Is Motherhood a historically and culturally changing Concept?
M. Ali Abdi
In this essay I want to argue that motherhood is not a fixed concept over different periods of time and within different cultures, but rather is a historically and culturally changing concept, and is closely tied to notion of femininity. I try to show how meanings of motherhood and roles of mothers have changed over time, and how different factors such as capitalism, patriarchy, nationalism, politics and even technology have affected this concept historically. Besides, I try to illustrate that motherhood cannot be analyzed in isolation from its context: class, race and gender also play roles in shaping it.
In colonial days in most of the Anglo-Saxon countries, nursing children was mother’s “sacred duty” and “a great blessing and privilege” (Blum 1999: 19). Since family life, before the rise of industry in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was that of “economically independent” and “commodity producing” unit, a good mother and wife was a major “economic asset”, whose work, skills and nursing was crucial to the family’s “standard of living” (Crittenden 2001: 46; Zaretsky 1986: 38).
Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, as the “cash economy” spread, women’s work at home as mothers and wives was devalued. Families were no longer the production units of the society. Men began to collect money through “commercial transactions” and “work became synonymous [with wage-labor and] … with men’s work” (Crittenden 2001: 47). Good “mothers” were encouraged, and at the same time exalted, to stay at home and educate the future free men of the “republic” (Blum 1999: 19; Zaretsky 1986: 52).
In the early years of the twentieth century, American mothers’ duties at home were considered to be major contributions to the U.S. “global dominance” (Blum 1999: 22). Some white middle class women of the time, whom historians call “maternalists”, reinforced state policies by arguing that mothers must be “educated” to stop their “waged-work”, to stay at home, and not to “cause labor unrest”. For maternalists of the early twentieth century, “… motherhood was sacred only without $” (Blum 1999: 22-24).
Later, through the twentieth century, physicians also joined maternalists in regulating lives of mothers at home. They took over the supervision of “infant-care” and “feeding” (Blum 1999: 29). Although the work of these two groups, physicians and maternalists, contributed to a noteworthy drop in “infant death” by 1930, it also controlled and restricted motherhood (Blum 1999: 28). According to physicians’ prescriptions mothers must “exercise regularly”, “eat a bland diet” and “avoid becoming nervous” in order to have a “healthy” child (Blum 1999: 28, 29). In the early years of the twentieth century “… the physician’s word was law” which changed the characteristics of motherhood impressively.
Besides, motherhood and child rearing had direct relations to “population quality”, “vigor of nation” and “race betterment” in that period of time in American history (Blum 1999: 22, 23). Such notions were not linked to motherhood only in the early 20th century in U.S., but also in post socialist countries in recent years (Gal & Kligman 2000: 21). As Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th U.S. president, compared motherhood to “military service” which intensifies the strength of a nation, politicians of the post socialist countries also valorized motherhood by exemplifying women as “national identities” or “spiritual representatives of the nation” (Kligman 2000: 24, 26). Hence, in the eyes of post-socialist men politicians, just some specific forms of reproduction were defined as the “legitimate” means of “national reproduction”, which forced mothers to reproduce less or more under different state policies. (Kligman 2000: 25)
With the rise of capitalism through the 20th century, implications associated with the concept of motherhood extended. Although motherhood, in parts of the world, is still considered to be a “sacred duty” and a major contribution to the “nation’s strength” and “national identity”, new meanings are added to it under capitalism. Two of the basic assumptions of capitalism are that everything is for sale and greed is the natural desire of people; so people want to make and accumulate as much capital as possible; therefore, individuals are looking for cheaper laborers who can produce more valuable products. Besides, from the standpoint of capitalism, “workers do not own or control the products of their labor”. (Rothman 1989: 39) So mothers, in the eyes of capitalism, are cheap “laborers” who can produce “precious” products (babies) for their employers (husbands) (Rothman 1989: 39).
