Although this era’s discussion of the maternal role was in a long tradition, the social changes of the postwar era brought it into a new phase. Earlier generations of feminists had assumed that the commitment of most women to motherhood was necessary to the future of society, which was otherwise threatened by a “twilight of parenthood.” But during the postwar baby boom such fears temporarily receded. Motherhood seemed to be undergoing a transformation from a lifetime identity to only one—and for some women, the less rewarding—aspect of a double role. Under these circumstances, would women continue to bear children? And, if so, then why?
The context for the discussion of this question was set by popular psychologists who during this era shifted their focus from the personality of the child to the mother-child relationship. Continuing the trend toward defining childbearing as a source of personal satisfaction rather than a duty, many told women that the only valid reason for having children was the overwhelming sense of fulfillment that they derived from motherhood. “The provision of constant attention day and night, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty-five days in the year, is possible only for a woman who derives profound satisfaction from seeing her child grow from babyhood through the many phases of childhood. . . and knows that it is her care which has made this possible,” wrote John Bowlby.111
A woman who did not feel this “profound satisfaction” was often portrayed as a bad mother. Spock explained that effective child-rearing did not depend on objective knowledge—“you know more than you think you do,” he reassured mothers—but on the mother’s attitude. He warned that a mother who was not completely and spontaneously loving might raise a child who was, if not mentally disturbed, then at least “cold and unresponsive.”112 The British psychologist Donald Winnicott, also a highly respected authority, affirmed that “the mother’s pleasure has to be there or else the whole procedure is dead, useless and mechanical.”113 The shift of emphasis from objective factors such as hygiene and nutrition to the mother’s subjective state created an impossible standard—what mother, however devoted, could maintain a positive attitude day in and day out? And, like other theorists of this period, these psychologists assumed that all mothers lived in middle-class comfort and took no account of the many problems and crises that could disturb the emotional equilibrium of mothers in less fortunate circumstances.114
Thus even as they glorified motherhood, child psychologists strongly implied that many, even most women were unqualified for it. Widely cited works on the psychology of women transmitted the same message. According to the Freudian analyst Helene Deutsch, who devoted the second volume of her massive work on women’s sexual lives (published in 1945) to the topic of motherhood, narcissism—the love of self—and masochism—the need for self-sacrifice—were core elements of the female personality. By perfectly merging her own ego with that of her child, the mother could gratify both of these needs.115 But unresolved “masculine wishes,” among which Deutsch classified all drives toward individual development, could impair this delicate adjustment. And few modern women could ignore the claims of the ego. “There is hardly a woman,” Deutsch remarked, “in whom the normal psychic conflicts do not result in a pathologic distortion, at some point, of the biologic process of motherhood.”116 However perfectly performed, moreover, the maternal role offered no permanent satisfaction: the more self-sacrificing the mother, the greater her sense of loss when her child grew up and became independent. The only defense against this threat was the production of numerous children, a path that was now “largely barred as a result of cultural influences.” Deutsch implied that, for most women, the maternal dilemma was insoluble—motherhood stood in the way of individual self-realization, and often brought more psychic conflict than pleasure.117
Simone de Beauvoir, who cited Deutsch copiously, turned the psychologist’s theory on its head by attributing the mother’s misery not to her own failed personal adjustment but to the maternal role itself. For Beauvoir, as for her partner Jean-Paul Sartre, full membership in the human race involved the transcendence of the body and its limitations through the development of an autonomous self expressed through intellectual or artistic creativity. But she asserted that under existing conditions transcendence was attainable only by males, who were not encumbered but empowered by their reproductive function: “the advantage that man enjoys… is that his vocation as a human being in no way runs counter to his destiny as a male.”118
Woman by contrast was trapped in immanence and the body, alienated from her creative potential and enslaved to “her whole organic structure that is adapted for the perpetuation of the species.”119 Deluded by the culture’s glorification of motherhood, women might believe that child-rearing itself was a path to transcendence. But Beauvoir rejected this possibility. When they were both adolescents, her friend Zaza had declared that “ ‘bringing nine children into the world as Mama has done is just as good as writing books.’ ” Beauvoir recalled that she “couldn’t see any common denominator between these two modes of existence. … To have children, who in turn would have more children, was simply to go on playing the same old tune ad infinitum; the scholar, the artist, the writer created other worlds, all sweetness and light, in which everything had purpose. That was where I wished to spend my life.”120 Though conceding to Deutsch that women bore children in order to gratify narcissistic wishes, Beauvoir condemned this as a false and harmful fantasy. The vicarious identification of one individual with another could only violate the right of both to develop in freedom. Not only could maternity not confer “transcendence by proxy,” but it was not “enough to crown a woman’s life.”121 In a famous formulation, she characterized maternity as “a strange mixture of narcissism, altruism, idle daydreaming, sincerity, bad faith, devotion, and cynicism.”122
Beauvoir broke decisively with earlier feminist theorists and their vision of a chosen, enlightened and socially supported “new motherhood.” To be sure, she suggested in her conclusion that the position of mothers might be improved in some future socialist state, but such utopian visions had lost most of their credibility in the postwar era, and she did not develop this idea. Her central message was pessimistic: the maternal dilemma (at least under existing conditions) was insoluble, for maternity was the enemy of autonomy. “There is one feminine function which is almost impossible to exercise in freedom,” she concluded, “and that is maternity.”123
The Second Sex was widely read and exceedingly controversial. Beauvoir was attacked from all sides: conservative critics invoked religious doctrines, socialists the importance of reproduction to society, communists the evils of “bourgeois individualism.”124 Some feminists asserted that motherhood was a rewarding task, and criticized Beauvoir’s identification of human potential with maleness.125 But others affirmed and developed her insights.
