nanny, that established Bowlby’s later fascination with mother-child relationships.
The 1940s were a critical period for Europe and for Bowlby, and most of his ideas were the fruit of this thoroughly atypical period. The Second World War bore witness to the large-scale evacuation of children from the cities to the relative safety of the countryside and sometimes abroad to other countries, such as Canada. Children were separated from their families for months, even years, often boarded with strangers and lived unfamiliar lives.
War changed the lives of women. In the previous decades women’s work outside the home had been declining steadily, but conscription and the call to arms reversed the trend sharply. Women staffed the munitions factories, went to the countryside to work the fields and bring in the harvests, volunteered as nurses, raised funds for the war effort and joined the Wrens. For the first (and last) time in the history of the country, the government both condoned women working outside the home and provided extensive, state-funded nursery and daycare so that they could do so.
Britain and the world had undergone massive social shifts, the long-term effects of which remained unclear. Six years of fighting a war had resulted in population shifts and decimated communities in the countryside and the city. Eventually, terraced homes, with their narrow streets and facing backyards, would be pulled down and replaced by modern tower blocks and prefabs. While that was still to come, the social effects were already felt, particularly by mothers who lost their support networks of kin and neighbours in one fell swoop. Women from the upper classes no longer had servants to administer to their children’s needs and for the first time became wholly responsible for their own offspring.
This is the context within which Bowlby produced his studies of institutionalized childcare and his twin theories of the instinctual bond between mother and child which should never be broken, and the effect upon children if the bond is broken.
Bowlby had been following with interest the work of Rene Spitz who had made a study of institutionalized babies. Spitz’s findings then mirror the situation documented in state orphanages in China in the 1990s: children deprived of human contact and isolated for long periods will fail to thrive, rocking themselves back and forth, hitting their heads repeatedly against the sides of their cot, or staring in dull passivity for hours on end. Bowlby carried out his own study of forty-four child thieves, noting that seventeen of them had been separated from their mothers for a period as infants. Struck by this fact he ascribed their later problems to this single event, famously writing: ‘changes of mother-figure can have very destructive effects in producing the development of an affectionless psychopathic character given to persistent juvenile conduct.’4
In 1950 the World Health Organization commissioned a study from Bowlby on children orphaned or separated from their parents as a result of the war in France, the Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland. The report, which was published in 1951, immediately caused an international sensation. In its pages Bowlby condemned the cruelty of all institutional care, arguing that children needed and were entitled to the love and care of a mother. Anything less amounted to ‘maternal deprivation’, the effects of which would be seared on the child’s psyche eternally and irrevocably.
Bowlby desperately wanted to close down or at least reform the system of large orphanages which were incapable of meeting the needs of individual children. In this he succeeded and he can be thanked for current social welfare policies which try to place a child with foster parents or in a family environment instead of in children’s homes. But for women, for mothers, Bowlby’s views, his high ideals and exacting standards as well as the way his work has since been interpreted, spelled disaster.
In Child Care and the Growth of Love, Bowlby declares that the mental health of a child absolutely requires ‘a warm, intimate, and continuous relationship with his mother…in which both find satisfaction and enjoyment’.5 No small order by anyone’s standards, but that is the very least of it. He continues: ‘we must recognise that leaving any child of under three years of age is a major operation only to be undertaken for sufficient and good reason.’6
In Bowlby’s terms, not only should a mother be her child’s constant companion, but she should find her fulfilment in the role, too. If she fails to do so, the whole exercise is useless. ‘The mother needs to feel an expansion of her own personality in the personality of the child’ – note needs to feel. ‘The provision of mothering’, he argued, ‘cannot be considered in terms of hours per day, but only in terms of the enjoyment of each other’s company which mother and child obtain.’ Any woman who hesitated received admonishment in the very next paragraph. ‘The provision of constant attention day and night, seven days a week and 365 days in the year, is possible only for a woman who derives profound satisfaction from seeing her child grow from babyhood, through the many phases of childhood, to become an independent man or woman, and knows it is her care which has made this possible.’7 Of course, there weren’t, and aren’t, many women who would have dared to declare themselves anything less than absolutely committed to the healthy progress of their children.
Bowlby elaborated all kinds of emotional, psychological and character disorders which could result from maternal deprivation, from the creation of full-blown psychopaths to adults unable to function properly in their own relationships. Deprivation had many causes, including a child’s stay in hospital. Ignoring a crying child counted as partial deprivation, this last much to the consternation of a generation of women who had followed the diktats of Truby King with their own children.
All the attention mothers were required to lavish upon their children facilitated their proper ‘attachment’ to each other. Bowlby was an early fan of ethology and from his readings on the behaviour of birds and monkeys, specifically ideas about imprinting (the way newborn animals automatically follow their mother), he concluded that an infant’s attachment to its mother was both natural and instinctive.
Fathers, it will be no surprise to hear, once again had no significant role, save as earners. By placing so much emphasis on mothers and arguing that attachment was instinctive and natural, Bowlby left little for fathers who have struggled to find a place in their children’s lives ever since. Bowlby himself was a father of four who, by all accounts, left the care of his children entirely up to his wife Ursula.
Bowlby’s theories were seized upon and his conclusions, based on extreme situations, were glibly applied to the everyday. It is clear, too, that Bowlby himself, in his zeal, overstated his case. An immediate consequence was panic among women terrified they had already damaged children – an anxiety he was obliged to quell by softening his message slightly in later writings.
Another far more serious consequence was Bowlby’s success in achieving the closure of not only the orphanages he loathed, but the vast proportion of nurseries and daycare centres which had opened up, with government approval and funding, during the war. In 1944 there were 1,559 nurseries in Britain catering to tens of thousands of children, but after the war the nurseries became an expensive wartime legacy for the government, which was also under pressure to provide jobs for thousands of returned soldiers. In 1951, in response to Bowlby’s commissioned report, a WHO report claimed that nurseries and daycare ‘cause permanent damage to the emotional health of a generation’.8 Bowlby’s findings swiftly became official policy. By the early 1950s virtually all the wartime nurseries had gone. It became accepted wisdom among health professionals, social workers and teachers that working mothers ran the risk of damaging their children.
It has been suggested by some historians and writers that more than a whiff of conspiracy surrounds what appears to be the remarkably fortuitous timing of mutually expedient concerns. From the point of view
