Mothers

by Jacqueline Rose

  There are, however, few testimonies available from the mothers of Ancient Greece themselves, who, in the words of Lauren Hackworth Petersen and Patricia Salzman-Mitchell, editors of a volume on the topic, ‘left little trace of their own existence’ (a lot of examples are taken by necessity from funeral urns).16 Hence my focus on drama, which has survived more or less intact and where different versions of motherhood, for better or worse, could be tried out for size, admittedly written by men. My engagement with classical culture on the subject of mothers has left me alternately cheering and tearing my hair (although, as we will see, by the time I have finished the two responses start to coalesce).

  In Euripides’ The Suppliant Women, Aethra pleads with her son Theseus to be allowed to speak on behalf of the Argive mothers whose fallen sons lie unburied. The play can be read as a mother-centred version of the better-known Antigone, whose more famous heroine insists on her brother’s sacred right to due burial against unjust man-made law. In The Suppliant Women, Aethra makes her plea, not for a brother against the state, but in the name of the city and on behalf of mothers who are not her kin. When Theseus first objects that these grieving women of Argos are foreigners, she replies: ‘You do not belong to them. Shall I say something, my son, that brings honour to you and the city?’17 Defying him in the name of a cross-national community of mothers, she presents her case in terms of the contribution women make to the civic good: if he ignores their plea, the city over which he rules will be destroyed.

  Aethra is drawing on the authority owing to her as mother of the Athenian king. Theseus concedes, and then proceeds to a passionate defence of democracy: ‘This city is free, and ruled by no one man. The people reign in annual alterations. / And they do not yield their power to the rich; / the poor man has an equal share in it.’18 As if to say: in relation to democracy, listening to the voice of bereaved, disenfranchised mothers is the true litmus test. The modern world could helpfully take note. In November 2016, the Mothers of the Movement, bereaved mothers of some of the highest-profile black victims of police violence in the US, started travelling the country to tell the stories of their dead children and to speak out on police racism, gun violence and criminal justice reform. ‘I had to change my mourning into a movement, my pain into purpose and sorrow into a strategy,’ states Gwen Carr, mother of Eric Garner, killed on Staten Island, New York, in 2014, aged forty-three. ‘I know it’s too late for Eric but we have to save the unborn.’ ‘When it’s time to speak, I go forth. I’m not a politics person. I mean, I guess I am now, in some ways’ – the words of Valerie Bell, mother of Sean Bell, shot in Queens, New York, in 2006, aged twenty-three.19 Another modern instance of mothers forging a political voice out of tragedy.

  In The Suppliant Women, Theseus himself ends up joining the grieving mothers as they wash the wounded corpses of their dead, vanquished sons. He enters the role of a mother, becomes one of their kind. When Adrastus, king of defeated Argos, hears of this he expresses dismay: ‘That was a dreadful burden, bringing shame,’ the messenger replies. ‘How can humanity’s common ills be shameful?’20 Victorious kings rarely embrace the bodies of the defeated (any more than do policemen with guns on the street). Theseus’ act is all the more extraordinary in a democracy where political freedom in the city space was seen to rely on keeping the crude necessities of life behind closed doors, which also meant that the paterfamilias, the kyrios or dominus, ruled over his family and slaves with a rod of iron.21

  Today, of course, in most countries in the world, women are citizens. Mothers can be leaders and fully enter the polis, although it’s worth noting that neither Angela Merkel nor Theresa May have children. In the case of May, when Andrea Leadsom, one of her rivals for the role of prime minister after the Brexit referendum of June 2016, suggested that this fact rendered her unfit for office, she had to withdraw from the leadership election.

  It is, however, still the case that today, in public, the bodily necessities of mothering are brushed under the carpet and/or consigned to another hidden, intimate world. Perhaps the dismay provoked by Theseus’ compassionate gesture allows us to speculate why. It is not just so that men can keep their hands clean – to which some men would fairly reply that today they share the housework and change nappies (we have moved on from 1972 when New Society reported that it was a rare father who could change his child’s nappy).22 Rather, the problem goes the other way. The radical care and visceral mess of child-rearing must neither degrade nor stain the upstanding citizen. The shameful debris of the human body, familiar to any mother, must not enter the domain of public life and spill onto the streets. I remember once trying to persuade a young university colleague that she shouldn’t hesitate to bring her baby to work as the need arose, first simply as a practical matter so she could get to work and make her life liveable, but perhaps, even more, so that the stuff that mothers deal with on a daily basis should be seen.

