Between 1970 and the present lies a great deal of history, which included many changes in the status of women and of mothers. Nonetheless, the old problems persist. And of all these problems, the maternal dilemma is among the most intractable. The difficulty of reconciling maternal and familial responsibilities with individual aspirations is still a major obstacle to the equality of women in Western Europe and elsewhere. In this book, we have seen how the maternal dilemma was defined and debated by feminists during the early and middle years of the twentieth century. What light can this history throw on the present?
First of all, our story calls many prevailing views of the relationship of feminism and motherhood into question. These views fall roughly into two categories. Post-structuralist theorists criticize feminists of past and present for purveying (in Judith Butler’s words) “universalistic claims” based on the “ostensibly transcultural structures of femininity, maternity, sexuality,” and thus creating a “normative and exclusionary” category of “women” that ignores differences of class, race, and sexual orientation.”1 This assertion that feminists were and still are too preoccupied with motherhood and other distinctively female functions is contradicted by the more popular trend known as “post-feminism.” Its proponents accuse feminists of a disrespect for the “real concerns of women,” the most important of which they identify as motherhood and family life.2
Neither of these accusations is borne out by the complex reality. It is true that the feminists discussed in this book sometimes—by no means always— showed insensitivity to differences of class, religion, and sexual orientation among women. It is not true, however, that they shared a “normative” conception of female nature that was centered on motherhood. On the contrary, their views of motherhood were exceedingly diverse. Maternalists such as Ellen Key exalted it as “the most perfect realization of human potential that the species has reached”; individualists such as Simone de Beauvoir dismissed it as “a strange mixture of narcissism, altruism, idle daydreaming, sincerity, bad faith, devotion, and cynicism.”3 Some feminists became mothers and others remained childless. Some were married; some were single; some lived in nonmarital relationships with partners of the same or the opposite sex. Some had large and some had small families. Some advocated, and others opposed, birth-control and abortion. Some pictured women as naturally gifted for motherhood, while others deplored their ineptitude. Some
believed that children should be raised by their mothers, and others that they were better off in day-care centers; some urged all women to become mothers, and others wished to confine motherhood to a qualified elite. Some portrayed child-rearing as a blissful, others as a hellish experience. Some believed that mothers should be paid for childbearing, others that they should be employed outside the home. Some stigmatized unmarried and childless women as “abnormal”; most defended them against discrimination.
Despite the considerable diversity among feminists’ views, certain trends are perceptible over the period covered by this book. One of these certainly led away from an essentialist view of motherhood as biological destiny or moral imperative. Increasingly, feminists thought of motherhood as a role— an identity that was not innate but assumed, and might be refused or combined with other roles. From the beginning of our period, some feminists asserted that childbearing and child-rearing was not enough to fill up the life or engage the talents of the modern woman—she needed some other focus. Many agreed with contemporary psychologists that an excessively intense or exclusive commitment to motherhood signaled maladjustment or mental disturbance. By 1970, the picture of motherhood as one of “women’s two roles”—the other usually defined as paid work—could be found in most feminist literature.
Another trend of our period—the rationalization of child-rearing as a science—likewise distanced it from any form of biological determinism. Though only mothers could bear children, the rearing of these children might—and some experts believed that it should—be entrusted to other adults, even to men. The notion of childbearing and child-rearing as services to the state—even as a female analogue to military service—was advanced by some feminists, particularly in the period before World War I. However, they did not imply that motherhood was a biological destiny—it was a choice, for which women required incentives in the form of subsidies, social services, or expanded political rights. By the end of our period, this cult of patriotic motherhood had been discredited by the traumatic experience of totalitarian regimes. Increasingly, feminists saw parenthood as an individual decision that was motivated by desire rather than duty. For those who had no such desire, childlessness emerged as a viable—though still highly controversial— option.
