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Childbirth and the âPositionâ of Women
... a house without a child is like a garden without a flower, or like a cage without a bird. The love of offspring is one of the strongest instincts implanted in women; there is nothing that will compensate for the want of children. A wife yearns for them; they are as necessary to her happiness as the food she eats and the air she breathes. [A doctor, 19111]
Artificial reproduction is not inherently dehumanizing. At the very least, development of the option should make possible an honest re-examination of the ancient value of motherhood ... until the decision not to have children or to have them by artificial means is as legitimate as traditional childbearing, women are as good as forced into their female roles. [A feminist, 19722]
The Institution of Motherhood
Throughout human society childbirth is never just one event in a womanâs life. It is always momentous, but in different ways. For culture, the different cultures that human beings have invented as ways of living, defines the meaning of birth, a biological act.
In colonial America, women had twelve or more children; unmarried women in their mid-twenties were economically useless old maids. In Alor, an Indonesian Island, in the 1940s, womenâs chief role was agricultural work, and men liked babies more than women did. Victorian moralists saw a fully domesticated wife and mother as a sign of a manâs social status and a large family as proof of his male power. Yahgan women of Tierra del Fuego go back to work one day or less after having a baby. In England, a woman is paid by the state not to work until her baby is seven weeks old. Jarara women of South America give birth in a domestic passageway or shelter in front of everyone, including small children. In parts of the United States in the 1930s it was against the law for mothers who gave birth in hospital to have their babies with them. Eighty-two per cent of women in a sample of seventy-six cultures gave birth standing up or sitting or squatting, the rest lying down. In Norway in 1974, 90 per cent of pregnant women received prenatal medical care; in Nicaragua 16 per cent did. Among some South American tribes it is regarded as an essential part of womanhood to give birth unaided: death is better than the shame of medical assistance. In contemporary Britain it is illegal to give birth without calling medical help.3
Children are important; children are not important. Fertility is admired; barrenness commands respect. Women are put on this earth to have children; women are the breadwinners and babies are a nuisance. Pregnancy means special treatment; pregnancy means work in a field or factory regardless. Birth is a time of medical danger or supernatural mystery; birth is a normal, public act. Motherhood is sacred; women are just people. A womanâs achievement is twelve babies or twelve fields cared for, twelve or more years in a factory or office, twelve years of full-time housewifery.
The meaning of childbirth is interlocked with a societyâs attitudes towards women. Both reflect its economic system. Capitalism, by concentrating production in places other than the home, altered the status of women: mothers working became The Working Mother. The production of capital requires the production of workers: thus womenâs role becomes not to produce but to reproduce: âthe mother employed out of the home presents a national problem of the first importanceâ.4
One does not have to be a Marxist to understand these connections between motherhood and the economy. And it is important to appreciate the history of motherhood as it appears to us in industrialised society today, because our sort of motherhood is unique in history:
The mother gave birth to the child, didnât she? She nurses it, doesnât she? She is, obviously, we conclude, solely responsible for it. Even when she can get help, time off, reprieve, relief for several hours during the day, the responsibility remains hers. During any absence she remains on call. At the theatre, at work, at the party, her ear is always half-cocked for the telephone message to come: the child is ill. If anything happens to the child it is she, not the father, who will be held responsible.
The role of the mother as we define it is almost unique. Motherhood as we institutionalise it is a product of affluence. Few if any societies have ever been able to spare adult, able-bodied women from the work force and specialise them so exclusively for the care of a small brood of children for almost a lifetime.5
The institution of motherhood is not identical with bearing and caring for children. ... Institutionalised motherhood demands of women maternal âinstinctâ rather than intelligence, selflessness rather than self-realisation, relation to others rather than the creation of self.6
The institution of motherhood is the way women become mothers in industrialised society today. And what happens to women when they become mothers reflects what has already happened to them as they became women. Like childbirth, femininity and masculinity follow different cultural patterns: being a woman means something different in fifteenth-century England, nineteenth-century Norway, twentieth-century Brazil. The industrialised world today insists on certain sex differences while having moved towards an idea of sex equality. Equality and difference are compatible, since equality in this ideology does not mean âsamenessâ. It means that women should be allowed to do the same jobs for the same pay as men, that girls should be educated as much as (though differently from?) boys, that a woman should become prime minister if that is what she and the country want. Equality applies to the world outside the home. Inside it, difference flourishes (thereby, of course, rendering external equality more of a mere vision)
In the maternity hospital where the women interviewed for this book had their babies two different labels are written out for girl and boy babies: pink and blue. (A reactionary development? Ten years ago all babies had white labels.) On the whole, little girls acquire particular ideas about their future roles that differ from those communicated to little boys. Two ideas about women that are still endemic in our minds are perhaps the key ones: the idea that women are not at the centre of their own lives, and the curiously impressive image of women as always waiting for someone or something: in shopping queues, in antenatal clinics, in bed, for men to come home, at the school gates or by the playground swing, for birth or the growing up of children, in hope of love or freedom or re-employment, waiting for the future to liberate or burden them and the past to catch up with them.