  Always I am on the lookout for those moments when mothers get to speak the unspeakable, trash the expectations laid upon them, play with other ideas. If the main function of a married woman in Ancient Greece and Rome was to provide fodder for the war machine, for many women this was not a tempting prospect (one effective herbal abortifacient made available to women was so popular it became extinct, the herb featuring on Cyrene coinage alongside the figure of a woman).23 At a key moment in The Suppliant Women, Adrastus laments the defeat of his nation. When the chorus, made up of the grieving mothers and their handmaidens, pleads, ‘No word for the mothers?’ he replies: ‘O wretched mothers of children! / Behold a sea of troubles.’24 This is tragic, but also hand-wringing and lyrical to the point of banality. Once again, pathos neutralises a far more radical complaint. The chorus is swift in its judgement: ‘Would that my body had never been yoked to a husband’s bed.’25

  What is the point of breeding sons with the sole aim of sending them to battle? In Sparta, girls benefited from being married off later than in other Greek states, but only because the Spartans realised that they were more likely to produce a healthy warrior child.26 The suppliant women are in revolt (not so suppliant after all). They turn against their destiny – and their husbands – because they can see the reality of the cruel political world they are being asked to gestate. Perhaps that is another reason why mothers are unwelcome in public spaces, integrated with difficulty into the political scene. If they really entered the world without let or inhibition, they would read it; they would see and lay bare its intolerable cruelty for what it truly is (speaking truth to power). In Britain, after the First World War, women turned their pain to political ends, demanding the vote as the fair if partial recompense for having been expected to send their sons to war.27

  But there must always be the risk that the mothers of soldiers just might decide that a world at war is worthy neither of their labour nor of the dedicated, albeit unchosen, futures of their offspring. In Euripides’ Medea, well before the heroine kills her two sons, the act for which she and the play are infamous, the chorus announces in one of its longest speeches that they have pondered and concluded that those who do not have children are happier by far: no shadow of care, no unknowing as to whether your labours will produce good or bad children, no endless dread that, in the worst and final disaster, Death may take your child.28 This is the bleakest view, half the story, or not even half the story, some mothers would say. But, as feminism has long pointed out, by refusing to be mothers, women have the power to bring the world to its end.

  * * *

  In Ancient Greece, the line between fighting and childbirth went deep, as the dangers of childbearing were spliced into the fields of war. This blurs the inviolable distinction between life and death that we expect mothers, of all people, to keep intact. It also stalls in its tracks any possible sentimentality on the subject of mothers, a sentimentality with which the modern world, in denial of its own violence, is still saturated. These lines spoken by Medea early in the play are among the most well known, often lifted clean out from under her mu
rder of her own children as a stand-alone feminist plaint:

  They, men, allege that we enjoy a life

  secure from danger safe at home,

  while they confront the thrusting spears of war.

  I would rather join

  the battle rank of shields three times

  than undergo birth’s labour once.

  Her list of grievances is long: women are obliged to accept a husband as ‘master of our body’, to keep ‘our eye on him alone’, whereas the man is free; women are the most beset by trials of ‘any species that has breath of power and thought’.29

