If a woman has failed to avoid unprotected procreative sex and to organize an abortion, one might imagine that the resulting birth would naturally make her a mother. But even birth has not always led to mothering as we now understand that concept. Women of the upper classes did not (and still do not) ‘mother’ their children, a nanny is paid to do this. Indeed until the twentieth century they might not even have suckled their own babies. Birth was not presumed to trigger maternal feelings or, if it did, the maternal feelings were not the same as those that are thought to constitute maternal feeling today (Badinter 1981). For women of other classes there were other ways of avoiding the practice of mothering. Infanticide was a long-standing practice available to desperate women. The first specific law against infanticide in England and Wales was introduced in 1623. This draconian legislation applied only to unmarried mothers and worked with a presumption of guilt so that the onus was put on a woman to prove that a still-born baby had not been deliberately dispatched. If convicted of this offence she faced capital punishment. It is well known that juries refused to convict women under these circumstances because people were too well aware of the problems facing unsupported mothers under the Poor Law. The technology was also not available to distinguish adequately between those babies who had been suffocated and those born dead or who died of natural causes soon after birth. But, as Sauer (1978) points out, by the end of the nineteenth century in England there was a veritable moral panic over the numbers of dead babies found abandoned, and presumed killed by their mothers. Doctors were increasingly willing to define infant deaths as infanticides and more women were prosecuted. We begin therefore to see a changing moral climate over the killing of new-born infants.4
The birth of a child in the nineteenth century did not therefore seem to herald an instant adoption of what we now presume to be an instinctual mothering role, either by upper-class or by poor mothers. Even poor mothers who did not resort to baby farming, abandonment or infanticide were likely to use their older children to care for new additions to the family rather than to do so themselves, because they had to work to support them. Moreover, the kind of physical care such mothers regarded as adequate would today seem like physical neglect. As Davin (1978) has shown, during the nineteenth century there were considerable energies put into ‘improving’ the care provided to children in working-class homes and mothers were the primary focus of attention in these new public-health measures.
What this brief historical sketch reveals is that women have had various means of avoiding conception, pregnancy and mothering and that, with various degrees of enthusiasm, they have used folk knowledge and alternative systems of ‘care’. This allows us to recognize that the naturalistic chain of events that supposedly leads inexorably to motherhood really only became inevitable at the end of the nineteenth century. We can also trace the growth of increasingly centralized methods to stop women escaping from motherhood. These methods have relied heavily on the criminal law until very recently (for example, abortion was only decriminalized in 1967 in England and Wales) and still rely on legal regulation (assisted reproduction techniques, for example, are available only to certain classes of women). Thus, at the end of the last century and for much of this century, we can speak of women being criminalized if they attempted to rely on traditional means of avoiding motherhood. Such a heavily policed system should make us question the extent to which motherhood is ‘natural’ save in the most banal of senses. But in addition other, more ideological strategies have also been deployed against women, and this brings me to the final element of the naturalistic chain of events.