the way that child has come out.
An ideal father to me would be willing to step in and handle the everyday stuff, knowing what to do without being told. Is there a conflict in saying the mother is the primary parent and expecting men to take responsibility? I suppose so. I like things done the way I want them done, and I suppose that can have a chilling effect on my husband when he tries to do things, for fear of being criticized. The best way would be for women to be able to let them do things their way, but it’s frustrating. If he does the lunches, he doesn’t put the right things in, he puts yoghurt in they don’t like and it ends up coming back.
An ideal mother for me stays at home with the children. Deep down I do think it’s the man’s responsibility to earn the money. Ideally a mother would be at home – always. She bakes cakes, she picks them up at the end of school, not later. She has two or three children, she has her first in her twenties and, yes, she is married. She’s my mother, actually.
Why am I not like that? Well, I work because I always want to have the ability to earn money. My background and skills are such that now I could always find work if I needed to. I also have much more to give than just being a mother. I spent a lot of time becoming educated and becoming prepared to be a person who made a difference in the world and I’m really uncomfortable about giving that up. I define myself a lot by what I am in the community. I am a role model and a leader in some respects, I sit on a lot of boards, for example. This is a difficult world and I feel it’s my obligation to do what I can. I try to strike a balance. When I’m at home I try to live up to my image of the stay-at-home mum. I bake, I make my children’s birthday cakes. I never talk about work. I’m as calm and housewifey as I can be. I cook dinner every night. Some people can’t believe I do that. So that’s the way my boys see me when I’m at home. I’m never on the phone doing business. And that makes me feel better. I try to do that because I want them to remember mum that way.
Yes, there is a tremendous emotional cost to me in being a working person and trying to be a calm, patient wife and mother as well. It’s very hard. It was worse when I was working as a lawyer. That was an even bigger shift. There’s another cost, in that – I’m sure you’ve heard this from other people – I never have any time for myself.
I have thought so hard about what I would tell a daughter, if I had one. It’s difficult because you always want your daughter to be independent and self-reliant if she needed to be. On the other hand I would want her to be a loving wife and mother, and create the kind of home for a family that I have done. And it’s very hard to do. I’m not sure what to say. I think I’d advise her to think about her goals very hard. My life is a paradox…I know that.
By the start of the twentieth century, the major historical and economic structures were in place to create the background for the modern motherhood myth. Changes to work which swept in with the Industrial Revolution had left women holding the baby at home while men went to work in the new factories, mines and metal works. At the same time a burgeoning fascination with scientific discovery had begun to exercise people’s minds. In 1861 Pasteur had published his theory of germs and the spread of disease was by now beginning to be clearly understood and controlled. In only twenty years’ time Alexander Fleming would notice changes taking place in his petri dish and give the world penicillin. These developments had a radical effect upon childcare and the raising of children. If romance had characterized motherhood in the previous century, then the twentieth century gave rise to the scientific mother.
Childcare became the subject of study, analysis and theory and was taken out of the hands of mothers and placed in the hands of men, who henceforth would tell mothers what to do. These were the childcare gurus. Suddenly babies became a matter for the experts. Popular writers emerged such as Frederic Truby (later Sir Truby) King and D. W. Winnicott in Britain; and in America John B. Watson and Luther Emmett Holt. Between them they moulded modern motherhood in their own vision, dictating every detail from the emotional relationship between mother and child down to mastering the fine art of burping or winding (a practice which, incidentally, is virtually unknown in many parts of the world).
The legacy of the first gurus lives on both in ideas about what constitutes good mothering as well as in the continued reliance of Western societies on the words of experts and their personal philosophies. Winnicott’s lectures broadcast on the BBC were replaced by Dr Spock’s Common Sense Book of Baby and Childcare with which generations of babyboomers were reared. When they became parents, they turned to Penelope Leach’s Baby and Child. It’s a rare woman today who embarks upon motherhood without a manual in her hand, like an instruction leaflet for a new computer. Despite the fact that every mother knows that the theory and practice of raising children frequently do not coincide, there are few who dare to go it alone. The experts create and feed their own market by issuing dire and prophetic warnings of the untold damage inflicted upon children by uninformed parents who may think they know what is good for their own child. Of all the many ways guilt has been induced and exploited in mothers, the childcare gurus must rank high on the list.
A famous author, who is the mother of several children, once told me that she had each of her children in a different decade and raised each on the popular method of the moment, with a different and conflicting set of rules every time. If after every birth, as she embarked on motherhood anew, she had believed the words of the fashionable, new expert she would only have been able to conclude that she had utterly ruined her preceding child. Truby King, who influenced many generations of mothers up until the Second World War, warned mothers against touching, petting or ‘spoiling’ their children and decreed a four-hour feeding schedule. A Truby King baby would have had a very different infancy from that of his younger sibling born in 1950 and brought up with Spock’s enthusiasm for displays of maternal affection and feeding on demand. From early on, experts emerged from various and often competing fields whose disciplines placed the emphasis on different aspects of the child’s well-being. Some were doctors whose main concern was with exercise and nutrition; others were ethologists keen to apply their observations on animal behaviour to human subjects; still others were psychologists and psychoanalysts who were far more interested in the dynamics of the relationship between mother and child.
Early in the twentieth century, Sigmund Freud was expanding his theories of human behaviour and the development of personality. The resulting discipline of psychoanalysis has, at its core, the belief that early experiences in childhood set in place events and behaviour in later life. It is this idea, which was built upon and developed by Freud’s disciples, that is central to the tendency, which later became endemic, to blame mothers for their children’s misfortunes and to scrutinize the relationship between mothers and their children.
Freud, however, was actually far more interested in the relationship between boys and their fathers and the resolution of the Oedipal conflict which was the foundation stone of all his theories. He did not actually delve deeply into the personality or behaviour of the mother, nor was he concerned with specific childrearing practices, believing instead that babies are driven by powerful instincts and love their mothers who are the people who feed, warm and comfort them. But he did explicitly point to the direction in which psychoanalysis was to progress by describing the mother-child relationship as ‘unique, without parallel, established unalterably for a whole lifetime as the first and strongest love-object and the prototype of all later love-relations – for both sexes’.
Freud’s sexism is notorious and has been the subject of criticism both from within psychoanalysis as well as outside. He saw women as castrated men and wrote of their ‘sense of inferiority’ and of the blame young girls place on their mothers for their lack of a penis which has left them for ever ‘insufficiently equipped’.1 Motherhood was women’s salvation and compensation for being without a penis, particularly if they bore a male child equipped with the prized piece of anatomy.
Only in relatively