  Medea is not alone in making her analogy between parturition and the injuries of war. According to Plutarch, a Greek living under the Roman Empire, the only exceptions to the rule against naming the dead on their tombstones were men who fell in battle and women who died in childbirth: the woman, producer of the future citizens of the city state, bore childbirth ‘just as the warrior bears the enemy’s assault, by struggling against pain: giving birth is a battle.’ ‘Not just a symmetry,’ the feminist classics scholar Nicole Loraux writes in her 1981 article, ‘Le Lit, la guerre’ (‘In bed, at war’), ‘it is more like an act of exchange or at the very least the presence of war at the heart of childbirth.’ Likewise, men become women, as the pain of a wounded soldier is compared to labour: ‘Fortune and misfortune of the warrior: to break all limits, including that of the virility he ostensibly embodies, in order to suffer like a woman.’30 In a wondrously gender-confounding moment, war blurs the distinction of the sexes in relation to the very acts – battle, childbirth – normally seen as their most representative and distinctive of roles. It reduces dying men to the state of women as the bearers of new life, while also giving only to both of them the right to be named for posterity on their tombs. Who then, soldiers or birthing mothers, are the true heroes? The answer must surely be neither or both. In which case, perhaps, Loraux suggests, we should not be in too much of a hurry to charge Greek thought with misogyny.

  By the time of Shakespeare’s Roman plays, this analogy will receive one of its most violent, exultant affirmations in the character of Volumnia, mother of Coriolanus, who, again in a speech that has become famous, turns the link between war and maternal nurture inside out. She, too, is dismissed as close on crazy, or more charitably as exerting undue influence on her son (an example of Shakespeare’s ‘suffocating’ mothers).31 In fact, she is one in a line of many mothers, as she draws on an ancient tradition to which she gives her own unique twist:

  The breasts of Hecuba

  When she did suckle Hector, look’d not lovelier

  Than Hector’s forehead when it spit forth blood

  At Grecian sword contemning.32

  These words are meant to shock or even repulse, but Volumnia is speaking the hidden truth of what a militaristic culture asks of the bodies of its mothers. For Medea, battle was preferable to the agonies of childbirth (a comparison that in the end works to the advantage of neither). For Volumnia, the blood of battle and the breasts of the nursing mother compete to win the aesthetic prize. It is not pain but beauty that violently aligns the archetypal trope of mothering – the milk of human kindness – and the spillage of war.

  Volumnia is a Roman mother. Even more than in Greece, the Roman mother was monumentalised on behalf of her citizen sons. Imperial mothers like Octavia and Livia were celebrated by buildings in whose construction they also sometimes played a role: Octavia completed the renovation of the Republican portico that bore her name; Livia left an extensive portfolio of public works that rivalled that of many imperial men; women of the Julio–Claudian family under Augustus involved themselves in his programmatic rebuilding of Rome. Today’s queens and wives of presidents have their realm restricted to interior design, while leading women architects are rare – Zaha Hadid, who did not have children, would be one striking exception, stating in interviews that her work would have made it impossible.33

  But it is as the mothers of warriors that the Roman woman reaches her apogee. Shakespeare goes out of his way to make Volumnia more militaristic than his source, Plutarch, where there is less emphasis on valiancy and glory, more on the misery Coriolanus has brought upon the ‘common weal’.34 His Volumnia out-soldiers them all. ‘If my son were my husband,’ she insists to the perplexed and downcast Virgilia, wife of Coriolanus, who is grieving his absence in war, ‘I should freer rejoice in that absence wherein he won honour, than in the embracements of his bed, where he would show most love.’35 When he was a young man, Volumnia delighted in sending her son into battle, from which he returned victorious, his brows crowned with an oak coronet: ‘Had I a dozen sons, each in my love alike, and none less dear than thine and my good Martius, I had rather eleven die nobly for their country, than one voluptuously surfeit out of action.’36

  But, by the end of the play, Volumnia is pleading with her son, who, expelled from Rome, has formed a deadly alliance with the Volscian enemy, not to tear ‘his country’s bowels out’ by laying waste to his natal city.37 She finally uses her persuasive power as mother to wrest back the violence that she herself had celebrated, casting its gory shadow, unflinchingly and with such relish, across her own maternal role. But it is her own brutal eloquence, her mental immersion as a mother into the carnage of war, that has uniquely qualified her to do so.

