Modern Motherhood and Women's Dual Identities

Rewriting the Sexual Contract

Petra Bueskens

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138677425
• eBook ISBN: 9781317195450
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Why do women in contemporary western societies experience contradiction between their autonomous and maternal selves? What are the origins of this contradiction and the associated 'double shift' that result in widespread calls to either 'lean in' or 'opt out'? How are some mothers subverting these contradictions and finding meaningful ways of reconciling their autonomous and maternal selves?

In Modern Motherhood and Women's Dual Identities, Petra Bueskens argues that western modernisation consigned women to the home and released them from it in historically unprecedented, yet interconnected, ways. Her ground-breaking formulation is that western women are free as 'individuals' and constrained as mothers, with the twist that it is the former that produces the latter.

Bueskens' theoretical contribution consists of the identification and analysis of modern women's duality, drawing on political philosophy, feminist theory and sociology tracking the changing nature of discourses of women, freedom and motherhood across three centuries. While the current literature points to the pervasiveness of contradiction and double-shifts for mothers, very little attention has been paid to how (some) women are subverting contradiction and 'rewriting the sexual contract'. Bridging this gap, Bueskens' interviews ten 'revolving mothers' to reveal how periodic absence, exceeding the standard work-day, disrupts the default position assigned to mothers in the home, and in turn disrupts the gendered dynamics of household work.

A provocative and original work, Modern Motherhood and Women's Dual Identities will appeal to graduate students and researchers interested in fields such as Women and Gender Studies, Sociology of Motherhood and Social and Political Theory.

Part I

Setting the scene

1 Introduction

On mothers and modernity

This book examines the contradictory impact of modernity on women with a view to locating innovative practices of resistance and reconstruction. It makes two key contributions to the literature: one theoretical and the other empirical. In the first instance, I argue that western modernisation ushered in a contradictory duality for women, insofar as it neither consigned them to the home, nor released them from it; rather, it did both and it is this duality that has created the pervasive contradictions in women’s lives today. In particular, the early modern separation of public and private spheres sequestered women to the home as wives and mothers, while simultaneously opening up new civil spaces into which they could enter as ‘individuals’, ostensibly free of domestic constraints. This produced the conditions for contradiction that are endemic in our own century and remain, I contend, the central unfinished business of feminism.

While it is commonly understood in feminist social and political theory that men’s freedom as ‘individuals’ mandated women’s subjection as wives and mothers, what is less well understood is that women’s ‘individualisation’ also generated gender-specific contradictions. To enter the public sphere – free as it is from domestic interruption and particularist ethics – requires that somebody else is taking care of the embodied, emotional, domestic and particularist-ethical domain. Since the early modern separation of spheres this ‘somebody else’ has been a woman – or, more specifically, a wife and mother – structurally separated from the economy, politics and society. However, in contemporary society, where almost all wives and mothers engage in paid work, this ‘somebody else’ is typically a different facet of a woman’s own dual (or divided) self. The ‘cultural contradictions of motherhood’, as Sharon Hays has aptly called them (1996), reside in this contradiction between maternal and individualised selves and, at a macro-structural level, between economic and domestic spheres. Given the interdependent relations between these spheres, or, in other words, given that specialisation in one domain is dependent upon specialisation in another, women are not simply free to pursue their interests and their ends. Rather, they must do so in the context of structural interdependence mandating an intensive role in the home. It is in this sense that the ‘private sphere’ is not in fact private; what goes on there is socially produced and nested within larger social, political and economic structures. The personal is political!

The category of ‘the individual’ is central to this analysis, since it is integral to the modern conception of autonomy and, concomitantly, to women’s struggle with their domestic and maternal roles. Arguably, it is integral to the pervasive phenomenon of delayed and declining fertility in the advanced capitalist nations. Understanding why women experience role contradiction, and, more fundamentally, why women’s two modes of self are dialectical rather than simply contradictory, opens up space to rethink contemporary dilemmas. My theory of duality argues that women’s individualisation is produced by the same social structure that isolates and intensifies mothering work, and that this is the deeper contradiction at the heart of the dual-role problematic. Understanding duality at the theoretical level is the first task of this book, drawing us back to the early modern social contract and its shadow: the sexual contract (Pateman, 1988). Fleshing out a contemporary example of subversion through the example of a group of women I am calling ‘revolving mothers’ is the second empirical task. This formulation underscores a cluster of key questions.

