Motherhood

I want to suggest that although (obviously) women have always had children, it is only with the rise of late modernity that we see the emergence of the legal institution that we now recognize as motherhood. Before the middle of the nineteenth century, women had no legal status or standing as mothers; put simply, motherhood had no legal existence. Although in practice the unmarried mother was held to be responsible for her bastard, the bastard itself was, in law, the child of no one. The married mother, on the other hand, did not even have these pleasures of responsibility except under the governance of her husband. Only fathers, and hence fatherhood, existed in law. The father gave a child his name, his inheritance, his religion, his domicile; in fact everything a child was granted was treated as coming from the father. The mother was significant in that she brought forth the legitimate heirs, but after that she was little more, formally speaking, than a nanny would have been.

Establishing motherhood as a recognized social and legal institution, with similar rights and duties as fatherhood, involved considerable struggle. This struggle came from two main directions. The first was from (middle-class and upper-class) mothers themselves. Starting with proto-feminist campaigns over the custody of children on separation or divorce (for upper-class women; Norton 1982) and campaigns over wife torture that involved allowing poor women to leave their husbands and to take their children under 7 years of age with them (Smart and Brophy 1985), feminists forced onto the public agenda the beginnings of an appreciation of the work of caring and the importance of mother-love for the welfare of children. These feminists were actively engaged in the social construction of motherhood as a recognized institution. They demanded institutional recognition through the law, and they constructed an ideology of motherhood that rendered mothers as caring, vital, central actors in the domestic sphere, as well as persons with an identity and source of special knowledge that was essential to the good rearing of a child. It is therefore important to recognize that the gradual bringing into being of the legal institution of motherhood was in part a result of political struggle by early feminists who were able to use the ideology of motherhood to try to gain more rights in the nascent family law of the day. These changing meanings of motherhood were integral with other well-documented changes in the nineteenth century, such as the increasing separation of public and private spheres and the rise of the middle classes and their waxing influence over dominant values in civil society.

The second source arose from the work of the philanthropic organizations of the nineteenth century (and later social work, health and ‘psy’ professions (Donzelot 1979; Davin 1978). These organizations sought to impose specific standards of motherhood on working-class women through health education, child protection legislation, and various activities associated with poor relief, such as demands for maternity benefits that would have ‘strings’ attached. These strings might be the requirement for a doctor to attend deliveries, or they might be requirements for mothers to attend clinics with their babies (Clarke et al. 1987). In other instances the imposition of the new values and practices of mothering could be more draconian, as with instances of bringing criminal prosecutions against mothers for leaving their children unattended while they went out to work. A whole range of persuasive policies was gradually brought to bear on working-class mothers to alter their mothering practices. These strategies were strongly supported by ideologies of motherhood that expressed the natural characteristics of mothers as coinciding with a class-specific, historically located ideal of what a mother should be. It is vitally important to recognize that this ideology was hardly persuasive in and of itself. Some working-class mothers resisted (and still resist) this hegemonic version of ideal motherhood, but a diversity of mothering ideals could hardly thrive under the pressures that were then exerted. The growth of a more centralized state, and thus the ability to create normative standards and to impose them more uniformly, meant that folk knowledges and customs in child­rearing came under sustained pressure. This meant that there was little appreciation of diversity or even of the difficulties faced by working-class mothers. Instead there were discursively created either good mothers or bad mothers.

NORMALIZING MOTHERHOOD

Once we recognize the possibility of homogenizing motherhood, made feasible by the institutionalization of certain standards as well as the introduction of more centralized strategies of imposition, we can begin to see how Foucault’s notion of normalizing discourse applies to motherhood. As ideals of good motherhood became fixed into policies (say, for example, in relation to the feeding of infants) then it became feasible to apply these standards widely through teams of health visitors, doctors, social workers or NSPCC officers.5 Thus, taking the feeding example, the mother who fed her infant on demand from a tube (Davin 1978) and the mother who fed her infant from her own plate ‘too soon’ became inadequate mothers. The good mother either breast-fed her infant herself or fed from a special and hygienically prepared bottle every four hours. (Much later, of course, only breast-feeding defined the good mother, and it was deemed that she should feed on demand and never to schedule.) We can think of numerous examples of minute practices that the good mother should follow, of which the bad mother remained, or so it was often assumed, deliberately or wilfully ignorant. These could range from allowing the infant to sleep in the parental bed (bad), to allowing it to sleep in the same room (all right for the first few months only), to failing to provide enough fresh air (bad),6 to swaddling or not swaddling, and right through to the modern rules on whether to place a baby on its front (bad now although good in the 1970s and 1980s) or its back (good in the 1990s) to sleep. These rules can be seen in Foucaultian terms as the calibrations of good motherhood. Initially they covered mainly physical matters of diet, warmth, immediate environment, and physical development. Later these calibrations were extended to include the immense realm of the psychological care and nurture of the child. Thus the good mother was no longer simply the one who fed and cleansed properly, she would be inadequate if she failed to love properly and to express this love in the correct fashion. Love, for example, should not be expressed by spoiling the child, but by very precise gestures and attitudes that were geared towards making the child an acceptable citizen. As Spensky (1992) has shown, for some mothers their love was thought to be best expressed by giving up their babies for adoption so that better-placed, married couples could raise them ‘properly’. By the 1970s, however, this mother-love was best expressed by wishing to keep such an illegitimate child.

The fact that the content of the calibrated rules of motherhood changes reveals that there is nothing natural in these manifestations of supposedly instinctual behaviour. But equally, the fact that the content changes does not weaken the overall strength of the system of rules. The significance for Foucault of normalizing discourses is the way in which degrees of adherence to the rules are secured by the stigmas and impositions placed upon those who disregard them. Thus we can think in terms of ‘tests’ that were and are imposed routinely to discover whether mothers meet or fail the standards of motherhood. There are now myriad ways of failing and, as the range of expertise on motherhood expands, so there are added new dimensions of success and failure. In the late twentieth century, even middle — and upper-class mothers can fail since the addition of psychological and emotional criteria has broadened and deepened the areas of scrutiny.7 However the public focus remains largely where it has always been, namely with working-class mothers. It is working-class mothers and, within that group, unmarried mothers (both black and white) who are still most likely to appear to disrupt the carefully calibrated norms of motherhood. That is to say they are the ones who are deemed most likely to fail on the many tests of what makes a good mother. It is therefore important to trace the history of the unwed mother alongside the rise of hegemonic motherhood, since in Foucaultian terms she is vital to the survival of normative motherhood itself. It is the boundary between the unwed mother and the married mother that has, for so long, been presumed to coincide with the boundary between the bad and the good mother.

Updated: 01.11.2015 — 20:40