number of books on motherhood from Kate Figes to Eleanor Black, but it’s also a lot harder than it seems. One woman’s truth is another woman’s fiction.

I 'ummed' and 'aahed' a bit before saying something ineffectual like 'it's good you've been to births before - that should give you an idea of what to expect'. This searing insight was followed up with something like ‘mine didn’t go so well, so it’s probably not a good guide as to what might happen.’ 

The understatement of the century.

But what is the thing to say?  It’s harder than you might think. One friend did have a straightforward natural birth that went pretty much as she wanted it. If I’d had that experience, I’d gladly tell anyone who asked. Other times, I’ve more obviously dodged the subject and said little to nothing at all. The so-called conspiracy of silence is less ‘government cover-up’ and more ‘if you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything at all.’

The double bind I found myself in at lunch the other day reminded me of the scene in The Deer Hunter (1978), where Michael, Steven and Nick encounter a Green Beret at the wedding reception. The three friends are just about to leave for Vietnam and they encounter the returned Green Beret drinking quietly - and heavily - by himself in the bar, as everyone else carouses in the main hall. In high spirits - both literally and metaphorically - Michael, Steven and Nick try to connect with the returned soldier. They tell him that they too are soon to 'go airborne' and ask ‘what’s it like over there?’ He tries to ignore them, preferring to deal with his demons privately. The more he does so, the more they want him to answer. Eventually, surrounded, he turns to them, raises his glass, and toasts them with a wry ‘f*** it.’

Caught between the desire to warn and be helpful, and the desire not to scare someone and potentially impact the positive frame of mind they’ll need to get through the experience, mothers have been accused of perpetuating a conspiracy of silence, particularly in relation to childbirth and the relentlessness of parenting. 

In 1997, Australian researcher Carol McVeigh published the results of a study of 79 first-time mothers, many of whom spoke about the conspiracy of silence, bewailing the fact that no-one told them what to expect, (as I myself did in an earlier post). Since McVeigh published her research, there has been an explosion of mummy-literature - books and blogs, academic research and novels - that not only exhort us to ‘tell the truth’ about motherhood, but also proceed to ‘tell the truth’ about the author’s own experiences. With all the truth-telling going on, it’s a wonder that the idea of a ‘conspiracy of silence’ still persists. 

Perhaps it's as my midwife said, that ‘women just don’t want to hear it.’ I know when I sat down to read Kate Figes’ Life After Birth while I was still pregnant, I quickly abandoned it after reading the back cover, as it just seemed too depressing. I also know that recommending her book to me was one way that a mother I knew had tried to break the conspiracy of silence for me. 

This blog is, I guess, my way. 

Next time, a bright-eyed mum-to-be asks me what my experience was like, I’ll know what to do. Instead of trying to capture the highs and the lows, the joys and the pain - while simultaneously trying not put them off all together - I’ll say, ‘It’s hard to sum up in just a few sentences. Here, read my blog instead. It’s the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Oh, and 70, 000 words and counting ...’

Or perhaps I should just offer the Green Beret’s toast instead?

'tis the season and all that

We are officially on holiday.

The office Christmas parties have been and gone. The Christmas tree has been shedding its fake fir finery over the floor for a few weeks (and that alliteration wasn’t even on purpose!) There are only six windows left to open on our Advent calendar. 

And this will be my last post of 2012 (‘amen!’ sigh the readers in relief)

I’ve been thinking about what to write for this year's final post. Last year, I took a light-hearted look at labour and childbirth in the original Christmas story. This year, I’m not feeling quite so jolly, or, at least, not yet. Each day seems to bring a fresh horror visited on the children of this planet: they are victims of war in Syria, Palestine and Israel, Afghanistan and the Congo (to name a few), a mass-stabbing in China, another US school shooting, as well as the less-headline-grabbing victims of child-trafficking, recession, and poverty.  And even some of those children who are privileged by comparison spend the holidays negotiating new family configurations, and experiencing the stresses and strains of the holiday season. 

As I was wondering what to write about this year, two items on the internet caught my attention: one an opinion piece by a mother on her contented child being the result of good parenting rather than just luck, and the other President Obama’s speech following the tragic school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. 