But by portraying motherhood as a choice that might sometimes be refused, these feminists did not downgrade its importance. Precisely because it was a choice, many asserted that it could for the first time become a vocation. And they emphasized that women’s reluctance to bear children did not always arise from an aversion to motherhood. Under existing conditions, the obligations of motherhood conflicted with women’s other aspirations, whether to education, career success, financial or personal independence, or other goals. Because these feminists believed that motherhood was a cultural construction that had evolved throughout prehistory and history, they insisted that the conditions under which women bore and raised children should and must be changed. We have seen that they proposed a host of solutions to the maternal dilemma, including new forms of social support for mothers, collective child-care, new forms of the family and household, the enhancement of the father’s role in child-rearing, the sequencing of childbearing and career obligations, and many others. In our own day, these solutions are still discussed. But the dilemma remains.
Many feminists of the period 1890-1970 portrayed motherhood as the distinctive contribution of the female citizen. The cult of patriotic motherhood offends today’s sensibilities. But, as the political scientist Carole Pateman points out, “motherhood and citizenship remain intimately linked,” for the survival of nations depends on the willingness of women to bear children.5
Today’s Western European governments recognize that parenthood is an individual choice that the state can encourage but cannot compel. The nations of Western Europe have made great progress toward such goals as equal opportunity in education and in the workplace, universal access to contraception and sex education, the right to abortion, the elimination of the disadvantages suffered by unmarried parents and their children, and the acceptance of diverse forms of the family—which now include same-sex couples, single parents, and communal households—as suitable environments for children. And despite remaining restrictions on reproductive choice, women control their fertility to a degree that is unprecedented in history. European governments encourage childbearing through positive incentives such as child allowances, generous maternity and parental leaves, and government-subsidized services for children.
In some ways, the maternal dilemma can be seen in a positive light, as the result of these favorable circumstances. For the greater her freedom of choice and the broader her options, the more complex is the individual’s decision for or against childbearing. In the present, increases alike in control over fertility and in women’s ambitions for career success and self-realization have made this decision increasingly difficult: “What was once the most natural thing in the world,” writes the German sociologist Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim, “has now become very complicated, at least among certain groups. Nothing is spontaneous any more, everything is considered.”6
But mothers’ choices are also constrained by the continued existence of gender inequality. The history of the twentieth century has been marked as much by continuity as by change, and the issues confronting women in 2000 were surprisingly similar to those that they faced in 1970. “While many people have come to believe that the situation of women has been greatly improved over the past twenty years,” wrote Barbara Helfferich, the Secretary General of the European Women’s Lobby in Brussels, in 2000, “current statistics and anecdotal evidence paint a different picture.”7
In the European Union, overall employment rates for women are steadily increasing. According to one recent estimate, labor force participation rates for women between the ages of 30 and 34 years ranged from 61 percent in Italy to 83 percent in Sweden.8 The European Commission reported that about 70 percent of European women of working age were employed in 1997.9
And mothers are almost as likely to be employed as other women in similar age-groups. For example, in France in 2000, 81 percent of women with one dependent child, 69 percent of those with two children, and 49.3 percent of those with three or more children were employed.10 Women’s work is important to their families—in 1996, 59 percent provided half or more of their households’ total income—and most women prefer employment to full-time housekeeping even in the absence of economic pressure.11 However, inequalities in pay and status persist; in France, for example, the average difference between men’s and women’s salaries was 27 percent in 1998.12 Women tend to be concentrated in low-paying and gender-segregated jobs; they are more likely than men to work part time (sometimes by choice); and they are more vulnerable than men to unemployment.
The reason that is most often given for these disadvantages is still the maternal dilemma—the problem of combining work obligations and family life. “Having children is highly relevant to women’s participation in the labor market,” stated a report of the Economic and Social Committee of the European Union in 1997. Many European governments now subsidize child care. For example, in 1990 the majority of children below school age in France, Belgium, and Denmark spent at least some time in public child-care facilities.13 But recent budgetary crises have limited the growth of all public services.14
In 2000, the European Union’s Economic and Social Committee urged that “it is essential for men to shoulder their share of responsibility for home, children, and the elderly.”15 However, the role of men in the home has not increased in proportion to that of women in the workplace. In Sweden, where parental leave is available to both women and men, only one-fifth of men, but almost all women took advantage of this provision in the period between 1974 and 1990.16 With the increase in single-mother households, many children also grow up without fathers or other stable male caretakers.
