As the heart rolled on the ground
It gave forth a plaintive sound And it spoke, in accents mild: ‘Did you hurt yourself, my child?’16
Not the kind of sentiment inspired by Christopher Hibbert’s story of Lady Abergavenny, one imagines.
Of course, this was a deeply hypocritical period. Upper-class women still left most of the physical care of their children to paid servants. Men revelled in uxoriousness and treated women (of their own class and race) like delicate vessels while satisfying their more earthly needs with women from the lower orders. It is extremely important to remember that the saintliness of motherhood was only accorded to women of a certain class. In England, although the crimes of Jack the Ripper (thought by many to be a nobleman) dominate our memory of the period, many working-class women on their way home at night were kicked to death by gangs of men in one of the vilest expressions of the misogyny of the culture of that period. In America the glorious days of the antebellum bore witness to the savage treatment of black women who worked in the cane fields up until the onset of labour pains, gave birth to their masters’ bastard offspring only to have them taken away. Sojourner Truth, the abolitionist and feminist who was born a slave, saw her own thirteen children sold into slavery. The contrast in the experience of womanhood from the perspectives of black and white is the theme of her most famous speech, in which she asks the question ‘ar’n’t I a woman?’
The cult of the ‘good mother’ depended (and still does) on money, and on a male wage that was sufficient to support a wife and children, which was (and is) frequently not the case. The many women who continued to work during the Industrial Revolution found themselves caught in the trap, now so familiar to working women, of trying to match the requirements of work and motherhood. Many tried to limit their families or to stop having children altogether because pregnancy posed such a threat to the family’s income and survival. Accampo’s studies of specific communities during the period show that, among the poor, the rates of abortion and infanticide soared. Children of the poorer classes were sent out to work as soon as possible and usually were ruthlessly exploited, as described in the work of Dickens, Wordsworth and William Blake, author of ‘The Chimney Sweep’.
Finally, the motherhood mantle de-sexed women. If Queen Victoria refused to believe that sex between two women was a possibility (and so refused to outlaw what did not exist), Victorian men simply could not tolerate the idea of mothers, perhaps even their own mothers, having sex. Whereas there are depictions of women of earlier generations enjoying hearty sexual appetites – from Chaucer’s tales through to James Boswell’s accounts of his sexual exploits with women of all classes in London in the 1760s – women were now stripped of their sexuality. From henceforth only men were to have a sex drive. Women were given maternal instinct instead, and in no time at all Sigmund Freud would give that view all the authority of science.
Scientific motherhood
It is no surprise to discover that, even among those women who benefited from all the changes so far, it took very little time for a downside to the new status of mothers to appear. The impetus was provided by science, which served to provide apparently objective justification for the social repression that was already taking place.
Childbirth was gradually being taken out of the hands of female midwives and delivered into the hands of male physicians, who previously had regarded such work as beneath their dignity. Now there was money to be made in attending births, particularly where they involved middle-class women, and the invention of forceps brought wealth to the men who devised them. At first, though, doctors killed more women and children than they saved by passing on diseases from their other patients. They also used unsterilized equipment and caused the horrific deaths of many women from puerperal fever, or childbed as it was then called. Gradually, with the discovery of bacteria, the development of inoculations and the introduction of standards of hygiene, doctors secured and held steady their power in the birth chamber.
At the same time, in the Western European countries, an understanding of demography led to a parallel fear that nations were effectively disappearing; an idea, as we have already seen, promoted by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Philosophes who blamed an apparently declining French population on bad mothers. Census-taking had started in the eighteenth century and a growing awareness of economics linked population size with national wealth.17 Governments began to embrace pronatalist politics and to elevate women’s calling as mothers. In Britain, horror at the waste of infant life prompted the opening of hospitals and homes for foundlings, which were soon inundated. By the 1900s women who practised birth control were accused of racial suicide, but only women of a certain class, of course, for poor people were no more encouraged to procreate then than they are now.
Alongside these new ideas came a trend which has proved to have enormous longevity – that of publishing manuals for women telling them how to be better mothers.18 Most of the earliest pamphlets were reasonably well-intentioned, aiming to bring to an end some of the most misguided childrearing practices and to save infant lives, but even Rousseau, whose stated aim with Emile was to improve the lives of children, couldn’t help throwing in a few side swipes at mothers and women in general. He believed women needed an education only to make them better wives and mothers, which he regarded as their true calling, and not to encourage them in intellectual pursuits in which they persisted. To prove his thesis he pointed to the natural tendency among little girls to play the coquette and to display a fondness for dolls; an observation later rubbished by Mary Wollstonecraft who commented that little girls, who could not share in their brothers’ education and with nothing else to do, would obviously entertain themselves in whatever way they could and with whatever they were given.19
Voices of reason were few and far between, however, as men lined up to give their tuppence-worth on the proper role of women, couched in the guise of maternal advice. By the nineteenth century, badgering mothers had become a popular sport. William Buchan, a Yorkshireman and supporter of Rousseau, published several immensely successful books: Domestic Medicine (1769), Offices and Duties of Mothers (1800), and Advice to Mothers (1803). Domestic Medicine was enormously popular, reprinted many times and published throughout Europe and in America. In it he warned women of the importance of remaining calm and ladylike at all times, and gave the instance of a woman who flew into a rage while pregnant and gave birth to a child with its bowels burst open.20 Andrew Combe’s Treatise on the Physiological and Moral Management of Infancy issued the same advice on the importance of emotional tranquillity to Victorian women, whose children’s physical and mental health he warned would be ‘a legible transcript of the mother’s condition and feelings during pregnancy’.21 And the famous Beeton’s Housewife’s Treasury cautioned women that ill-temper would sour their milk, turning babies’ food into ‘draughts of poison’.22
From that day to this, advice to mothers and mothers-to-be has proliferated, but the warning tone remains the same from Donald Winnicott in the 1950s to Penelope Leach in the 1980s. Indeed, many of the same old chestnuts – for example, putting pressure on women to breastfeed, the idea that unborn children react to their mothers’ emotions, or that motherhood is women’s true calling above and beyond other roles – appear time and time again.
Conclusion
So, in brief, that is how motherhood came to be as it is today: one of the most natural human states and yet one of the most policed; the sole responsibility of women; not