In the first piece, the mother of a young son wrote about the way in which she bristled whenever people told her how ‘lucky’ she was to have such a settled baby. Luck, in her view, wasn’t the whole story, as ‘according to the parenting books, we haven't exactly been the ideal parents’. With a similar antipathy towards parenting books to that described in my previous post, these parents have sought instead to respond to their baby’s cues for food, sleep and clean nappies, rather than try and conform to someone else’s schedule. As a result, the writer concludes, they have a baby who sleeps ten-plus hours a night, has been sick once in ten months and has met or exceeded every developmental milestone. While I wasn’t over-fond of her implied judgement of other parents whose offspring weren’t so co-operative - there are plenty of parents who feed on demand and let their children sleep when they want to sleep who don’t get a good night’s sleep, for example - I liked her broader point about the way in which the work of parenting was met by dismissive ‘you’re so luckys’ that rendered it invisible and inconsequential. Good parenting does matter, it is hard, and everyone - regardless of whether they have children of their own - will reap the benefits from it.

In the second piece, one which will no doubt be read and heard by a great deal more people than the first, President Obama spoke about the need for the US to do better by its children. Without ever mentioning the word ‘gun’, he clearly indicated that it was time for the US to change its gun culture, which, in Newtown, resulted in the murder of twenty six- and seven-year-olds, along with some of the adults who took care of them. President Obama spoke at length about raising children, and about the ways in which children were brought up not only by their parents and immediate family, but also by the wider community. He said:

"It comes as a shock at a certain point where you realise no matter how much you love these kids, you can't do it by yourself, that this job of keeping our children safe and teaching them well is something we can only do together, with the help of friends and neighbors, the help of a community and the help of a nation.

And in that way we come to realise that we bear responsibility for every child, because we're counting on everybody else to help look after ours, that we're all parents, that they are all our children.

This is our first task, caring for our children. It's our first job. If we don't get that right, we don't get anything right. That's how, as a society, we will be judged.

And by that measure, can we truly say, as a nation, that we're meeting our obligations?"

Obama’s conclusion was ‘no’, that there was more to do, and he was going to do everything in his power to try and achieve that. History will show whether he - and the wider communities that he leads - will be successful.

Both pieces resonated with me: the former emphasised individual responsibility, and the need to ‘teach your children well’ (as Crosby Stills Nash and Young once sang); the latter reminded its listeners of their and our collective responsibilities, that ‘teaching them well is something we can only do together.’ 

It is fitting that both these reminders, albeit the latter in tragic and totally un-wanted circumstances, come at the beginning of the holiday season. 

Christmas - the holiday with which I am most familiar - may be starting ever earlier each year as shops groan under the weight of consumer goods to go under the tree. But, in celebrating the exchange of gifts and the sharing of meals, it is also drawing on something more powerful and less ideological than mere capitalism. In the 1920s, French sociologist and anthropologist Marcel Mauss wrote in his most famous work The Gift that the exchange of objects established and cemented relationships between groups and between individuals in a variety of societies. This exchange established the central principle of reciprocity and fostered social solidarity as well as self-interest. In doing so it created obligations, responsibilities and duties between people, families, adults and children.

While we’re counting our presents along with our blessings these holidays, we would also do well to remember the relational responsibilities that are inscribed in every gift: those new socks and chocolates (to our immediate family, friends and neighbours), that yummy lunch (to all the people - locally, nationally, and internationally - that had a role in preparing it), and that statutory holiday (to the national community).

Because if children are a gift, and a gift to their communities as well as their parents, then we all have obligations for their care and wellbeing.

And, on that note, Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays!

Books etc

Have no fear, I am not about to launch this post by saying that my two year-old is now able to read. She certainly enjoys books, and a combination of the pictures and (incredibly) repetitive reading means she can now reel off by heart the words in some of her books. But proper reading of unfamiliar words - in fact, of any words - is still a ways off yet.

No, the subject of this post, is books about child-bearing and child-rearing, more particularly, my antipathy towards them. I’m not the only one it seems. Novelist Rachel Cusk describes them in this way:

There are books about motherhood, as there are about most things. To reach them you must pass nearly everything, the civilised world of fiction and poetry, the suburbs of dictionaries and textbooks, on past books about how to mend your motorbike or plant begonias and books about doing your own tax return. Childcare manuals are situated at the far end of human experience, just past diet books and just before astrology.