As it did in the past, the prospect of motherhood still shapes the mentalities and life-plans of women. Despite governmental and private measures that encourage girls to enter occupations previously dominated by men, they still tend to choose typically “female” occupations in education, the social services, retail sales, and office work, partly because they believe that these jobs, which offer flexible hours and the possibility of part-time work, can be easily combined with motherhood.17 Women are rare in the top echelons of industry, business, the academic world, and politics. And the lives of employed mothers are exhausting. “Every day, they have to combine two types of work: professional work and maternal work,” wrote Yvonne Knibiehler of French professional women. “And each one affects the other. The have to organize their time: full-time, part-time, optional time, compulsory time, convenient time, saved time, parental time, free time. . . each week, each day, each year, over the course of their lives. Time becomes their obsession.”18
Recently, a new “population crisis” has brought the conditions under which mothers raise children into the news. Birthrates have fallen off steadily since 1966 and are now are among the lowest in the world: as of 2003, the average number of children born to each Belgian woman was 1.48; to each German woman 1.29; to each French woman 1.8; to each Italian women 1.2; to each Swedish woman 1.29; to each British woman 1.6.19 In an eerie reprise of earlier natalist rhetoric, pessimistic pundits predict the dying out of European nations. “Europe’s population is shrinking and greying—with grim consequences,” proclaimed The Economist in 2003. The bankruptcy of pension funds, a struggle between generations for resources, even Europe’s “slow and inexorable exit from history” are numbered among the possible consequences of these demographic trends.20 In Germany, a forthcoming book by Elisabeth Niejahr is entitled “The Republic of the Old” (Altenrepublik).21
In this context, the warnings of earlier generations of feminists that women who are forced to choose between child-rearing and individual selfrealization may avoid motherhood take on a new relevance. European governments propose yet more family-friendly social policies as a solution. But the effect of such measures on birthrates is limited; European women are wary of natalism, which they associate with the authoritarian regimes of the past, and resist pressures to produce more children for the state.22 The improvement of material conditions, however important, is clearly not enough. The disadvantages suffered by mothers are due to a more basic problem—the continuance of what Charlotte Perkins Gilman called “our androcentric world.” Male experience is the norm upon which all institutions of Western society—education, the family, the workplace—are based. Women are now allowed to take on roles previously reserved for men. But the price of integration into the male world is increased stress and conflict. Expected both to live up to male norms and to fulfill distinctively female functions such as motherhood, women are still caught between “two roles.” As Carole Pateman observes, only in a changed system in which women do not experience gender difference as disadvantage and subordination will the maternal dilemma be resolved.23
However, an interpretation of low birthrates that focused exclusively on any one issue—including gender relations—would be oversimplified. As Knibiehler wisely reminds us, childbearing is not an industrial process that responds to economic conditions and market incentives. Nor is it a social problem that can be solved by public intervention. The decision to bear a child is more emotional than rational, and is driven by such psychological forces as the need for love, connection, and self-affirmation, the desire to re-live one’s own childhood, even a longing for continuity beyond one’s own death.24 And therefore maternalists such as Ellen Key, Nelly Roussel, or Dora Russell, who extolled the gratification and fulfillment to be gained from parenthood, cannot simply be dismissed as the purveyors of reactionary gender stereotypes. In our own era, both men and women aspire to these rewards.