In 1958, the appearance of a book entitled Frauen im Laufgitter (Women in the Playpen), by the lawyer and activist Iris von Roten, caused almost as sensational a reaction in Switzerland as Beauvoir’s book in France. Von Roten, who had read Beauvoir, also aimed to gain an overview of the “problems of women’s lives, that arise from the double role—individual person, female person—in the context of male-dominated society.”126 Von Roten broke decisively with the mainstream Swiss women’s movement, whose propaganda in favor of woman suffrage featured a domestic and nonthreatening image of the Swiss woman. Like Beauvoir, von Roten characterized motherhood as a “burden without dignity” (“Burde ohne Wurde”). Conventional idealization of mothers thinly disguised men’s disgust for women’s reproductive functions: “they regard themselves as fully superior to what they regard as the shame of the female sex.”127 And as for mothers’ fabled devotion to their children, it too often became a kind of vicarious satisfaction for women whose lives were otherwise empty. This kind of “mother-love,” which was threatened by children’s independence and autonomy, was more likely to have harmful than beneficial effects.128 When it was published in 1958, the book attracted so much negative criticism that von Roten’s former allies in the League of Swiss Women’s Associations immediately distanced themselves from her radical ideas, which they feared would discredit the suffrage movement.129
In the 1960s, many younger feminists saw their own situations reflected in Beauvoir’s book. When the British sociologist Anne Oakley read The Second Sex, she had two small children. “I was trying to adjust to the role of full-time mother and not succeeding very well. … I found it really inspiring, in common with many other people—many other women.”130 Joyce Goodfellow, another British reader of the same generation, also concluded that Beauvoir was right: “I feel the book should carry a health warning: ‘Beware of breeding; it cramps ambition, intellectual opportunity, and the bank balance, and it isn’t fair to the children.’ ”131
Whatever their opinions of Beauvoir, her readers agreed that she had broken the taboos that still constrained the discussion of motherhood. “There was nothing else that did what The Second Sex did in terms of analyzing why women are in the state they are in,” remarked Ann Oakley.132 Encouraged by Beauvoir, mothers of the 1960s often openly expressed ambivalent feelings. They complained about the social conditions of the postwar era—cramped housing, a lack of child-care facilities, and the dangers of an urban environment now dominated by automobile traffic—which afforded mothers little relief from the company of their young children. But their problems were even more psychological than practical. “I remember having spent four years and three months without ever being without small children for more than a few hours,” wrote Evelyne Sullerot. “Such a task requires the extinction of all personal life. One loses the sense of time. With increasing sleep deprivation, the days go by like a dream. . . . The frustration of every continuous effort gives rise to a peculiar sense of monotony and confusion. Repetitions, interruptions, new starts.”133 A young British mother, Val Charlton, recalled that the birth of her son in 1970 was “a tremendous shock… I really hated it; I loved him, but I hated the way of life. I was isolated, I was in the place by myself, I thought I was going insane.” Even before she joined a feminist group, Charlton had decided that “this is ridiculous, we can’t live like this, we need to do something about it.”134
As had their predecessors of the interwar years, feminists of the 1960s debunked the myth of mother-love by focusing on the pathological side of the mother-child relationship. In 1967, a new feminist movement was initiated in the Netherlands by an influential essay entitled “Woman and her Discontents”(“Zfe onbehagen bij de vrouw”) by the literary critic Joke Kool — Smit, who a year later joined the founders of a new organization called the “Men’s and Women’s Society” (Mann-Vrouw Matschaapij). Kool-Smit declared that motherhood could never be a creative activity, for the mother did not “create” her children—whether they were smart or stupid, difficult or easy to raise was largely a matter of luck.135 In 1966 the British literary scholar and Marxist theoretician Juliet Mitchell charged that the channeling of women’s pent-up energies into child-rearing damaged their children. “Anything the child does is… a threat to the mother herself, who has renounced her autonomy through this misconception of her reproductive role. There are few more precarious ventures on which to base a life.”136 And in Penelope Mortimer’s novel of 1962, The Pumpkin Eater, the mother of a large family realized that, having sacrificed her personal development, she had nothing to give her children: “In fact, lacking now my own instincts, values, and beliefs, I had nothing to offer them, and what they offered me— dependence, love, trust—seemed a monumental responsibility which I could no longer bear.”137