It is possible, I sense, to make a specialism out of anything and hence unravel the native confidence of those you address. The more I read, the more my daughter recedes from me and becomes an object whose use I must relearn, whose conformity to other objects like her is a matter for liminal anxiety. (A Life’s Work, p 111)

I don’t want to totally slate these kind of books, nor criticise people for relying on them. At times, particularly in the first year of my baby’s life, I was as much in need of support and advice as anyone. I have talked with many people - other new mothers and fathers, experienced parents, health professionals - and I have read a few books, looked online and dipped into books and magazines. But my forays into child-bearing and rearing manuals - no matter how well-intentioned - have led me to conclude that Cusk, in her supercilious way, may be right: that they can work to undermine confidence even as they seek to reassure; that they can serve to distance a parent from their child - who becomes an object to be analysed or a problem to be solved - even as they emphasise responding sensitively to each child’s individuality and difference. 

I’m not suggesting that this is necessarily a conscious agenda of disempowerment on the part of the writers - much as it isn’t on the part of self-help books that exhort you to ‘Love Yourself’ and then give you tips on how to get your hair and makeup just-right. Rather, it seems to me that these contradictions help drive a process that effectively polices parents, especially new parents, and especially mothers. 

Recent research by historian Angela Davies has shown that childcare manuals by authors from Dr Spock to Gina Ford have been setting the bar too high and, for 50 years, mothers have felt more powerless, not less, after reading their words of wisdom. Davis carried out 160 interviews with women of all ages and from all backgrounds to explore their experiences of motherhood. In Modern Motherhood: Women and Family in England, 1945-2000, she says every manual designed to offer support and advice to women has had the opposite effect, leaving them dispirited and feeling inadequate. She says:  

Despite all the differences in advice advocated by these childcare 'bibles' over the years, it is interesting that they all have striking similarities in terms of how the experts presented their advice. Whatever the message, the advice was given in the form of an order and the authors highlighted extreme consequences if mothers did not follow the methods of child-rearing that they advocated. Levels of behaviour these childcare manuals set for mothers and babies are often unattainably high, meaning women could be left feeling like failures when these targets were not achieved. So while women could find supportive messages, some also found the advice more troubling. (Davis quoted in the Guardian)

Ordinarily a lover of books, I haven’t immersed myself in these ones, not least because in the weary times I wasn’t caring for my new baby, the very last thing I wanted to do was read about caring for babies. In fact, one of the first books I read after leaving the hospital and figuring out which day of the week it was was not What to Expect in Your Baby’s First Year but Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk! I have dipped into them in times when I wasn’t sure about something - or done the online equivalent - but something stopped me from devouring them in pursuit of the secrets of good motherhood. 

Now, as this blog attests, this didn’t stop me reading about experiences of motherhood itself. Far from it. I have read books by novelists exploring their own experiences of motherhood, whether fictional (Margaret Drabble) or non-fictional (Anne Enright, Rachel Cusk). I have read about the experiences of professional women who have combined the insights of their working lives with their personal experiences of mothering (Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Stephanie Coontz, Sue Kedgley). I have read the polemical works of feminist mothers (Adrienne Rich, Naomi Wolf, Elisabeth Badinter). And many more besides. 

Where these books - of which, it sometimes seems there are numbers now to rival the What to Expect, Baby Whisperer and Contented Baby ilk - differ from the how-to manuals is that, where they move beyond the ground of personal experience (and not all of them do), they seek to empower rather than undermine, to foster solidarity rather than individually guilt-trip, to analyse and critique rather than simply accept. One could argue that some of these approaches may alienate mothers who don’t wish to engage with the more political aspects of mothering, rather than the day-to-day business of it. That may well be the case. But what they don’t do is tell you how to do it nor imply consciously or not that you could be doing it wrong and you should be thinking about how you will get it right or pay the consequences at all times.

Elsewhere, Susan J. Douglas and Meredith W. Michaels trace the ways in which parental advice books have proliferated since the 1980s, as part of the ideology of what they call the ‘new momism.’ This has happened in parallel to the increasing dominance of neo-liberalism and the development of ‘turbo-capitalism’. As Susan Gregory Thomas outlines in Buy Baby Buy, this period also saw an explosion of toys and other materials aimed at parents. Similarly, the profusion of how-to books offer up the enticing proposition that good parenting can be bought and sold, that the secret to raising happy children is as simple as making the right purchase. And no matter how well the books of such high-profile feminists as Naomi Wolf might sell, they would be well below the sales figures and brand proliferation enjoyed by the likes of the What to Expect range.