Also, the outburst of technology, along with the growing capitalism, changed the concept of motherhood (Rothman 1989). Use of new technologies such as replacement tools for disabled body limbs, “breast pumps” for women to store their milk, and “surrogacy” as a way to produce baby for an infertile couple in the body of a fertile woman, changed, and is still changing, how people think of themselves (Rothman 1989: 49; Blum 1999: 55). These forms of technology dehumanize and “disembody” people by encouraging a mechanical self-image (Blum 1999: 52). Mother’s bodies become factories or “… resources out of which babies [or milk] are made” (Rothman 1989: 39, 41). This expunging of the maternal body might lead to new forms of social control, as proved in recent “fetal right cases”, because the body of a “disembodied mother” doesn’t exist anymore (Blum 1999: 60).
On the one hand, capitalism allows a mother to think of her “body” as her own, as her “individual property”, but on the other hand it doesn’t assure that the baby produced in mother’s body is her “own” baby (Rothman 1989: 44, 45). The products of these factories belong to men as “from the standpoint of the ideology of patriarchy it’s men’s babies that are being made” (Rothman 1989: 39). In patriarchal ideology the child is an “extension” of a man not a “property” of a woman (Rothman 1989: 45). So patriarchy also joins capitalism and technology in “commodifying” children, “proletarizing” wives, “disembodying” mothers, and changing our understandings of the concept of motherhood accordingly (Rothman 1989: 39; Blum 1999).
However, these are not the only factors which affect the concept of motherhood. “Subordinated groups”, in different class and racial contexts from that of dominant ones, might see motherhood in a way which is inexplicable by the dominant discourse (Collins, 1994: 48). For example, in a Chicago neighborhood, called The Flats, in which most of the residents are living in poor black communities, the content of “rights” and “duties” in relation to children differs from that of white middle-class (Stack 1974: 73).
In these communities, motherhood is a “social position” and owns some distinctive “behavior patterns”. Thus, not necessarily (and not only) the biological mother of the child, but “anybody” can occupy this social position, and more than one person can occupy it at the “same time” (Stack 1974: 83). As a result, rights and duties of biological mothers “… can be shared or transferred to other individuals”, which is not a common practice among white middle-class women (Stack 1974: 63).
What determines the eligibility of a person to be entitled to assume the social position of motherhood in The Flats is directly related to “residential patterns”, “interpersonal relationships” of adults, and “daily exchanges” and “distributions of the limited resources” available to poor people in The Flats (Stack 1974: 64, 83). Therefore, “close friends” and “kin” who are “active participants in domestic networks”, or are needed for future exchange of “goods and services”, are likely to possess “parental roles”, and “discipline”, “train”, “provide”, “cure” and “groom” each other’s children (Stack 1974: 66, 78, 84, 86).
Other subordinated groups in US, like “African-American”, “Asian-American”, “Hispanic” and “Native American” communities, which are framed by the intersection of race and class, also have different perceptions from the notion of motherhood and mothering (Collins 1994: 45). “Motherwork” at home, such as nursing, nurturing and socializing the next generation, is understood as work “on behalf of the family as a whole” and a struggle to preserve “family integrity”, rather than “benefiting men” exclusively (Collins 1994: 47).
This type of “motherwork”, in these communities, is seen as a means to maintain “physical survival” of children, to strengthen the “power” of community, and to foster a “meaningful racial identity” in a society which discriminates against people of color (Collins 1994: 47, 49, 57). Actually, without racial ethnic women’s motherwork such communities would not “survive” because mothers are the ones who “make preparations for their babies to live” in extremely unpleasant conditions (Collins 1994: 50). They struggle for “maternal empowerment” in order to have “control” over their bodies, to keep those children that are “wanted”, and to prevent dominant groups from controlling their children’s “minds” (Collins 1994: 53, 54). They also try to provide their children the necessary skills required to “confront” and “challenge” the systems of racial oppression (Collins 1994: 58). So survival, power and identity shape motherhood, especially for marginalized women of color, who are illustrative examples of culturally changing concept of motherhood.
Lastly, I want to re-emphasize that the main argument that I wanted to follow through the text was that the concept of motherhood is not immutable but rather is changing through time and has different perceptions and roles affiliated to within different social, cultural and economical contexts. Its implication extends from a sacred duty to the vigor of nation, to a proletariat, to a valuable commodity, to a practical tool in the hands of nationalist politicians, even to a powerful means to oppose poverty. So one might predict that the notion of motherhood would acquire new indications in future and, as a matter of fact, this text is a proof for this prediction.
