PATROLLING THE BOUNDARIES OF MOTHERHOOD

For there to be a normative ideal of motherhood it is perhaps self­evident that there must be those who ‘fall’ outside the norm. These two are in a symbiotic relationship and, although the boundaries between them are redrawn according to fashions in motherhood, without the one, the other could not have a social existence. But this moving boundary does not shift in one direction; it is multi-faceted. As one element of the boundary might begin to diminish the significance of the difference between the married and the unmarried mother (for example, some psychological discourses on mother-child bonding), others might be reinforcing negative connotations of unmarried motherhood (as with emphasizing selfishness or irrespon­sibility in the context of available contraception). The boundary is therefore not a smooth line, and the ebbs and flows are various. However, examining which behaviours and which qualities fall outside good motherhood sheds light on the complex policing of motherhood and how, rather than being an unchanging and natural condition, it is a highly contrived and historically specific condition.

Mapping all the elements of these boundary changes between good and bad motherhood is not possible here and so I shall concentrate on what I regard as the three main discursive strategies affecting motherhood since the turn of this century. These are sketched out in Table 2.1.

In this broad sketch I have identified key moments in the history of discursive interventions into motherhood. These are far from definitive, but they represent the dominant character of these discourses and policies at specific times. Through this sketch it should be possible to identify contradictory shifts and emphases and the emergence of new methods of marginalizing unmarried or disruptive (bad) motherhood.

If we read across the columns starting at the top, we can see that psychological discourses on motherhood are not relevant until the post-war period. Although training and advice manuals on how to rear children were available to mothers for some centuries before this, these could not be called psychological. Psychoanalytic discourses significant to motherhood do start to be influential after the 1920s when Freud’s work is translated into English, but we have to wait until the Second World War before a broader, more normative and empirically based psychology starts to identify the mother as central to the emotional and psychological health of children. Until the 1940s then, we shall focus on the two dominant areas of welfare and moral/ legal discourses.

The Poor Law in England began in Elizabethan times, and it remained the primary method of dealing with the unsupported poor until the introduction of the insurance principle in 1911 and the eventual creation of a welfare state in 1945. The Poor Law’s treatment of unsupported, unmarried mothers fluctuated in severity. At times fathers were required to pay for the child’s keep; at other times they were not (Laslett 1977). Typically unsupported mothers were forced to resort to the workhouse where they would be separated from their children and where they suffered great hardship. Such mothers were seen only as an economic burden on the local state and thus the Poor Law also attempted to act as a deterrent to mothers having illegitimate children. This harsh economic climate and inadequate welfare provision have to be read alongside the moral and legal discourses of the period. Throughout the nineteenth century and at the start of the twentieth century, legislation and moral rhetoric failed to support and indeed punished unmarried mothers. Legal policies rendered them desperate and destitute and the criminal law threatened them with prosecution if they abandoned or neglected their babies. By the end of the nineteenth century, illegitimacy had been constructed as a major social problem. The status of the illegitimate child in law was abysmal, having no legal kin and no common law right to support from either its mother or its father (Cretney 1987).

At the turn of the twentieth century therefore, the position of the unmarried mother was precarious unless she had some kind of protector. Victorian moral purity movements had cast her as the fallen woman and interpreted her motherhood as a result of immorality rather than as an outcome of changing structural and employment conditions (Gillis 1979). But interestingly, the economic position of the married mother was not necessarily much better if she left her husband and he refused to support her. She could apply for maintenance if she was deserted or if he was violent towards her, but mechanisms to ensure that she was paid were non-existent. The main difference therefore between the married and unmarried mother was the former’s moral and legal status and standing as long as her marriage was intact. We therefore see emerging a ‘grey’ area between the married mother and the unmarried mother. This was occupied by the separated (and later the divorced) mother. In terms of welfare policy, the once-married mother might be treated almost as badly as the never-married mother. The only real difference between the separated mother and the never-married mother was the legal status of their children. However, the stigma and the material consequences of illegitimacy could be such that it was much preferable to be a separated mother, even if one endured almost the same degree of poverty. The ‘plight’ of the unmarried mother and the separated or divorced mother therefore operated as a severe warning to the married mother to keep her marriage intact.

After 1911, the Poor Law was supplemented by provision based on the insurance principle. The National Insurance Act marked the beginnings of a shift in the way that married mothers were to be treated in the twentieth century. It marked the beginning of a recognition that motherhood required a financial supplement from the state and an acknowledgement that husbands were not always sufficient providers for mothers and children. The Act gave women the right to a maternity benefit, but this was an entitlement that could only be claimed through an insured husband. This still bound mothers’ fate to the vagaries of their husbands’ economic status but it also began the system of exclusion of unmarried mothers from a ‘respectable’ and non-stigmatizing insurance system. Unmarried mothers were left to the mercies of the remaining elements of the Poor Law or to charity at their time of confinement.

