To begin any deconstruction of motherhood we have to go behind the mother-child relationship, which is where much feminist work starts, in order to focus on the supposedly natural chain of events that gives rise to motherhood in the first place. Standing behind motherhood, in the shadows so to speak, is a chain of events that are presumed to be so natural as to be inevitable, unquestionable and automatic. This chain of events can be depicted as follows:
sexual activity ^ pregnancy ^birth ^ mothering ^motherhood
But if we examine each link in this naturalistic chain we can begin to understand that this process arises from a number of socially ordained behaviours and from the sanctioning and exclusion of other behaviours. I want to suggest that sexual activity does not naturally lead to pregnancy, that pregnancy does not naturally lead to birth and so on. Rather than the unfolding of nature we can see a channelling of choices and options that are historically and culturally specific. At each stage of this process, decisions are taken that relate to existing values, social conditions and available options. I shall look at each stage in turn.
Sexual activity
Since the Victorians it has been almost a tenet of common sense that sex leads to pregnancy. But the idea that sexual activity results in pregnancy is a reflection of the way in which sex itself has come to be seen as coterminous with heterosexual intercourse. Once we decentre heterosexual penetration it becomes apparent that one can be very sexually active without risking pregnancy at all. The questions that we need to consider therefore are when and how did sex become reduced to intercourse and why have we come to see all sex as either procreative sex or as (undesirable) perversion?2 We have only to think of the Victorian hysteria over masturbation to understand that penetrative sex was actively given a dominant place in the hierarchy of sexual practices and that there were rigorous (although unsuccessful) attempts to eradicate other forms. Following Foucault (1981) we can see that reproductive intercourse was actively ‘naturalized’ in the Victorian period and other forms of sexual activity became defined as unnatural. This construction of perversions, with dire warnings about dangers to health that would ensue from following such practices, was linked to the rise of medical and psychological sciences.
But the pre-eminence of procreative sex predates the nineteenth century. Christian teaching had long held that sodomy and onanism were sins (although not perversions). Given this long-standing privilege accorded to penetrative sex, the question we need to ask is whether women exposed to the risk of pregnancy sought to avoid this outcome? What seems to emerge as an answer to this question is that before the nineteenth century they did, but during the Victorian era women ‘lost’ their knowledge of contraception. McLaren (1992) and Flandrin (1979) argue that folk knowledges of barrier methods, coitus interruptus, douching, extended breast-feeding and early forms of spermicides existed in Europe in the early modern period. Long before the availability of what we now regard as reliable contraception, certain families were limiting their size effectively. But it would seem that these folk knowledges were ‘forgotten’ in the nineteenth century. McLaren (1992:168) argues,
English upper-class brides of the late eighteenth century, trained
to hide any interest in sexuality, warned not to listen to the gossip
of servants and cut off from the larger female community, were probably more ignorant of the workings of their bodies than their grandmothers had ever been.
Working class women suffered too, he suggests, as practices of breast-feeding changed because of the demand for women’s labour and because there was medical and ideological pressure on these women to give up breast-feeding early. He suggests,
It is possible…that the critique of the birth controllers, complementing as it did that of doctors opposed to lengthy breastfeeding, actually undermined working-class confidence in a measure that offered an important margin of protection to both mother and child.
(McLaren 1992:188)
The margin of protection he refers to is the cultural practice of avoiding intercourse while a mother was breast-feeding since a successive pregnancy would dry up her milk and put her infant at risk. He points out that, as a consequence, although there was a general fall in fertility rates in the nineteenth century in England, the exception to this was the urban poor.
In addition, we have to recognize that the state was ready to prosecute as obscene any published contraceptive information and that, initially at least, both the medical profession and the women’s movement argued strongly against the availability of newer forms of contraception (such as rubber condoms). There was therefore a loss of knowledge, an active suppression both of traditional knowledges and of new technologies, which put women at greater risk of pregnancies at a time when alternative non-procreative forms of sexual expression were being pathologized most actively. The suppression of this knowledge can be seen as part of a strategy of establishing the inevitability of the link between heterosex and pregnancy.3