Mothers

by Jacqueline Rose

  Long before the migration crisis provided its image of the alien, invading mother, the single mother, it seems, was the original ‘scrounger’, the term that allows a cruelly unequal society to turn its back on those it has itself thrown to the bottom of the social scrapheap. This manipulative, undeserving mother was the perfect embodiment of the so-called ‘dependency’ culture, an idea that is being revived today in the UK in order to justify an even more full-scale dismantling of the welfare state, and more widely in the global North as part of austerity measures that target social provision above all else. ‘In a country where many children do without homes and food,’ Michelle Harrison writes in a report issued in Canada by the Metis Women of Manitoba, ‘it is easier to punish one pregnant woman than to alleviate the condition of many.’33

  Again, it is also worth noticing how far the real vulnerability and needs of a single mother, not to speak of those of the child or children for whom she has responsibility, seem to work in her disfavour. Lone parents, especially unmarried mothers, are still one of the poorest groups in Britain; it is estimated that they will lose 18 per cent in the universal credit squeeze.34 According to a 2013 US census, single mothers earn an average income of $24,000 compared with the $80,000 earned by married couples with children.35 As if genuine neediness – being, or having once been, the baby of a mother – is what Conservative rhetoric hates most. Perhaps when right-wing politicians screw up their noses at scroungers, asylum seekers and refugees, it is their own vaguely remembered years of utter dependency that they are trying, and instructing us, to repudiate. The one who most loudly promotes the ideal of ironclad self-sufficiency must surely have the echo of the baby in the nursery hovering somewhere at the back of his or her – mostly his – head.

  We should also remember that it was not until 1973 in the UK that, following divorce or separation, mothers gained equal custody rights over their children. The father was legally the sole parent and a mother was only granted custody of her children until the age of seven. Up until the 1920s a woman was only free to apply to the courts for equal custodianship if she was legally married. A single woman was robbed of her children, tarred with deficiency, as if she herself were the reason for the economic constraints and social exclusion from which she was likely to suffer. In fact, the prejudice was no respecter of class. The nineteenth-century aristocrat Caroline Norton was denied all access to her three sons when she finally left her physically abusive and profligate husband (he subsequently failed to tell her when one of them suffered a fatal accident).

  Historically, single mothers are not the exception. Throughout the twentieth century the number of single mothers in the UK was high, matched by the levels of illegitimacy precipitated by both the First and the Second World Wars (during the wars, with so many men at the front, single motherhood was something of a norm). The perfect family model of a married heterosexual couple, against which single mothers are so harshly measured, is an anomaly, a mere blip of the statistics, typical only between 1945 and 1970. When Pat Thane laid this out in 2010 in ‘Happy Families? History and Family Policy’, the question mark of the title was the giveaway and provocation. Her pamphlet provoked an outcry from Conservatives and family lobbyists determined to prove the lasting damage inflicted on children by family breakdown and the unconventional child-rearing arrangements that have been its consequence (I am inclined to think that the real scandal might have been the idea that a single mother, however hard her life, might also be happy).36 Although absentee fathers are also indicted, the barely hidden subtext of this rhetoric is that single mothers cannot be entrusted with the care of their own children. In the UK, the number of young women who had their children forcibly removed for adoption over three decades from the 1950s to the 1970s is only today coming to light (in October 2016, the Catholic Church issued an open apology leading to calls for a public inquiry).37 The irony is glaring. Mothers in the home are expected to manage more or less on their own – one of feminism’s loudest, most persistent and fairest complaints – but the one thing a mother cannot possibly manage by herself is mothering.