As conspicuous a present-day phenomenon as the refusal or limitation of childbearing is the growth in the genuine desire for children—a desire that can emerge only when childbearing is, or is thought to be, freely chosen. One sign of this desire is the overwhelming popularity—particularly in the rich countries of Europe and North America—of reproductive technologies that overcome infertility and promise children to the childless. The future may see the disruption of the entire concept of “motherhood”—who is the mother, the donor of the egg, the birth mother, the woman who raises the child? 25 And eugenics, now practiced not by states but by individual parents who aim to determine the characteristics of their offspring, has made a comeback. The “right of the child to choose its parents,” fanciful when asserted by Ellen Key at the turn of the twentieth century, is now seriously asserted as lawsuits on behalf of handicapped children charge parents with “wrongful birth.” Clearly these new technologies bring new dangers as well as new opportunities to mothers and families.
The desire for children is encouraged by some aspects of Europe’s postindustrial culture. Unlike their American contemporaries, Western European women and men are now reevaluating the work ethic that defines individual worth through career success and financial gain. The demand for 35-hour work weeks, long vacations, and early retirement ages expresses a deep and widespread desire for more time to develop the emotional and affective side of life. More than ever, the home is a retreat from the workplace, and the family—which now exists in many different forms—is an environment for self-realization. Western adults still associate children with the qualities that they miss in themselves—spontaneity, curiosity, energy, imagination. Thus, as Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim points out, contemporary parents expect that child-rearing will fulfill their emotional needs and help them to live richer and more balanced life. “From their children they expect a kind of salvation,” writes Beck-Gernsheim of some parents, “and a cure for the pathologies of adulthood.”26
This brings us to the question we have addressed repeatedly in this book— why have children? According to the French historian Philippe Aries, a profound attitudinal change may shape child-rearing and family life in the twenty-first century. As we have seen, the twentieth century began as “the century of the child.” The fall in birthrates and the decrease in the number of children per family—a trend that by the 1920s was common to all social classes—was motivated largely by concern for the child as an individual. Careful investment in the health and education of its children often served the interests of the family in upward social mobility. Aries sees the “baby boom” after World War II as a response to unprecedented prosperity and security. It was also a period when the renewal of family life and reproduction had a strong emotional and political appeal. For Aries the low birthrates after 1970 represent a new pattern. They might also be interpreted as the continuation of a cultural trend that began in the 1920s—the redefinition of parenthood from a duty to a form of self-fulfillment. Today the planning of reproduction focuses less than in the early years of the twentieth century on the welfare of the child and more on that of the parents, for whom child-rearing is but one of many priorities. As the family unit becomes less stable, moreover, the investment in its future through the rearing of a new generation becomes less important. This does not, of course, mean that today’s parents do not love their children. However, they tend to integrate the child into a total life-plan—in the words of Aries, as “one of the various components which make it possible for adults to blossom as individuals.”27
In social policy, too, the child is no longer the supreme concern.28 In part, this is due to striking improvements in child health. High death rates and poor health among infants and children no longer threaten the survival of nations. Public attention is now focused on other periods of life—on the fetus and the gene, which are the objects of medical, scientific, and religious controversy, and upon the elderly, the fastest-growing group in all Western societies. If these trends continue, the twenty-first century will not be “the century of the child.” But what it will be, only time will tell.
Whatever the future may bring, feminists in the present face many of the same challenges as were confronted by the generations whose lives and work we have considered. The “maternal dilemma” is not only still present, but is experienced by an increasing number of women. For the near future, at least, it will continue, for both women’s desire for children and their drive for individual self-realization are trends that are here to stay. In their approach to these issues, present-day feminists must wrestle with the same problems that perplexed earlier generations. How should we reconcile the social with the individual dimensions of reproduction? How can we emphasize the importance of motherhood as a “social function” while still defending it as an individual and personal decision? How can reproductive freedom be protected against the new pressures that may result in the future, as in the past, from natalist pressures? How can women’s claims to equal opportunity in the workplace be reconciled with their special needs as mothers? How can we create a child-friendly society without discriminating against those who prefer to remain childless? What new forms of family and community life will enable both men and women to participate in the joys and stresses of child-rearing? What are the opportunities offered to women by new reproductive technologies, and what are the dangers? In our approach to these questions, our knowledge of history provides us with invaluable resources. We can be guided by the wisdom of past generations and learn from their rich legacy.
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