When it comes to childcare books, it seems that making parents feel bad is pretty good for business.

review: Mother Nature

I was prompted to read this book after wondering about a gut reaction I had had to a picture of a dog suckling a cat posted on a breastfeeding support website. The picture made me uncomfortable. Well, not so much the picture itself, as the context in which it appeared, particularly as it was posted shortly after a woman’s story of how she found comfort and connection in her role as a newly-nursing mother by watching the nursing chimpanzees at the zoo. ‘I am not an animal,’ I raged to myself. ‘I am not a chimpanzee or a dog or a cat.’  

Now, of course, the latter might be true, but the former is not. I am an animal of the species called homo sapiens. But I am also aware - given my human facility for reasoning, empathy, and symbolic language - that ‘animalising’ other humans - that is, seeing them as somehow less than human - is a means by which gross atrocities such as colonialism, slavery, and genocide have been committed. The basic concept that all homo sapiens are human underpinned the development of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights after the end of the second world war.

And, as Hillary Clinton powerfully said in 1995, ‘women’s rights are human rights’. Seeing women as not quite human, then, can potentially lead to the denial of human rights, including basic rights to life, liberty, security of the person and self-determination. This has been appallingly demonstrated recently in the case of Savita Halappanavar, a woman who this year died of blood-poisoning after doctors refused to uphold her right to life over that of the slowly dying fetus within her. With a gruesome irony, the fetus was female. 

Now, de-humanising women is by no means what either the new mother or the breastfeeding support people were advocating. Rather, they were emphasising the no-less political point that breastfeeding is a normal biological function that human females share with other mammals. As such, it should be respected, celebrated and normalised, both on the level of societal comfort and societal support (e.g. statutory parental leave, paid breastfeeding breaks). I support that position and have little argument with it. 

And yet ...

I couldn’t silence my gut feeling that something did not quite sit right with me about the comparison. Perhaps it was being likened to a ‘dairy cow’ when I was breastfeeding myself. Perhaps it was something more. 

Elsewhere, during the course of my reading, I had come across several references to primatologist, anthropologist and sociobiologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s book Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and the Shaping of the Species (2000 - interestingly, I have come across several different subtitles for this book!). Perhaps this book would help me find some answers.

Or perhaps not.

French philosopher Elisabeth Badinter - whose early work Hrdy admires - criticises Mother Nature for its perpetuation of the ideology of ‘naturalism’, which has ‘as its core a belief that the world is governed by natural principles‘ (The Conflict, pp 29-30). Despite Hrdy’s nuanced approach and her demonstration of social, political, cultural and historical maternal diversity, Badinter contends that Hrdy refuses to let go a belief in innate instinct. In response to Hrdy’s discussion of lactation as the crucial ingredient in mother-infant attachment, the source of so-called maternal instincts, Badinter asks ‘if breastfeeding is the trigger for maternal attachment, what of those who have never breastfed, as is the case with millions of mothers. Do they love their children any less than those who breastfeed?’ (The Conflict, p 53). Hrdy does, in fact, address this later in her book when she categorically dismisses the idea of the critical bonding period immediately post-birth: ‘Children can be adopted days after birth and loved just as intensely, as ferociously, as those babies whose bodies passed through their mother’s birth canal and then pressed against her right after birth (p 538).’ 

Judith Warner, by contrast, thinks that Badinter got Hrdy’s argument wrong:

Hrdy ... has argued ... in ... “Mother Nature” (the chief argument of which is badly misrepresented in “The Conflict”), that a life combining both nurturing and providing for family is not only the most satisfying, but also the most traditionally natural for mothers. Hrdy’s research teaches that the split, or conflict, between a woman’s nurturing maternal role and her out-in-the-world, family-­provider role is a false one that flies in the face of the mothering practices of our primate ancestors, and that has been greatly aggravated by the work patterns of the modern industrialized world.

Having ploughed through the 540 pages of Hrdy’s book I’m not so sure that Badinter does mis-represent her argument. Warner’s account might be what Hrdy gestures at throughout but nowhere does she put it as baldly as this, partly, I suspect, because it would not be ‘good science’ to be so overtly political. What she does say is that field research shows that animal and human mothers continually make ‘trade-offs between quantity and quality, managing reproductive effort in line with their own life stage, condition and current circumstances’ (p 350). The care of allomothers (‘other than mothers’, including the father) is particularly critical to reproductive success. Mothering in nature, then is diverse, highly dependent on circumstance and support, and subject to threat from male attempts to control female fertility. Badinter is concerned less with Hrdy’s depiction of biological diversity, than with the political ideology to which it is in service (whether consciously or not). Given its breadth, I think Hrdy’s book supports both Badinter’s and Warner’s account of it.