During the period from 1910 to 1940, the position of the married mother gradually improved. Grounds for divorce were extended and her right to maintenance on divorce and separation was consolidated (albeit far from perfect). Even so, there was not a clear — cut distinction between the legal treatment of the separated or divorced mother and that of the unmarried mother. Many working — class mothers who left their husbands still had to use the magistrates’ courts to try to get maintenance and so were subject to some of the same indignities as the unmarried mother. Going to court at all for domestic matters was seen as shameful, even if the shame was worse for the unmarried mother. This was because cases were heard in open court alongside criminal cases. Their details appeared in local newspapers and so the separated mother, like the unmarried mother, had no privacy for her affairs at all.

At the level of moral rhetoric, a very significant feature of this period was the rise of the campaign for the Endowment of Motherhood. This campaign, which eventually led to the introduction of Family Allowances in 1945, can be seen as one of the most powerful discursive strategies of the period (Macnicol 1980). The writings and lobbying of the Endowment campaigners established the idea that the mother was not only central to the health of the family, but that she should be entitled to an independent financial recognition of this. This was more, therefore, than moral invective. Although success in policy terms was not achieved until after the Second World War, we can witness a gradual recognition of the significance of the institutionalization of motherhood as a basis for new citizenship rights in the form of benefit entitlements.

In 1942 the Beveridge Report was published (Beveridge 1942). It appeared during the Second World War as the promise of a new social order when peace was achieved. It proposed the complete sweeping away of the remnants of the Poor Law and the introduction of an integrated, national system of both insurance-based and meanstested safety net benefits. Beveridge’s proposals, including a family allowance, were introduced after the end of the war. In his Report the role of the mother was recognized as vital to the post-war reconstruction. Her role was to be the good wife and fecund mother. The nascent welfare state thus continued the presumption that the married woman would be financially dependent upon her husband; indeed, through its structure of benefits, the new machinery ensured that this would be the case. This meant that the unmarried mother remained highly vulnerable because, although she could insure herself while in work, she would lose benefit rights once she left work to look after her child, including her later pension entitlement. In any case, she was likely to be sacked the minute her pregnancy was discovered since no women then, married or otherwise, had employment protection when they were pregnant.

What is interesting is that these proposals came into being at a time when illegitimacy rates had increased considerably because of the war and there was also an increase in adulterous pregnancies where married women had become pregnant by other men during their husbands’ absence (Smart 1996). These changing social conditions were not recognized in the Beveridge proposals, possibly because it was assumed that the end of the war would mean that conjugal reproduction would resume its ascendancy and that, in the new social order, illegitimacy would become marginal.8 At this stage, one of the main methods of attempting to deter unmarried motherhood and adulterous pregnancies (apart from the lack of financial support) continued to be the punitive and stigmatizing status of illegitimacy that was visited upon the child. Spensky (1992) shows that at this time it was still thought to be far preferable for an unmarried mother (or an adulterous mother) to give her baby up for adoption, whereupon it would be legitimized, than to keep the baby who would have to carry the stain of illegitimacy

The introduction of the Family Allowance in 1945, payable to the mother rather than the father, gave concrete substance to the enhanced status of motherhood in a general sense. But equally, the important studies by Bowlby (1953) and Winnicott (1957) heralded a new emphasis on the importance of the mother for the emotional health of the child. As Riley (1983) has argued, Bowlby cannot be held directly responsible for the way in which his theories were taken up and applied, but his work on the supposed damaging effect of separating mother and child did give rise to an orthodoxy about the need for mothers to stay by their young children almost constantly. This emphasis on the mother was a mixed blessing. On one hand it meant that it was presumed that mothers would keep the children if there was a divorce or separation, on the other hand it was always mothers who became the focus of blame if children became delinquent or maladjusted. In particular, attempts by middle-class mothers to go to work during their children’s formative years and the need of working-class mothers to stay in work to support their families were treated as major crimes against childhood and the stability of the next generation.

It was the dominance of this psychological paradigm that gave rise to the insistence that unmarried mothers should surrender their children for adoption at this time. This shows a remarkable shift in management of illegitimacy from the moral presumption that the child was the punishment for the sin and that the mother should not be relieved of the burden of care to the equally firmly held belief that the mother must give up the child. In the first instance, the concern appears to be that the mother should sin no more. In the second it appears that the concern has shifted to the ‘quality’ of the child and its ability to grow into a well-adjusted citizen. In neither of these models was the welfare of the mother at all significant.

