including psychoanalysis, have Freud’s theories about women been properly addressed. In the 1970s Kate Millett, the American feminist, accused Freud and his followers of overlooking in their entirety existing social structures and notions of femininity which, rather than biology, might account for women’s social status. In other words, Millet argued that nurture rather than nature might account for gender differences.
From within the therapy movement, psychologists Dorothy Dinnerstein and Nancy Chodorow have both powerfully reinterpreted Freud’s theories on motherhood. In The Mermaid and the Minotaur, published in 1977, Dinnerstein presents the idea that small children develop a rage against their mothers (which is never properly overcome) as the person who alone has the power to grant or withhold what the child desires. Chodorow says it is the girl’s unconscious identification with her mother, while boys see themselves as different and separate, that endlessly reproduces gendered divisions of labour and women’s exclusive responsibility for nurturing children: girls copy their mothers mothering. Both women argue that society and the position of women and mothers will improve only when men take on their share of responsibility for their children.
So, in the first three decades of the century, while Freud was producing his theories, the essential elements which would eventually produce our modern maternal ideology were coming together. The medicalization of motherhood – the result of an increased scientific understanding – removed childcare from the hands of women and placed it in the hands of experts. Soon most babies in Britain would be born in hospital and this, added to the creation of the welfare state in the post-war period, dramatically decreased the infant mortality rate. For the first time in history, parents did not need to fear the death of their children.
Concern for the physical health of children was immediately replaced by new considerations for their mental health and psychological well-being. The psychoanalyst John Bowlby highlighted this concern with his theory of ‘attachment’; in other words, the biological bonds between mother and child urgently required that, in the post-war period, women should return en masse from the world of work to their rightful place, as he saw it, in the home. Between them these men – and with very few exceptions they were all men – created the ideal of the 1950s stay-at-home, full-time mother.
The gurus rose fast in their respective fields, amassing tremendous fame and influence, but one by one their theories have been reconsidered by subsequent generations and either debunked or rethought. Today, no one would dream of leaving a young baby to sleep outside on a cold night, as Truby King once advised. Bowlby’s ideas have been revisited and watered down. In modern times, Marshall Klaus and John Kennell, two Bowlby followers, presented their theory of bonding to a receptive public, only to have their methods criticized and their findings overturned by their peers. Few were unmasked as spectacularly as Bruno Bettelheim, a world-famous psychoanalyst and expert on autism. Bettelheim’s theory that autism, now recognized to have an organic genesis, was caused by extremely brutal treatment at the hands of the children’s mothers gained wide acceptance, despite the protests of the accused women. Bettelheim’s solution was to separate mother and child and allow no contact between them. Only after his death by his own hand in 1990, when an American investigative journalist Richard Pollack (whose own mother had been blamed for his brother’s autism by the doctor) delved into Bettelheim’s background, did the truth emerge.2 Bettelheim had fabricated his credentials including his training as a psychoanalyst, faked research and claimed to have cured children he never even treated. In all, he was a fraud who tormented and vilified mothers, and influenced the way emotionally disturbed children were treated for decades.
Frederick Truby King
Most of the childcare gurus make one unequivocally positive contribution to childcare and with Truby King it was the revival of breastfeeding, which at that time had become thoroughly unfashionable. ‘Breast is best’ was his saying and his achievements, including halving the infant mortality rate in New Zealand, are undoubtedly due to that single premise. Otherwise posterity has not judged Truby King kindly. His approach to childrearing was strict, forceful and unyielding. He bullied, cajoled and threatened mothers whom he appeared to regard as the weak link in the entire process (he once commented in exasperation that if men had the capacity to breastfeed they would have the sense to do what he said) and he advocated for the care of small babies a regime of almost military harshness.
Babies were to be fed only every four hours and at no other time, regardless of how much they cried or however apparent their distress. He also forbade mothers to feed at night at all, urging them to let their babies ‘cry it out’ rather than give in. To do so would have been to spoil the child. The Truby King method also discouraged physical contact between mother and child, including kissing or cuddling which was considered unnecessary as well as unhealthy and highly likely to pass on germs. Playing with babies would only overexcite them and for that reason was frowned upon. Of course, many women broke the rules and hugged or played with their babies only to berate themselves about it afterwards.
A flick through his most famous book, Care and Feeding of Baby, reveals what has become the standard style for babycare books even today: the only two characters are Mother and Baby (fathers have no role except to earn money); baby is always a boy; the family arrangements are nuclear. The prose is classic ‘carrot and stick’. The author uses his professional status to back up his mixture of inducements and warnings. Mothers would achieve peace and perfection if they followed his advice.
Breaking the rules resulted in indiscipline, a ruined child or even death as the eminent paediatrician remarked in speeches which were sometimes little more than rants against the failings of mothers: ‘much wastage of infant life in our midst is due to self-indulgence and shirking of duties.’3 Mothers frustrated Sir Frederick who would have much preferred that the care of infants was entirely taken over by specially trained nurses.
Despite a firm belief in gender roles and the place of women, Truby King did not appear to believe in the idea of maternal instinct. He considered motherhood a calling for which women had to be trained, because left to their own devices they would ruin the lives of their children. The closest he ever came to recognizing any kind of natural emotions was a reference to the additional advantage of promoting bonds between mother and child when breastfeeding. In general he regarded mothers as inadequate, ignorant and lacking in discipline. A mother was all that stood between him and the creation of the perfect child.
When Truby King died in 1938 in New Zealand, his long and distinguished career had earned him international recognition. His ideas lived on until the war years and just beyond; many of today’s fifty-, sixty- and seventy-year-olds were Truby King babies, and many grandmothers still regard silence, solitude and timed feeds as the definition of a good baby.
The aftermath of the Second World War produced a new set of circumstances and a different agenda. Women, too, were ready to give up this gruelling and often heartbreaking regime. By the 1950s, Truby King’s ideas were swept aside as a new era of motherhood rolled in.
John Bowlby
No other theorist had as powerful and as radical an effect on thinking about motherhood as Edward John Mostyn Bowlby who died in 1990 and whose ideas on ‘attachment’ and the effects of maternal deprivation form the cornerstone of modern maternal ideology. Unlike the other great ‘gurus’, Bowlby was not so much a popular writer as an academic and theorist. Nevertheless, his first book. Child Care and the Growth of Love, sold hundreds of thousands of copies around the world. It was a seminal work.
Bowlby came from somewhat elevated beginnings. He was distinctly upper class, the heir to a baronet who was raised by a nanny, followed by boarding-school and Cambridge. As with Freud, there has been speculation over whether it was Bowlby’s early experience of being raised
