target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#litres_trial_promo">6 The book is subtitled ‘The Untold Story of Child Abuse’ and recounts many of the horrors to which infants have been subjected in the name of care. From birth babies were wrapped tightly in swaddling clothes and often hung up on a peg. The rationale was that it kept babies from harming themselves and made their limbs grow straight, but in reality de Mause argues it had far more to do with keeping them out of the way altogether. Red in the face from the pressure, overheated and steeped in their own urine and faeces, babies were left in this way for days. Then there was the popular method of getting babies to sleep by ‘rocking’ them, in actual fact shaking them literally insensible in the name of peace. It goes almost without saying that children (‘the Devil’s seed’) were frequently beaten and bullied, when they weren’t left alone to cry for hours or burn themselves in the open hearth while their peasant mothers worked in the fields.
The death of a child was a commonplace event and merited little in the way of mourning or even grief. Parents, including mothers, rarely bothered to attend the funeral if there was one. Infants were regarded as eminently replaceable. Michel de Montaigne, writing between 1580 and 1590, famously observed: ‘I lost two or three children during their stay with the wet nurse – not without regret, mind you, but without great vexation.’7 Madame de Sévigné, a French noblewoman who left numerous letters and other records, remarks in passing of a friend’s distress upon hearing the news of her daughter’s death: ‘She is very much upset and says that she will never again have one so pretty.’8 An observation which neatly captures the pitiful extent of a child’s worth in the eyes of even her own mother.
With the infant mortality rate much higher than it is today, it is perhaps not all that surprising that both mothers and fathers took such news in their stride. Edward Shorter, though, concludes that their behaviour had less to do with stoicism than with indifference. Women frequently were unable to remember their children’s names and ages, referred to infants as ‘it’, and, most remarkably, could not even remember how many babies they had given birth to. Nor, as he indicates, did they have the excuse of ignorance in matters of hygiene and basic childcare:
Now by the late 18th century, parents knew, at least in a sort of abstract way, that letting newborn children stew in their own excrement or feeding them pap from the second month onwards were harmful practices. For the network of medical personnel in Europe had by this time extended sufficiently to put interested mothers within earshot of sensible advice. The point is that these mothers did not care, that is why their children vanished in the ghastly slaughter of innocents that was traditional child-rearing.9
In addition, infanticide, often by exposure, was a common method of ‘family planning’. It was the sight of dead and dying infants heaped in the gutters of London that led Thomas Coram to establish a foundlings hospital in the eighteenth century. (In Macbeth, one of a range of objects the three witches throw into their pot is the finger of a strangled infant.) Not all these children could have been the offspring of the poor; descriptions of their clothes indicate that some clearly came from wealthy families.
The attitude of women towards their offspring in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries could not be more different from approaches to motherhood today, which view children with enormous sentiment and place immense value on them. Seen from a historical perspective, women’s behaviour in the eighteenth century must cast doubt on current theories of biological motherhood such as Richard Dawkins’s ‘selfish gene’ theory, which posits that women are more committed than men as parents because they have already invested much more in a child whom they have carried for nine months and then laboured to bring into the world. What we now know is that, for several centuries in Europe, mothers like everybody else frequently saw children as, at best, amusing but more likely as enervating and time-consuming and, at worst, unwanted. What is particularly hard to comprehend is that these attitudes, although generally held, were not fostered or forced on women by men. Among the very poor and those unwed mothers who left their children to die, perhaps the instinct to survive outweighed maternal instincts, but there is no such rationale for the attitudes of middle-class and upper-class women.
All this information is tremendously uncomfortable, and the ramifications of historical knowledge are not always clear. One thing is certain: motherhood has worn very different guises at different times. The politics of maternalism which later flourished in Britain and in America in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries could never have taken seed, or indeed made any kind of sense at all, at a time when motherhood was linked with negative and not positive qualities. Fairytales told during the period, such as Snow White, indicate how mothers were generally seen, for in the original tale Snow White was persecuted by her natural mother. It was the Brothers Grimm in the nineteenth century (by which time the cult of motherhood was at its height) who later changed the character to a stepmother.
Much of the research on wet-nursing and childcare has been undertaken by French historians, but that does not mean that their findings do not apply to England, where Puritan dogma urged parents to eradicate sin from children by beating the devil out of them, and where an infant’s cries were interpreted as expressions of anger rather than distress. Wet-nursing was endemic here as well, as was cruelty. In The English, Christopher Hibbert recounts this story of an upper-class mother: ‘Lady Abergavenny whipped her daughter so savagely for so long that her husband was drawn into the room of punishment by the child’s shrieks, whereupon the mother threw the girl to the ground with such force that she broke her skull and killed her.’10 According to Hibbert, it is only towards the end of the eighteenth century, due to the eventual spread of the humanitarian ideas of John Locke, that children came to be treated a little better as evidenced by, for example, the appearance of toys for the first time and of books specially written for children.
Motherhood came with no special status, duties or assumptions. A woman gave birth and that was the fact of the matter. She was not presumed to love the child, unless she chose to. It wasn’t even assumed that she would take care of the baby. Indeed, in instances of divorce in England, France and America it was usually the father who kept custody of the child, often at the mother’s behest. In colonial America it was fathers, not mothers, who were in charge of the children, not just in matters relating to discipline and moral rectitude as one might imagine, but they were also the parent who got up in the night to comfort a crying child.11 Women were considered too amoral, too inferior and too weak to be given such responsibilities. In this context, given the task of building a nation, children were valuable and regarded as too important to be entrusted to mothers. In Europe the opposite was true. Children had no value and therefore nobody, including women, could be persuaded to care for them. That view was set to undergo a radical change in the course of the next century.
The creation of maternal love
Europe in the eighteenth century underwent a massive shift in the way that people thought. It was the most significant change since Martin Luther jettisoned notions of Original Sin during the Reformation and the Italian Renaissance elevated art, music, poetry and the finer human sensibilities. These served as the background to another smaller, yet in its own way (certainly as regards the history of motherhood) equally important, change in values. This was a ‘revolution in sentiment’12 for which one catalyst was the Enlightenment movement, a school of philosophy which emphasized man’s right to happiness, his true noble character, romantic love, freedom and nature. This change would eventually lead to love (rather than status or social obligation) becoming the principal reason for marriage and children being regarded as the fruit or gift of that love. Maternal love arose out of all of this.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a leading light in the world