It took some time before the core idea, that mothers were important to the psychological health of their babies, was extended to include unmarried mothers. Because there was presumed to be a natural bond between a birth mother and her baby, it became difficult to sustain the idea that this was only the case if the mother was legally married. Policy began to change until it came to be assumed that if an unmarried mother did not have a legal termination (available after 1967) then she would keep the baby. This shift came about for several reasons. One crucial element was the realization that an illegitimate child was not, automatically, an unwanted child. In any case, mothers started to refuse to give up their babies. The wider availability of contraception (after 1964) and abortion meant that unwanted babies could more readily be avoided or unwanted pregnancies could be more readily terminated. In addition, the distinction between the unmarried mother and the divorced mother also became more blurred. After the 1960s, the category of lone mothers was predominantly constituted by divorced mothers rather than never-married mothers. It therefore became more difficult to ‘brand’ all such mothers simply as feckless.

The late 1960s and the 1970s can therefore be identified as a discursive high point in the history of motherhood. In 1974 the Report of the Committee on One Parent Families was published (Finer 1974). The Finer Report made substantial and radical proposals to extend the support offered to lone mothers from the welfare state. Most crucially it proposed to ignore, for benefit purposes, the route by which mothers found themselves caring for children alone. The hierarchy of lone mothers (from widows, to the divorced, to the never married) would have been virtually swept away if the proposals had been adopted. But his ideas were seen as too radical and too expensive and they were never implemented. None the less, for our purposes, the mere existence of such a Committee and such a Report shows how far, discursively speaking, the status of the unmarried mother had been reconstructed. Moreover, during the 1970s there were gradual changes to the status of the illegitimate child such that the distinctions between the legitimate and the illegitimate became less and less significant. In addition, the availability (albeit not universal) of contraception and abortion meant that two of the elements of the inevitable and

supposedly natural chain of events between sex and reproduction were diminished. The 1970s therefore gave rise to the possibility of sex without reproduction and, should a woman choose to become pregnant, the decade held forth the promise (if not the actuality) of the possibility of fully autonomous motherhood. It is during the 1970s that we can see positive shifts towards lone motherhood in all the three discursive fields of psychology, welfare and moral/legal. This was therefore an extremely important moment in the history of motherhood because motherhood stood on the threshold of independence (from the governance of men and marriage) and in sight of a proper means of economic support. However, the promise of this moment did not survive the end of the 1970s.

In the 1980s we can see a number of significant shifts again. I shall outline these below, but first it is important to note that after the 1970s it is the lone mother (whether divorced or never married) who is reconstituted more firmly as a burden on the state, as an inadequate mother to her children and as damaging to the moral fibre of society. Within this category of lone mother, the never married may have been seen as somewhat more culpable, but it is the general category of lone mother that was, once again, demonized. It is in the 1980s that we witness the rise of men’s and father’s rights movements, which sought to challenge the new status of the lone mother (Smart and Sevenhuijsen 1989). These movements sought, on the one hand, to eradicate the husband’s financial responsibilities for his former wife and, on the other, to increase his rights in relation to his children (legitimate and illegitimate). Figuratively speaking, we can say that fatherhood emerged out of the shadows again to try to reclaim its lost status in the family and in wider society. These claims were enhanced by a revival of psychological studies that purported to prove the link between the absence of the father and delinquency in the child (Dennis and Erdos 1993), which mirrored to some extent the 1950s and 1960s ideology of motherhood. Thus fatherhood became accepted as being emotionally and psychologically vital for the welfare of the child. This father was not construed as the distant disciplinarian or stout economic provider but as an engaged and caring parent. The influence of this movement was such that changes were made to family law so that it was no longer possible for mothers to gain the sole custody of children on divorce.9 This re-enhancement of fatherhood, along with the continuing demonization of lone mothers as economic burdens on the public purse, led to another legal change. This was the introduction of the Child Support Act in 1991. This measure was designed to recoup benefits paid to lone mothers from the biological fathers of their children. This measure threatened fathers with the same sort of financial penury that previous laws had imposed on unwed mothers and divorcing mothers prior to the 1970s (see Fox Harding, Chapter 7 in this volume). In this respect we can see the Child Support Act as a means of bolstering marriage through economic measures and thus, indirectly, as a way of trying to reduce the incidence and the costs of lone motherhood.

This renewed antipathy towards the lone mother could be found elsewhere in the 1980s (see also Mclntosh, and Roseneil and Mann, Chapter 11 in this volume). The growth of reproductive technologies such as in vitro fertilization (IVF), as well as the more mundane practice of artificial insemination, came under scrutiny. While these practices raised wide ethical concerns, a subset of concern was focused on the unmarried and widowed woman who might want to become a mother through the use of such techniques. The 1990 Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act limited the access of unmarried women to these procedures and imposed an indelible mark of illegitimacy on any child born to a widow using her husband’s gametes posthumously. Thus we can see that, with the rise of new technologies, new distinctions were drawn to preserve the boundaries of good mothering.