CONCLUSION

In terms of these prominent discourses of motherhood it is possible to argue that it was in the decade of the 1970s that the boundaries between good and bad motherhood were most blurred. Not only were there increasing material supports for different forms of motherhood, but alternative household organizations were prefigured and motherhood began (symbolically and to a lesser extent actually) to escape the normative constraints of psychological and moral orthodoxy. Legal and policy changes also made it possible for motherhood to detach itself from the governance of the father. But this brief moment (for now it would seem that it was quite fleeting) has been followed by a renewed discursive closure for the possibilities of motherhood even though the actual number of lone mothers keeps rising. The reconstitution of fatherhood has had important consequences for motherhood because it has not been a radical reconstruction of men’s responsibilities so much as an attempt to demote the significance of the mother who was thought to have become too powerful in the 1970s. We can speak of an ideological attempt to reprivatize motherhood, by which I mean an attempt to reinforce mothers’ economic dependence upon men at a time when other avenues of economic independence for women continue to be limited. There is, in the 1990s, a renewed fear of the consequences of allowing lone motherhood to thrive positively as opposed to by default. Morgan (1995) for example, has argued that not only does lone motherhood lead to delinquency and other maladjustments, but that women’s independence from men will produce a new ‘warrior class’ of young men who have no attachment to their communities and no responsibilities to keep them law-abiding. Married, dependent motherhood is seen as a means of civilizing men who otherwise return to a supposed state of nature. Such arguments seem to be gaining ground and the lone mother is once again depicted as the source of almost all social ills. Yet such views seem to be completely devoid of a historical perspective on motherhood and family life prior to those that occurred in Britain in the 1950s. In particular, it ignores the extent to which the ‘traditional family’ was a nineteenth-century construction that was dependent upon clear strategies of disempowering women and binding them to motherhood and the private sphere in a way that was unprecedented. This is not to argue that there was once Utopia, but merely to stress that what is now an idealized form of motherhood was the product of certain historical developments. It is increasingly important to sustain a knowledge of the history of motherhood in the face of this new orthodoxy. The revisionist history I have outlined here can only be a small part of such a project and is itself, of course, a contested ‘version’ of events. I am conscious, for example, that this history is an institutional history and not a history of women’s agency and resistance. But this history at least suggests that women have not always fallen into motherhood as if it were simply their destiny. Moreover, we can see quite clearly how motherhood has always been a site of contested meanings and values. Given this history, we should hardly be surprised that motherhood is again on the political agenda in Britain in the 1990s.