Key questions

Theoretical questions

What is the relationship between liberal individualism and the institution of motherhood in modern western society? In a related sense, how are women’s sequestration and individualisation related? What are the early modern and late modern ‘sexual contracts’ and how have they shaped the terms of women’s participation in society?

Empirical questions

If women have moved as a group out of the home into education and employment over the last forty years and this has precipitated dual-role conflicts when (or if) they become mothers, how are some mothers challenging and reconstructing these conflicts? How, in effect, are (some) mothers ‘rewriting the sexual contract’ and what role does maternal absence play in shifting gendered dynamics in the home and in society at large?

Definitions and theoretical framework

The ability to move freely between public and private spheres, as well as between mothering and paid work (or leisure), is critical to women’s autonomy. I am therefore interested in how women’s historical movement out of the home into the public sphere transforms gendered dynamics in the home as well as in society at large. At the same time, such separation presupposes role specialisation for those social agents – men and women, respectively – assigned to each separate sphere. Thus, structural differentiation both creates and constrains the possibilities for women to leave the home.¹ Concomitantly, it is in the transition to modernity that we see the emergence of two historical figures: the woman who stays home – or what became popularly known as the ‘angel in the house’ – and the woman who leaves home in pursuit of her own individualisation – the paradigmatic ‘New Woman’. I also use the terms ‘mother who stays’ and ‘mother who leaves’ to capture the historically specific qualities of the maternal role that developed in the early modern period and the feminist struggle against it.

It is axiomatic to my argument, then, that individualised women are ‘modern inventions’, which means that this subject position is only possible within the context of modern social structure. To be more precise, it is the social construction of the mother who stays home that underscores the emergence of the mother who leaves home. My point is that once wives and mothers are sequestered to the home and new economic, civil and social spaces emerge outside, the possibility opens up for women to leave in a qualitatively different way than was possible within a pre-industrial society where home was functionally integrated with work and wider social life. At the same time, once the category of ‘the individual’, and the idea of freedom on which it is based, were constructed, it became possible to extend these ideas to women. The central obstacle, of course, was the parallel construction of the mother-wife as a facilitating resource to ‘the individual’ and therefore outside its definitional scope.

It is timely, then, to ask: who is the ‘mother who leaves’? In this study I define her in two interconnected ways: theoretical and empirical corresponding to the two dimensions of the thesis. First, she is an ‘ideal-type’ in the Weberian sense of an abstraction based on a distillation of central traits and defining characteristics. I read this ideal-type across the canvas of modernity and therefore identify her as a new historical agent made possible through the discourse of individual freedom and the separation of spheres. The mother who leaves (or the individualised woman) is, in this sense, a normative category devised for heuristic purposes. Second, I define her empirically in terms of temporary voluntary absence from the home and/or her roles in the home (as we shall see in the next section). While there are central differences between these two categorisations, the former is the theoretical basis deployed for understanding the latter. That is, I identify and interpret the emergence of ‘individualised women’ in terms of the key social and structural transformations of modernity.

Situating the study and defining the theoretical argument

Most of the social and political theory on women and modernity tends to stress the exclusion of women from modern rights in the early modern period, and the parallel construction of sequestered, intensive mothering within the institution of marriage (Elshtain, 1981; Landes, 1988; Pateman, 1988; Applewhite & Levy, 1990; Fauré, 1991; Hunt, 1992; Duby, Perrot & Fraisse, 1993; Marshall, 1994; Ryan, 1998, pp. 195–222; Caine & Sluga, 2000, pp. 32–54; Abrams, 2002, pp. 213–241; Kerber, 2004, pp. 119–127; Fuchs & Thompson, 2005, pp. 5–23; Hunt, 2006, pp. 216–258; Simonton, 2011). This theory emphasises women’s exclusion from the liberal category of the individual and, in turn, from citizenship and a (legitimate) status as a waged worker. Histories of the family point to the gradual removal of production from the household and the concomitant ‘invention of motherhood’ (Shorter, 1975; Badinter, 1981; Lewis, 1997; Ryan, 1998; Abrams, 2002, 2006, pp. 30–33). Histories of women’s labour similarly point to a complex process of attrition over the course of the nineteenth century (Tilly & Scott, 1989 [1978]; Clark, 1992 [1919]; Bythell, 1993; Simonton, 1998, 2006, 2011), while sociological, literary and historical accounts note that women came to represent tradition, love, sexuality, irrationality, nature, ‘otherness’ and the sublime (Sydie, 1987; Hewitt, 1992; Marshall, 1994; Felski, 1995; Abrams, 2002, pp. 228–36). In each case women’s ‘natural’ roles as wives and mothers figure prominently as the basis for exclusion from the public sphere and parallel sequestration to the private-domestic sphere. However, just as women were put in the home by modern social structure, so this same social structure created clandestine pathways out! This is also the century and a half of Mary Wollstonecraft, Olympe de Gouges, the ‘factory girls’, the Woman rights activists, women novelists, suffragettes and blue-stockings. While these two paths are both acknowledged and analysed in the literature, rarely are they understood in relation to each other. In other words, what is missing is a theory of duality, specifically of modern women’s contradictory duality produced by the new discourse of individual freedom and the momentous changes associated with the emergence of industrial capitalism.