  It is, of course, a predominantly white, middle-class domestic ideal that is being promoted, one which fewer and fewer families can possibly live up to. But that has not prevented it from spreading down the class spectrum and across all ethnic groups, trampling over the ‘motherwork’ of women of colour, which, as Patricia Hill Collins, scholar of African American studies, was the first of many to insist, cuts across private and public, and is not corralled inside the family unit. Instead such work plays a crucial role in collective, community survival in a racially discriminating world, thereby unsettling just about every white-dominated dichotomy on the subject of mothers.38 Today the relationship between white mothers and mothers of colour is repeating an age-old history, especially in the US, as undocumented migrants take care of the children of white middle-class mothers, relieving them of the burden of childcare so they can parade the seamless compatibility of their professional and domestic lives.

  When Zoë Baird, nominated for attorney general in 1993, was found to be employing two undocumented Peruvian immigrants, one as a babysitter, there was a public uproar for her violation of immigration law prohibiting the hiring of illegal aliens. The practice, it turned out, was widespread, though no one, least of all the hiring mothers, wanted to talk about it. Notably absent in the outcry over the case of Baird, who had to step down as potential attorney general, was the slightest concern for the migrant mothers themselves.39 Their working conditions are often inhuman. Maria de Jesus Ramos Hernandez left her three children in Mexico to work for a household in California, where she was repeatedly raped by her employer, who threatened her with jail as an illegal migrant if she did not submit. Her case received little attention, but the story is typical. These migrant women, who so often have to leave their own children behind, are mostly paid a pittance. Once again lost motherhood is the tale behind other forms of exploitation. Like Bimbo Ayelabola, they are accused of leeching off the welfare system (a charge previously targeted at job-stealing migrant men). In fact, they are being used as a cheap labour force that greases the economy while allowing other mothers to get rich. Solidarity among mothers, across class and ethnic boundaries, is not something Western cultures seem in any hurry to promote.

  * * *

  It is, therefore, immensely reassuring to register the instances of women organising against the forms of prejudice and social exclusion directed towards those mothers who have tried, and are still trying, against the harshest material odds, to create a viable life for themselves. In 1918, the pioneering National Council for the Unmarried Mother and her Child was set up in the UK to support such women, and is still active today (renamed the National Council for One Parent Families in 1970; since 2009 as Gingerbread, with which it merged in 2007). Its history includes moments of unlikely solidarity. During the First World War, the Prince of Wales Fund decided not to support unmarried mothers. One of their midwives told the executive committee about a ‘respectable married woman’ she had attended the previous day who had said she was happy to ‘wash herself and leave her child unwashed’ so that the midwife could go to plead the cause of unmarried mothers.40

  A report on mother and baby hostels set up during the Second World War – another moment when unmarried mothers were the target of moral panic – describes how the matrons turned desolate premises into havens for ‘utterly friendless girls’ who may never before have known a home or ‘whose parents set their own petty respectability above the ordinary decencies of human relationships’.41 The girls would leave the hostels ‘with a great deal more confidence than when they arrived’.42 The report was never published.

  Note, too, the sexual undertow (these girls are not ‘respectable’). One of the greatest wartime fears was that single girls would become pregnant by black American servicemen, with dire consequences for the race of the nation and potentially for the servicemen themselves. ‘Any English girl who walks out, however harmlessl
y, with a coloured American soldier,’ a lady-in-waiting to Queen Mary, the Queen Mother, wrote to Violet Markham in 1942, ‘should be made to understand that she will very probably cause his death.’43 In the same breath her remark manages to express solicitude for the girl and the soldier, and raw prejudice against the idea of ‘mixed marriages’ and their potential offspring.

  During the First World War, Markham had been secretary to an official investigation into suggested ‘immorality’ among servicewomen stationed in France. The charge was common. Gail Lewis, sociologist and writer on race and gender, was born to a white mother and a black father. In a conversation written as an open letter to her mother, Lewis quotes Major-General Arthur Arnold Bullick Dowler, who in 1942 wrote a secret missive, ‘Notes on Relations with Coloured Troops’: ‘White women should not associate with coloured men. It follows then, that they should not walk out, dance, or drink with them. Do not think such action hard or unsociable. They do not expect your companionship and such relations would in the end only result in strife’ (the letter was published in the first volume of Studies in the Maternal, one of the most open-minded online journals on the complexity of mothering). The fallout from these attitudes would track Lewis for the rest of her life. ‘How others cast you’, she addresses her mother, ‘as sexually depraved and morally bankrupt.’44 A white mother bearing a black child surpassed all understanding.