How could mothers and children be freed of this pathological bind? One solution was to shorten the period of full-time motherhood and allow the woman to return as soon as possible to her interrupted career. In the 1950s, almost all advice to mothers, including the influential work of Klein and Myrdal, had discouraged day care for children under school age. And mothers seem to have agreed, for few worked full time when their children were young.138 Socialist and communist women’s groups campaigned for the expansion of public day care, but without much success. In fact, day-care centers had acquired a negative image as the last resort of the poor and desperate. But by contrast, working mothers of school-age children asserted that their children did not suffer, but on the contrary gained in independence and self-reliance.139
By 1960, Bowlby’s theory of “maternal deprivation” came under an ever more intense critique. Among the first and most vocal critics was Iris von Roten, who wrote in 1958 that “the male-supremacist arrangement through which mothers are responsible for all their children’s needs for a quarter — century … is doubly tragic. For it is in the interests neither of mothers nor of children.” As long as children were sure of their parents’ affection, she continued, they were better off in a well-run day-care center than in an isolated home.140 Results based on institutionalized children in wartime, wrote the Norwegian sociologist Ase Grude Skard, were not applicable to the more secure lives of children whose mothers worked predictable hours and left them with loving substitute caretakers. Besides, the mother too had needs: “a woman is more than just a milieu for her child or her children—she has her own value as a human being and the problem must also be considered for what may serve her interests and development.”141 Many authors of the 1960s urged their readers (in the words of the French feminists Texier and Michel) to “distinguish between the quality and the quantity of contacts between mother and child.”142 The establishment of experimental day-care centers, often staffed by parents, was among the first projects of “new feminist” groups after 1968.143
Another way of lightening the burdens of maternity was to expand the role of fathers. In the interwar era, as we have seen, feminist theorists had advocated the transformation of the patriarch into a nurturing parent. Not until the postwar era, however, did the laws of most countries support a flexible division of parental labor. In Sweden, social scientists coined the phrase “sex roles” to replace the customary definitions of motherhood and fatherhood. “Both men and women have one role, that of a human being,” asserted the sociologist Edmund Dahlstrom in 1962. “For both sexes, this role would include child care.”144 The sociologist Per-Olaf Tiller reversed Bowlby’s theory to lament the absence of fathers from their children’s lives, which left their sons without male role models.145 The concept of egalitarian parenthood was brought into Swedish policy discussions through the work of the “Sex-Role group,” which was founded in 1964 and included influential academics, journals, and leaders of parties and trade-unions.146 By 1968, the equalization of parental roles had become a goal of the new feminist movements in all countries. The French birth-control activist Catherine Valabregue noted in that year that laws would soon give mothers and fathers similar rights and responsibilities—why should they not drop outworn roles and create a new style of family life?147 Juliet Mitchell recommended the deconstruction of the nuclear family and its replacement by diverse households and institutional settings in which child-rearing responsibility could be shared by parents, teachers, and other adults.148
The Dutch feminist Joke Kool-Smit looked forward to the day when women could see themselves “first as human beings, and only secondly as women.”149 But was this idea of the “human” truly gender-neutral, or was it modeled on men’s lives? And in either case, what were its implications for motherhood—a distinctively female function? Did motherhood belong to a set of outworn expectations that the modern human being could simply cast off? This fear was expressed in 1949 by the American anthropologist Margaret Mead, who had a wide readership in Europe. Mead speculated that the blurring of gender boundaries might threaten continuance of the human race, which required that “women had to be willing to accept men as lovers, live with them as wives, and conceive, bear, feed and cherish their children. Any society disappears which fails to make these demands on its members and to receive this much from them.”150 Many feminist writers of this era asserted that the desire for children was so deeply rooted that women would, of course, continue to become mothers. “The dearest desire of the majority of women will always be to have children,” wrote Valabregue.