  We can pathologise Volumnia, as indeed Medea, but that is too easy. They have both tapped into a way of thinking, lost to our time, that does not require motherhood to purify and blind itself to the world’s violence, or to our own: ‘We know too much,’ writes Adrienne Rich, ‘at first hand [of] the violence which over centuries we have been told is the way of the world, but which we exist to mitigate and assuage.’ ‘We know too much’ – Rich is implicating herself as mother in the worst of the modern world. In Of Woman Born (the 1995 reprint), she defends her decision to keep the final chapter on mothers and violence, which she was pressured to remove. It was read by some mothers as a betrayal (as if mothers can only be defended as humans if they are good).38 On the other side of idealisation, war and childbirth are recognised in classical thought as two moments when the fabric of the social order is rent. Unlike today when, against all the bloody evidence, armies and mothers – lynchpins of the social order, although at opposite poles of the human spectrum – are called upon to secure our futures and make a precarious, dangerous world feel safe.

  * * *

  We know that the male colonisation of mothers’ bodies starts inside the womb. One of Donald Trump’s first executive orders reinstated the ‘global gag’ rule that bans funding for groups anywhere in the world offering abortion or abortion advocacy, even if they use their own funds to do, which has been described as a ‘death warrant for thousands of women’ (one of the most notorious photos of his first one hundred days in office is of a bunch of indistinguishable men signing the order into law).39 As well as putting the health and lives of women seeking abortion at risk, the rule will cut funding worth billions to the developing world and threatens free speech. Republican presidents regularly reinstate this rule, which had been overturned by Obama, but reproductive groups described it this time as the most extreme of its kind.40 As I write, the Roe v. Wade ruling is considered to be at serious risk of being overturned for the first time since it was passed by the US Supreme Court in 1973: Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s first appointment to the Supreme Court, is famous for the vehemence of his anti-abortion convictions.

  But the issue of abortion is not the only form that such colonisation can take. In 1999, the case of Dobson (Litigation Guardian of) v. Dobson was brought to the Supreme Court of Canada. A woman, whose son was born with serious impairment after a car accident in which she was deemed negligent, was sued by the maternal grandfather on behalf of her child. In the end, the charge of negligence was set aside and the decision focused entirely on whether the son, Ryan Dobson, ‘has the legal capacity to bring a tort action against his mother for her allegedly negligent act which occurred while he was in utero’.
Can a child sue his own mother for what she did, or failed to do, before he was born?

  This, we could say, is the social punishment of mothers with a vengeance, a nightmare version of where we started, as the law extends its cold, hard reach deep inside the body of the pregnant woman, judging her culpable before life even begins. But in a judgement heralded by feminist legal scholar Diana Ginn, the judges decided for the mother on the grounds of her privacy, autonomy and the rights of women. Had they imposed a legal duty of care upon a pregnant woman towards her foetus or unborn child, the potential for curtailing women’s choices and behaviour would, they acknowledged, have been ‘staggering’, with no ‘rational’ or ‘principled’ limit to the type of claims that might be brought (they were citing a 1993 Royal Commission on new reproductive technologies).41 Although there was a dissenting opinion, Ginn fairly sees the result of this landmark case as striking a feminist blow for mothers, which she traces to the atmosphere fostered by Adrienne Rich’s book (Ginn’s essay appears in a collection celebrating Of Woman Born and its legacy).42

  In a way that is again reminiscent of Greek thought, today’s legal writing tends to see a pregnant woman and her foetus either as an organic unit or as a potential field of battle.43 In the Dobson case, Judge Cory referred to the ‘inseparable unit between the woman and her foetus’ as the basis for taking the mother’s side. Dissenting Judge Major, on the other hand, insisted that the interests of the foetus and the mother were not, and should not be, considered as one: ‘It is no answer to the plaintiff in this case that unilateral concerns about a pregnant woman’s competing rights are sufficient to “negative” a negligent violation of his physical integrity. His rights, too, are at stake.’44 The distinction is legally significant but also partly illusory. Either way, the mother is being pressed to recognise, as if she did not already know, that her unborn child depends on her for life itself. Note how this obvious truth erases any concern for her social condition. Class, housing, level of nutrition, the presence or absence and behaviour of the father or partner are all wiped out of the picture. She has been placed in a social vacuum, severed, even before her baby is born, from the mundane, basic realities and pressures of a lived life.