  As so often in relation to mothers, something about sexuality – its pleasures and dangers – is at play (this too will be my refrain). It is another common assumption that a single mother is a woman who puts her sexual life ahead of her social responsibility. She therefore has only herself, or rather her voracious sexual appetites, to blame. Manipulative or sexual, the single mother exhibits either too much control over her sexual life or not enough – what is hardly ever mentioned in relation to teenage pregnancies is the possibility of child abuse and rape. Behind the idea of maternal virtue, therefore, another demand and/or reproach. A mother is a woman whose sexual being must be invisible. She must save the world from her desire – thereby allowing the world to conceal the unmanageable nature of all human sexuality, and its own voraciousness, from itself (as if sexuality never exists outside the bounds of married life).

  Even in the years leading up to the 1960s, when there was more sympathy for the predicament of single mothers, the basic assumption was there. ‘Innocent’ girls could get into trouble and merited understanding provided, in the words of Thane and Evans in the opening pages of their book, ‘they did not flaunt their transgressions.’45 Nor is the childless woman immune from sexual taint. ‘Surely,’ as one journalist summed up a common presumption about the declining birth rate in twenty-first century France, ‘a woman who refuses to be a mother enjoys lovemaking rather too much?’46 The shudder of disapproval barely conceals its own excitement. At whatever point of the spectrum – no babies or illegitimate babies or too many babies – women find themselves caught in a steel vice (the most recent version being the charge that excessively reproducing mothers are responsible for climate change).47

  I started this chapter by asking: what are mothers being asked to carry, what forms of failure and injustice are they made accountable for, above all, in the modern Western world? What are the fears we lay on mothers, both as accusation and demand (the one following the other)? Why do we expect mothers to subdue the very fears we ourselves have laid at their door? For much of the rest of this book, in dialogue with some of the most searching writing on mothers, I will be attempting some kind of answer. In the meantime, since the most powerful ideologies of motherhood present themselves as eternal and unchanging – from here to maternity – the question must be: has it always been thus? After all, it is one of the first principles of feminism that, if you want to challenge a stereotype, especially one masquerading as nature or virtue or essence, if your aim is to drag it down from its pedestal or yank it up from the dirt where it festers, then try and find where it all started. Better still, look to a place and time when – maybe – it was not even there.

  THEN

  There was a time when becoming a mother meant no loss of a woman’s role in vital forms of public life. In Ancient Greece, a woman was maiden, bride and then, after childbirth, mature female. This was hardly a life of freedom. Young girls of thirteen and fourteen were married off to men in their thirties. Women, like slaves, were not citizens (the woman/slave analogy eloquent in itself). A woman could fulfil her destiny only as a mother. But according to one account of Greek motherhood, in doing so she did not cease to be involved in civic space, notably in the community of women who participated in religious ceremonies.1 It was the single arena in which women enjoyed parity or even superiority vis-à-vis men. Women held priestly office and performed ceremonial duties, such as at the Eleusinian Mysteries in honour of the goddess Demeter and at the Panathenian festivals that celebrated the Athenian patron goddess Athena (they appear everywhere in the Ionic frieze of the Parthenon, the most important religious building in the city).2 Women played an important role in the cult activity that fostered the welfare of the household (oikos) and city, including the ritual commemoration of the dead.3 Such activity enabled them to intervene in the politics of their community, granting them, in the words of classics scholar Barbara Goff, ‘significant presence and agency in the public realm’ (as she also points out, ritual itself was a type of work).4 Although ancient Athens was undoubtedly a patriarchal society, scholars have argued that names, property and priesthoods could all travel through the female line.5