I found much that was of interest in this book - e.g. its accounts of infanticide in different primate and human societies (pp 288-318) and the reasons why it is sometimes considered to be in both a mother’s and a community’s best interests (this was particularly interesting in light of debates about late-stage abortion) - and I think her point is well made that feminist critiques of sociobiology often critique the field as it was not as it is (p 535). Her own research and that of others shows that in nature, mothers of many species are not ‘all-sacrificing’ and passive, but ‘multi-faceted ... flexible actors whose responses were contingent on circumstances’, who sought varied ‘maternal alternatives to caring for their own infants’ (p 535). Here the science finds a ready audience in feminists and, you would think, anyone with half a brain. 

Despite this, parts of this book really challenged me, much like that initial picture. At first, I checked myself: as a non-scientist, and indeed, a ‘cultural critic’ was I guilty of knee-jerk disciplinary bias? Perhaps. I will certainly concede that I don’t have the disciplinary knowledge to challenge the science of what Hrdy writes about. I do, however, have the ability to critique and challenge the cultural meanings that she makes from that science (i.e. the recordings made of the observable habits and practices of animal and human societies). There were two particular things that played on my mind as I read the book: a lack of an overt awareness of the wider cultural and political context of her work, and a lack of any overt self-reflexivity about it.

Taking my first point, Hrdy nowhere acknowledges the legacy of social Darwinism and scientific racism nor the reasons why feminists or other cultural critics might have distanced themselves from it. What is now discredited as ‘scientific racism’, for example, categorised humans in stages of modernity, likening those at the bottom to ‘less-evolved’ apes and using dubious scientific experiments to support their theories. To be clear, I’m not accusing Hrdy of doing this, but the lack of acknowledgement of this legacy while drawing on primate societies and contemporary hunter-gatherer societies to draw conclusions for her audience (primarily Western and middle class) is astonishing. 

In that context, consider this sentence from the end of the book: ‘Over the next twenty years, Pat Draper ... studied the transition of the !Kung from a nomadic Pleistocene lifestyle to settled living amongst other African villagers’ (p 520, my emphasis). What is extraordinary about this statement, is not that contemporary !Kung people have adapted the way they live to changes in their environment, but that their previous life is described as ‘Pleistocene.’ ‘Pleistocene’ is the name given to the geological epoch which lasted from about 2,588,000 to 11,700 years ago. Its use as an adjective to describe a contemporary human society suggests traces of the legacy of scientific racism still remain. The woman who studies them, by contrast, is named and individualised. Furthermore, the transition to a lifestyle that might be considered ‘settled’ from a Western point of view, may well be profoundly ‘unsettling’ from the point of view of the !Kung. This is, however, difficult to gauge without hearing their testimony, of which is there is little in the book. 

My second point, closely related to the first, concerns the little overt acknowledgement of the power-relations between anthropological field workers and the ‘objects’ of their study. This was particularly disturbing to me when she cited, without any context, examples from work on the Yanamomo people of the Amazon basin to support her argument. I say ‘on’ quite deliberately. A couple of years ago, I saw the excellent but disturbing documentary Secrets of the Tribe (2010) which explored the devastating effects a handful of anthropologists had had on the Yanamomi people. Some of these effects included sexual abuse and the (knowing) spread  of epidemic diseases. 

I can only conclude that, like me, this book is confused. I wondered about the other book - glimpsed in personal examples offered periodically throughout - that Hrdy didn’t write. The one that began with her own experience of being both a scientist and a mother, the trade-offs she had had to make. She mentions at one point that a respected male mentor challenged her decision to continue working once she had children on the grounds that research in their field had shown that this was not good for child development. Surely, this is the place to start a book intended for a general audience? It could then have moved back and forth between developments in scientific research, how it is given meaning culturally, historically, and politically, and what that might mean for the lives of real women. Perhaps Hrdy’s belief in ‘dispassionate analysis’ (p 349) does not sit so well with the cultural idea that the personal is political. 

Did Hrdy’s book help explain my profoundly un-scientific reaction to the nursing dog and cat? Not really. Writing this review, however, and trying to find the words to describe my disquiet has. In trying to figure out what bugged me, I’ve come to this conclusion: I may be an animal, but I refuse to be animalised - whether positively or negatively - if it in any way means being defined as less than human, as an object who is acted upon rather than a subject who acts.