Carol Smart
Motherhood is not a natural condition. It is an institution that presents itself as a natural outcome of biologically given gender differences, as a natural consequence of (hetero) sexual activity, and as a natural manifestation of an innate female characteristic, namely the maternal instinct. The existence of an institution of motherhood, as opposed to an acknowledgement that there are simply mothers, is rarely questioned even though the proper qualities of motherhood are often the subject of debate. Motherhood is still largely treated as a given and as a self-evident fact rather than as the possible outcome of specific social processes that have a historical and cultural location which can be mapped. It is interesting that, in a comparable area, historians and, more recently, sociologists have problematized the concept of childhood (James and Prout 1990). While recognizing that there have always been immature adults, the new sociology of childhood now generally understands that childhood is the product of a number of cultural processes and modernist ideas, which have come to define a specific life stage as different from others and as in need of special treatment, education and moral guidance. It is also assumed (at least in recent British culture) that children should behave differently from adults, that children should be protected from the adult world, and that they should exist in a state of considerable dependence upon their parents or immediate family. As a consequence, childhood has a history; it is not a timeless, transcultural phenomenon but something that has changed and is capable of further change and redefinition.
Revisionist histories of childhood have allowed us to loosen the grip of naturalistic assumptions about the capacities and incapacities of children and the relationship between children and adults, and to become aware of the extent to which modern childhood is of our making rather than a natural phenomenon. This process of
‘denaturalization’ has occurred elsewhere, for example, in the fields of sexuality (Foucault 1981; Giddens 1992), disease (Sontag 1983), and gender and sexual difference (Butler 1990; Laqueur 1990). Anthropologists like Edholm (1982) have undertaken the same deconstruction of the western notion of the idealized family, revealing that it is a cultural construct and not a naturally occurring unit. Kaplan (1992) has deconstructed media and popular images of motherhood, and Davidoff and Hall (1987) have deconstructed domesticity and traced the rise of the private sphere as well as the location of white, middle-class women therein. But we do not yet seem to have a revisionist history of motherhood per se. Perhaps this is because, for all its problems, the concept of motherhood has been too central to much feminist work. This centrality has arisen in two ways. The first is the way in which motherhood has been identified as a source of women’s oppression because of the burdens and responsibilities of solitary care, the opportunity costs of caring and leaving the workforce, and the association of child care with menial tasks and limited abilities. This has led to a focus on issues of how to improve the conditions of motherhood rather than a more historical approach. The second is the way in which motherhood has been seen as a source of women’s strength and uniqueness, a site that is entirely feminine and that draws upon women’s special qualities and knowledge. Thus motherhood has been seen in realist terms, which is to say as an actuality from which women draw strength and from which oppositional politics can derive. The institution has thus been given a special status by feminists and non-feminists alike, and, while its parts have been critically deconstructed (such as the rise of domesticity),1 the whole has not been subjected to a social constructionist analysis. So, while there has been much discussion of the social conditions of motherhood (and how these might be improved or radically changed), there has not been much interest in creating a revisionist history, as opposed to a realist history, of motherhood per se.
In this chapter, therefore, I want to start to map out some of the elements of such a revisionist history in the full knowledge that this can only be a sketch that ultimately needs much greater elaboration. I shall do this by focusing on two areas of exploration. The first will question the presumption that motherhood is natural. I want to ask this question because I have become increasingly intrigued by the rise of criminal and other legal measures such as those against abortion, infanticide and contraception. Historically speaking there has been such a heavy weight of machinery brought to bear on women to force them into motherhood we must ask why these measures were necessary if motherhood itself was simply a biological process like ageing. The second will explore the rise of specific normative expectations of white, British motherhood in order to see how the boundaries of ‘proper’ motherhood are patrolled to ensure that, once established, motherhood takes the appropriate course.
These are important questions for contemporary feminism. On the one hand, giving motherhood a history alerts us to the extent to which motherhood has been a politically contested site for centuries (and certainly not just since the rise of feminism). We need to know that abortion rights are not a new ‘freedom’, but an old resistance to compulsory motherhood regained. We need to know that there were contraceptive methods used in the past that did not entail potentially damaging drugs. We can thus recapture a history in which women were not simply the victims of Nature from which modern science has saved us. On the other hand we need to expose the construction of dominant normative constraints that create certain categories of mothers as bad or inadequate because they are perceived to fail to live up to the ideals of motherhood that are imposed through legal and public policies.