The problem is that motherhood is not a passive role. Brought up to regard herself as dependent on other people, a mother discovers that her children are dependent on her. She has responsibilities that far outweigh those she held as a secretary or a machinist or a doctor (for even these responsibilities are limited and doctors do not work every hour of every day every year). She has to make decisions and choices, decide what is best for her child nutritionally, aesthetically, educationally, physically, psychologically, emotionally. Mothers must be strong. In one study of women having a first child, the women who âadjustedâ best were those who were least âfeminineâ.7 Contentment as a mother was more likely among the active and independent women, who more often experienced childbirth as a positive achievement. The greatest difficulties were encountered by âfeminineâ women who had more rigid ideas about what mothers ought to be like (perfect and selfless). Trying to live up to this ideal is difficult enough, but being a perfect mother and wife and housewife all at the same time and without help â this is an ordeal. Again âidealâ motherhood is perhaps achieved only where people are not typical: a study of mothers in six cultures found that mothers were most ânurturantâ where they had most help with child care (from anyone â older children, men, other women).8
First-time motherhood calls for massive changes. Thirty years ago women gave up their jobs on marriage: now the occasion is impending motherhood. The return to work is slow: 20 per cent four years after, 52 per cent ten years after (and it is likely to be a different sort of work chosen for its compatibility with maternal duties). Becoming a mother is more than a change of job: it involves reorganising oneâs entire personality. For there is a chasm between mothersâ needs and childrenâs needs that mothers have to bridge. In a society where children are reared in small, quite isolated families, babies have an absolute need to be mothered (who else will do it?) but mothers, however âmaternalâ they are, only have a relative need for their babies. They have a past identity and a future one in which real children do not feature. In the past, when families included grandparents, lots of siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, etc., these other people filled the gap. Now they no longer do so, the question is: of what are women deprived by their maternity?
Surveying the mental health of women, research workers in London have found that one in three women have definite psychiatric symptoms of depression and that the likelihood of becoming depressed is crucially related to motherhood.9 To Freud and those who follow him, motherhood is an escape route from the handicap of female inferiority: the wish for a child replaces the wish for a penis and is the route to maturation for a woman. Womanhood equals motherhood, baby equals redemption, so that women who choose to spend their adult lives doing something else are neurotic (or masculine). Yet, on the contrary, motherhood seems more often to lead to a sense of lowered (âdepressedâ) self-worth: children take the centre of the stage; the mother is merely a supporting player. Her role is static, theirs dynamic: having no time to herself, her self is quiescent. To talk of âadjustmentâ in this context seems wrong. What is the psychological status of those who âadjustâ, and what kind of strains are felt by those who fail to? In any case, as the sociologist Alice Rossi has pointed out, we have an apparatus of ideas about motherhood, but we know far too little about what âgoodâ mothering is â from either the childâs or the motherâs point of view.10
Most women now have their first babies in their early twenties, so that well before the age of 30 the biological tie of pregnancy and breastfeeding is over. But the period spent having and caring for young children is the time when men choose careers and advance in them; by their mid-thirties, parenthood has firmly wedged the sexes apart. If mothers want careers outside the home they are at a disadvantage. Responsibility for children is the key factor in the non-employment of female graduates, and it lies behind the phenomenon of part-time work (our generationâs panacea for the problems of womenâs role). In Britain, more than a third of all employed women work part-time. Women under capitalism count as a reserve labour force. The double standard continues to apply: men are the breadwinners, women the housewives; the nuclear family supports the nation. When it suits the nation, women are encouraged to work and it is made easier for them to do so. During the Second World War in Britain for example, day nursery provision increased enormously as three and three-quarter million more women joined the labour force.11 But after the war, reaction set in. In the 1950s maternal employment became once again a thorn in the national conscience, a symbol of womenâs inhumanity, a sign of failing morality and decaying family life.
âThe familyâ, a pejorative term, is part of a conservative ideology. We all (or most of us) think about couples getting married and having children and staying together. Some do. But on the other hand, divorces are now in some countries approaching 50 per cent of marriages; more than half of all households are not of the nuclear family kind; many âfamiliesâ are women and children on their own. âThe familyâ is not always kind to men, women or children. Children are battered psychologically or physically; so are women. Men die earlier than women, of an impressive list of stress diseases.
A baby makes a family. A home is not a home without children. The drive to parenthood is felt, but not understood. Of course the negative side is countered by a positive side; some of the visions materialise: babies do smile and smell sweet, children are loving and rewarding, the shaft of sunlight does catch the heads of shining hair, the glowing skin, the sturdy limbs and healthy souls. Biological parenthood is unique among all human experiences. To hold the child you grew as part of yourself seems a miracle. And the wonder recurs throughout the years, for it appears that in this most natural activity of reproduction human beings achieve something supernatural: they transcend their simple humanity.
Many children are now the exception and not the rule, but more people become parents some time in their lives:
Perhaps the most significant aspect of current reproductive behaviour in industrial societies, and yet one that is so taken for granted that it is rarely mentioned, is the fact that parenthood remains almost universal. Reproduction is statistically normative for the majority of adults within these societies. Widespread parenthood has remained. ... In England and Wales approximately 80% of adults become parents.12
The figure is hard to arrive at, for official statistics so take the fact of parenthood for granted that they provide no basis on which to calculate it.
Altered patterns of reproduction mean that more babies are first babies. In England and Wales in 1976, 42 per cent of all legitimate births in first marriages were first births, and in the United States in 1975 the figure was the same.13 If more women experience motherhood, each mother has a narrower experience of childbirth. First childbirth has become more significant: in the first place because it is not the first of many, but the first of two or three (even the only one). Meaning and satisfaction in childbirth are more important. Secondly, the shadow of death no longer hangs over birth the way it did a century ago. Today in England and Wales for every ten thousand live births, one mother and 160 infants die; a hundred years ago the figures were 48 mothers and 1560 infants.14 Women expect every pregnancy to produce a healthy baby. Embarking on a first pregnancy seems like a safe course, the horizon of that first healthy cry easy to navigate, and the entire journey to desired family size seems well charted and free of the hazards that beset past generations of mothers.
Medicalisation
Much of the improvement in maternal and perinatal/infant mortality rates reflects a more healthy population. People eat better and live more hygienically than they used to, and, since women have fewer children, high-risk groups of older mothers having their fourth or later child have been reduced in size. Pr...