But why, if motherhood plunged them into a painful dilemma? “The younger generation of women wish to become mothers—they wish to care for their families and surround themselves with harmony,” stated Elisabeth Pfeil, “and at the same time they want to contribute to the support of their families and exercise a profession.”151 To a woman caught in this dilemma, maternity might well bring not the fulfillment, but rather the splitting of the self. The British sociologist Viola Klein argued that pressures to reconcile the demands of her two roles by acting “confident and businesslike” in the workplace and “sensitive, adaptable, unassertive. . . domestic. . . and if possible not too intelligent” in the home doomed the modern woman to emotional distress.152 Beauvoir’s contemporary, Fran^oise d’Eaubonne, pictured the modern woman in the grip of a wrenching conflict between mind and body, striving “to reconcile the subjectivity that she possesses as a human being and the object that she becomes as a servant of love and the species.”153
Subjectivity as a human being, objectification as a mother—these were antitheses that could not be reconciled. Even before the rise of a new feminist movement around 1968, a few thinkers directly stated that the refusal of motherhood was a step toward autonomy. Chief among these was Simone de Beauvoir, who rejected Mead’s contention that women must remain in the “iron grip of the species.”154 Though she conceded that motherhood, when “freely assumed and completely wanted,” might be rewarding, Beauvoir stated plainly that under existing conditions, it was slavery—an opinion that she never changed.155 In 1986, the year before Beauvoir’s death, she was asked by Yolanda Patterson whether she still believed that “maternity prevents women from finding her own identity.” Beauvoir responded that “as it exists today, I think so. Because the woman is too much of a slave.”156 As she recounted in her memoirs, she and Sartre decided against parenthood early in their relationship. Not only did she feel no narcissistic desire to rediscover herself in a child, but she refused to engage in “a purposeless and unjustifiable increase in the world’s population… I never felt as though I was holding out against motherhood: it simply was not my natural lot in life, and by remaining childless I was fulfilling my proper function.”157
The postwar era, which began in 1945 with a return to motherhood, ended noisily in 1968 when a new generation claimed the right to refuse it. “There is no reason, except the moral prejudice that women who do not have children are shirking a responsibility, why all women should consider themselves bound to breed,” wrote Germaine Greer, the British author of a widely read book, The Female Eunuch (1970).158 “Boss of my own belly!” (Baas in eigen buik!)” read the placards carried by Dutch feminists who picketed a gynecological congress in 1970.159
Should we have children, or have none?
The choice belongs to us alone.
proclaimed German demonstrators in 1971.160 “The only rational attitude toward what society has made of maternity is to refuse it,” declared a French manifesto entitled “Slave Motherhood” in 1972.161 The words of this vocal minority signaled a broader trend. By 1966, the end of the postwar baby boom was marked by a slight but noticeable fall in birthrates in all of the Western European countries. From a postwar peak of 18.3 births per 1,000 population in 1959, France’s birthrate declined to 17.4 in 1966; that of the Netherlands from 21.3 in 1961 to 19.2 in 1966; that of England and Wales from 18.5 in 1964 to 17.7 in 1966.162 The continuation of these trends would result in birthrates below replacement rate by the mid-1980s and in negative growth rates after 2000.163 The “twilight of parenthood,” predicted by writers of the interwar era, had begun.
The thinkers of the postwar era provided a basis for the new feminism that developed after 1968. Their contributions were important. By repudiating the cult of patriotic motherhood they defined childbearing as an individual choice, which might be supported but should not be constrained by the state. By validating individual experience, they laid the epistemological foundation for a new feminist scholarship. Nonetheless, their ideology of gender equality raised as many questions as that of the earlier generations who had stressed gender difference. For in their zeal to avoid biological determinism, the postwar thinkers had created an ideal of the “human” which in fact was modeled on male occupational, sexual, and ethical patterns. “Maternity, far from being presented as the supreme destiny of women,” suggested d’Eaubonne, “should be relegated to the important, but non-essential, status of paternity in the lives of men—that is to say, the fulfillment of a life that is already sufficient in itself.”164 The living out of this ideal brought, not a gender-neutral equality, but new forms of subordination. The “three-phase” life-plan, the equation of career success with emancipation, the double burden—all these were attempts to fit female existence into male dominated structures of work and family life. Even the renunciation of motherhood was an admission of inequality—for men did not experience the same pressure to choose between career success or other aspirations and parenthood. And in the world of work that women now entered in great numbers, they would encounter new forms of discrimination, inequality, and marginalization.
Therefore, a new generation of feminists soon discovered the difficulties with the assertion of a gender-neutral, “human” identity that was in practice male-identified. Some decided that a radical critique of male supremacy could only come from an oppositional position—a positive female identity. In 1970, the Italian group Rivolta Femminile reclaimed motherhood as a distinctive aspect of that identity: “The transmission of life, respect for life, awareness of life are intense experiences for woman and values that she claims as her own.” And the discussion turned again to the maternal dilemma—to the conflict between the claims of the generically human and the distinctively feminine aspects of identity. “Woman’s first reason for resentment against society is being forced to face maternity as a dilemma.”165 The debate on the meanings of gender equality and gender difference would be continued by a new feminist movement.
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