With the specialisation and differentiation of spheres in early modern society, new inside and outside spaces emerged normatively delineating those who stayed home (wives and mothers) from those who left home (citizens and breadwinners). This indeed produced the sequestered wife and mother or, more abstractly, ‘the sexual contract’. However, underwriting this ‘contract’, I contend, was the creation of the conditions for its transgression. Structural differentiation and the discourse of individual rights produced, from the outset, a recalcitrant feminist discourse promulgating the natural rights, freedom and equality of women and a host of subversive female practices. I count the emergence of the ‘individualised woman’ as the paradigmatic expression of opposition to the sexual contract; albeit one made possible by the very public/private divisions inaugurated therein. Thus, my account of the mother who leaves is that she is an outlaw to the ‘institution of motherhood’ (Rich, 1986 [1976], p. 13). As an ideal-type of the modern, the mother who leaves is a truant – quite literally she is a woman out of her place (to use a particularly Parsonian schema (2002 [1956])) – who, in turn, redefines just what ‘woman’s place’ is.

The gradual but ineluctable movement of women out of the home is one of the distinguishing features of modernity. However, in emphasising only one side of the story – exclusion and sequestration, romanticisation and otherness – we miss the equally crucial individualisation process and, further still, the interrelation between the two. This mutually constitutive duality is largely missing from the literature. Either a jubilant story of ‘progress’ is adumbrated, which lacks sufficient understanding of the deleterious consequences of women’s sequestration to the home; or, as is more typical among feminist writings, the story of women’s sequestration elides the simultaneous individualisation process. Alternatively, and more theoretically, there is a valorisation of a female-dominated ‘ethic of care’, and a concomitant rejection of ‘the individual’ as a tenable paradigm of self – a critique that links to several other prominent critiques of liberalism including Romanticism, communitarianism, multiculturalism and postmodernism. While for those who acknowledge both individualisation and sequestration, on the other hand, there is no social theory that examines their interrelationship. That is, we have yet to understand and explore the implications of women’s individualisation in terms of the underlying sexual contract.

This book is pitched directly at this theoretical gap exploring how the social construction of motherhood in the modern west – as specialised, intensive labour performed alone at home – was pivotal to the construction of individual rights, first for men (who left women at home), and then for women (who leave nobody at home). That is, just as modernity produced the ‘institution of motherhood’, it also, and by the same process, created the ‘mother who leaves’ – that is, it produced a shadow to the ‘angel in the house’. Thus, while it is commonly understood that men’s freedom as ‘individuals’ (in public) mandated women’s subjection as wives and mothers (in private), what is less well understood is that women’s freedom as ‘individuals’ also generated gender-specific contradictions, although these contradictions didn’t play out for the majority of women until the late twentieth century.

This point requires further elucidation as it is the central theoretical argument developed here. First, then, once the category of ‘the individual’ was conceived, a corresponding category of the wife and mother emerged as his dialectical counterpart. This was necessary as ‘the individual’ was only ever a partial construction whose ‘private self’ – specifically, whose biases, loves, opinions, traditions, religion, specific family culture, customs and personal attributes – was no longer relevant to his...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Citation
• Half Title
• Fm
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• PART I: Setting the scene
• PART II: Philosophical, historical and theoretical context
• PART III: Empirical research
• PART IV: Conclusion
• Index