that they had more in mind than the happiness of infants when they embraced Bowlby’s theories so readily. But Bowlby probably also imagined he was elevating the status of mothers by bestowing on their task so much importance, rather than simply driving women back into the home. It is easy to see how his theories could have been a soft sell to plenty of women. Many had witnessed or experienced the wartime shattering of their families. They wanted time to re-establish relationships with their children and their husbands. These were the babyboom years when not only cities and economies were being rebuilt, but families too. Postwar prosperity in Britain, helped by billions of dollars of Marshall Plan aid from America, meant that even blue-collar workers could earn enough to keep a wife and family.
It is illuminating to see how certain of Bowlby’s recommendations were taken up, while others were ignored. Bowlby was opposed to mothers with young children going out to work at all. Previously most nurseries were perfectly prepared to accept two-year-olds, but soon, thanks to Bowlby’s warnings, they would only take children from the age of five. Bowlby, however, did recognize that most women who worked did so because they needed the money. By way of compensation he suggested a wage for housework to be paid by the government to mothers, to encourage and enable them to stay at home – a proposal that never made it to the statute books.
The train Bowlby set on track gathered pace in the years that followed. In time, researchers began to focus not just on the mother’s relationship with her child, but even on her competence. Selma Fraiberg, a Bowlby devotee, invented a method for measuring a child’s attachment to the mother and declared that children whose mothers were not sufficiently skilled or attentive were poorly attached and would grow up insecure. In her immensely popular 1959 book The Magic Years, she argued that nothing less than twenty-four-hour devotion would do, and that being cared for by persons other than their mother was actually harmful to infants. Notably, her calls for financial support for mothers to stay at home also went unheeded.
So the 1950s mother was actually Pygmalion mum, the result of one man’s vision of the perfect mother. For a mixture of social and economic reasons, Bowlby’s ideal of the loving, selfless, stay-at-home supermum became, and still is to this day, the established view of what constitutes ‘normal’ mothering. Motherhood became transformed into a rigid, rule-laden process, governed by dogma produced by so-called experts whose views were always framed in terms of what was best for baby, placing them beyond debate. By being so inflexible and so extreme in the application of ideas which had started as guiding principles, the new professionals put the interests of mothers and their children into conflict.
Typically, far more attention is paid to a controversial or radical new theory than to the subsequent critiques. If Bowlby and his followers were accepted uncritically by the general public, within his profession his views prompted no small degree of controversy. Many other critics came from fields outside psychoanalysis such as ethology, sociology and anthropology. One of his critics was the world-famous anthropologist Margaret Mead who had spent years chronicling childrearing methods in Samoa, Bali and the United States and elsewhere. She dismissed his ideas on the need for exclusive mothering and his ideas about attachment. Others pointed to aspects of Bowlby’s research, in particular the methods he used, which would never meet the standards required of scientific studies today. He rarely, for example, used control groups to measure his findings or looked for other possible causes.
Perhaps the main and most constant criticism is that while Bowlby claimed to be making a study of the effects of ‘maternal deprivation’ on children, what he was really looking at were the results of institutionalization. The children whose case histories make up the bulk of his work were deprived of everything, including ordinary human contact and any kind of affection. They were placed in huge orphanages and had dozens of carers who often provided poor care. Many had suffered some kind of distress in the form of family conflict, or wartime loss, others had been abused. Simply put, these were deeply unhappy children.
The British psychiatrist Michael Rutter has significantly revised and rethought many of Bowlby’s ideas. In his 1972 book Maternal Deprivation Reassessed, he shows that some of the symptoms of ‘maternal deprivation’ which Bowlby described, in particular stunted growth and poor speech development, had far more mundane roots. The children did not grow properly because of their meagre, vitamin-depleted orphanage diet, not because they lacked a mother’s love. Similarly, they had poor vocabularies because of their environment, not their parenting. Indeed, children in large families often display the same problem. As for maternal deprivation creating ‘affectionless psychopaths’, Rutter showed that children whose mothers had died did not become delinquents. The root causes of criminal behaviour in children lay elsewhere.
The popular appeal of Bowlby’s theory of uninterrupted mothering lay in the fact that it seemed to explain something mothers already recognized – that children can be clingy. Bowlby took that premise several stages further and insisted that separating mother and child was actually wrong because it was damaging. Many psychologists now agree, however, that separation per se does not equal damage, even if the child cries when the mother leaves and even if the mother misses her child when she is apart from her. A child is not harmed by his mother working or by being left with other carers.
In his assessment of all the research since Bowlby, Rutter argued that attachment was neither exclusive nor irreversible, but rather a child could be attached to more people than just the mother and attachments could strengthen or weaken during the child’s life. As far as the mother was concerned, it was not the quantity of time but rather the intensity of interaction during the time she spent with her child: ‘mothers who play with their child and give him a great deal of attention have a more strongly attached child than those who interact with the child only when giving him routine care.’9 Rutter still talked in terms of the duties of mothers as opposed to fathers and so did little to shift the weight of responsibility, although he did lessen the load slightly. One unanticipated result was to start the 1980s vogue for ‘quality time’ with which modern working mothers tried to assuage their feelings of guilt towards their children.
Neither Bowlby nor his supporters paused to consider the individual characteristics or needs of mothers. It was as though they regarded women as coming from some kind of mould like Stepford Wives, willing and able to accept all the many requirements of their role. Perhaps they believed that ‘instinct’ would somehow subsume every other personality trait and mothers would express towards their children only a bland, ideal type of love. But it seems evident that an aggressive, competitive woman will make a very different kind of mother from a bookish, withdrawn one; an exuberant, cheerful woman will approach her role unlike an anxious woman; a woman whose interests consist solely of classical music and intellectual discourse will doubtless find less pleasure in the company of a three-year-old than someone who prefers board games and walking in the park. When it comes to ideas about motherhood, common sense can sometimes appear to go out of the window. Women have their share of all mankind’s imperfections, and yet to this day we expect to create perfect mothers out of imperfect humans.
Nancy Chodorow, a powerful psychoanalytical thinker, has taken the debate about attachment one stage further by saying that forcing mothers to spend all their time with their children, and to carry the entire emotional burden, guarantees the failure of the very relationship which Bowlby was trying to promote. Ann Dally, a psychiatrist, also points out that although mothers staying at home with their children remains a popular ideal, ‘there is no scientific evidence to justify it on psychological grounds and…if one wanted to look for evidence one might even come up with the suspicion that the era of unbroken and exclusive maternal care has produced the most neurotic, disjointed, alienated and drug-addicted generation ever known.’10
What’s more, the ideology of motherhood which Bowlby helped to create is almost entirely middle class in its aspirations, as well as being culturally specific. Although exclusive maternal care is often deemed to be natural – proponents of the idea usually point to baby monkeys