  Visits to temples both before and after the birth of a child gave the mother considerable access to the community beyond the domestic boundaries of the home.6 On becoming a mother, the woman therefore maintained her ties to a realm that exceeded the domain of motherhood itself, an idea that modern times seem progressively to have lost. ‘Parenthood is not a transition,’ Rachel Cusk writes in A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother (2001), ‘but a defection, a political act.’7 After the birth of her first child, Cusk felt she had been left stranded on the far shore of any viable political life. Her horizons narrowed. She was cut down to size. Cusk is pointing out that this isolation from the wider world – separate spheres, as it was first defined in the nineteenth century – is as sudden as it is absolute (this regardless of whether today’s mother eventually returns to work). But it is neither natural nor eternal. It is a piece of history, and should be recognised both as personally damaging and as a fully political fact.

  A few years earlier, in 1998, Melissa Benn wrote of the way modern mothers seem ‘encased in a new silence … We know what we do, but we don’t talk about it publicly.’8 She praised the new-found forms of community and solidarity she encountered among mothers while researching her book, but she also noted the restricted compass of mothers talking mainly, sometimes only, to each other. In fact, in the UK and the US, a mother’s separation from the polity has by no means always been the norm. There is a long tradition going back to the eighteenth century of seeing motherhood as part of civic life. The role of the mother was to generate the new citizen, and the nation’s stability was seen to reside in the civic virtue she cultivated in her child – although, since the mother was confined to the home, this only granted her, in historian Linda Colley’s words, a ‘public role of a kind’.9

  In 451–450 BC, Pericles, orator, statesman and a general of Athens, passed a law that made citizenship conditional on descent from an Athenian mother as well as a father, excluding all xenos, or foreign ‘outsiders’.10 The Athenian mother therefore played a key role in transmitting the citizenship from which she herself was debarred (that she was being used to block the civic status of alien mothers has a chilling resonance in today’s anti-migrant world). Scholars are divided as to whether this increased or lowered her status, as they are as to whether the virtue of the mother’s femininity in relation to husband and child was freighted with the duty of securing the viability of nation and city space.

  Either way, as classics
scholar Edith Hall has pointed out, the frequency with which Greek men enunciated their ideal of femininity suggests that women by no means always conformed to it.11 Athenian women uttering obscenities and handling pastry models of genitalia during the winter Haloa festival at Eleusis may have acted as a safety valve, but such practices also indicate that the dominant codes aimed at securing the role of successful wife and mother for women were, as Goff puts it, ‘always at risk’.12 According to Thucydides, women joined in the fourth-century revolution in Kerkyra (Corfu), throwing tiles onto the heads of the oligarchs from the roofs (this also appears to have been viewed as an acceptable activity for women in times of siege).13 Speeches from the ancient courts of law show women, despite the severest restrictions on their legal rights, determined to do all they could to maximise their influence.14

  Attic drama suggests this independent spirit was nowhere more present than in relation to mothers, who are portrayed as citizens, chorus, subjects on the world’s stage. This can help us – it certainly has helped me – to envisage alternative ways of thinking about the real and imagined political selfhood of being a mother. At moments, Greece and Rome – with Shakespeare in a walk-on part – will appear as inspirational, at others as scarily familiar. Not for nothing is Greece, in the famously Eurocentric formula, referred to as ‘cradle’ or ‘birthplace’ of the West – or ‘the mother of us all’, as one might say. We should be wary, of course – classical culture is not the only way of tracking the path from now to then. But, as scholars from Mary Beard to Edith Hall have convincingly argued, the Greeks are still with us today, even as Beard issues the salutary caution that our grip on classical times is fragile. As ancient historian Esther Eidinow writes, the sparse evidence throws ‘only the faintest of silhouettes down through time’, even while her study of witch trials in fourth-century Athens is aimed at retrieving the agency and power of these women.15