Henrietta L. Moore
Mothering and motherhood are not, contrary to popular belief, ‘the most natural things in the world’. They have taken very different forms in different times and places. What it is to be a ‘mother’ is both cross-culturally and historically variable. Historians writing about wet-nursing and child fostering in Europe remind us how very different motherhood was in the past, and how little it resembled the project of a full-time, home-bound, isolated career on which the ideal of Euro-American motherhood has been based in this century (Pollock 1983; Aries 1973; Lewis 1986). Recent work has also emphasized the degree to which the experiences of mothering, and of being a mother, differ according to divisions of race and class (Glenn et al. 1994; Cock 1980; Hansen 1989, 1992; Thornton Dill 1988). Women working as domestics might relieve their employers of some of the heavier burdens of motherhood, but this left them very little time to attend to their own children or for the maintenance of broader family relationships. Mothering and motherhood thus vary within specific contexts as well as between them.
Motherhood and the context in which it is supposed to operate, ‘the family’, have always been sites of contestation. The state has a clear interest in intervening in the production and reproduction of the work-force, in the delineation of units of welfare provision and taxation, and in the structuring and maintenance of differentiated social identities (Moore 1994a; Molyneux 1985; Abramovitz 1983; Barrett 1980; Stacey 1983). This is particularly clear in colonial contexts, where the social construction of mothering was part of a larger project of societal reconstruction involving the management of social and racial differences (Jolly and Macintyre 1989). In many cases, failure to conform to standards of idealized mothering led to stigmatization and discrimination.
Ideologies of mothering and motherhood necessarily exert
considerable influence and pressure in all situations, but the degree to which they determine practice is very variable. Dominant ideologies of mothering and motherhood certainly coexist alongside subdominant ones, but those who do not or cannot conform to the dominant ideologies may pay a heavy price. Recent debates about mothering and lone parents in the UK and the USA demonstrate this point since those women who have apparently demonstrated their inability to mother within a ‘complete’ family have paid with social stigmatization and cuts in welfare provision. The issues here are many and complex, but tend to revolve around whether mothers can be workers, whether women who have children should be able to support them, and whether those who parent outside of a conventional nuclear family should expect support from the state. The rhetoric that has animated this debate has inevitably drawn on ideas and assumptions about the role of women, about what constitutes adequate mothering and about the ‘natural’ form of the family. The impact of the debate, however, has not been confined to the USA and the UK, but has extended into the international arena and formed part of a larger discussion about the relationship between the family and the market, the role of the state in mediating that relationship, and the problem of how to limit rising welfare costs. This discussion has been fuelled not only by pragmatic or financial concerns but also by the often rapid social changes that many countries and communities are experiencing. Globalization and market integration, coupled with other factors, have had an uneven but none the less dramatic impact on family structures and household livelihood strategies. The result in many cases has been a general perception of disequilibrium and unsought-for change in family life. The validity of and reasons for this perception are difficult to judge, and would require specific analysis in each context. It would certainly be more than foolish to make global generalizations, but it is the case that anxieties about a ‘crisis in the family’ have found fertile ground in many places, albeit for rather different reasons.