There are, of course, no simple answers to these questions. There is no false reconciliation. This is not a mother tasked with historical and political redemption.27 But merely by asking them, Magona is giving voice to a problem that resonates throughout this book. How to get such stories into the mainstream version of what it means to be a mother, and into the narrative of what mothers might be for each other? What would happen, finally if, instead of asking mothers to appease the wrongs of history and the heart, and then punishing them when they inevitably fail, we listen to what they have to say – from deep within their bodies and minds – about both? Perhaps it would indeed bring the world to an end as we know it, but I suspect, certainly for mothers, this would be no bad thing.
CODA
When I was preparing to adopt my daughter, I would try to seduce my social worker with obscenely large red cherries, which would sit in their bowl, I liked to think, as a flagrant riposte to and distraction from her steely, relentless inquisition (the adoption process raises the idea of a fault-finding mission to a new height). I remember thinking later that the two things the whole process could never prepare you for, and which made it as useless as it was invasive, were first, the worry – the OMG of every scratch and fall, at once absurd and wholly in tune with the fragility of life – and second, the joy. In the famous story, Tiresias is struck blind by Hera, in some versions by Athena, for having revealed that a woman’s sexual pleasure is greater than a man’s. As I was thinking about motherhood in our time and reading all the outpourings on the subject, past and present, that story came to mind. We need a version for mothers, one in which the acute pleasure of being a mother, without any need for denial of everything else talked about here, would be neither a guilty secret, nor something enviously co-opted by bullies – ‘You will be happy!’ Instead, it could be left to get on quietly with its work of making the experience of motherhood more than worth it.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
When the London Review of Books invited me to write a piece on mothers, none of us, least of all me, had any notion of where it might lead. This book is the ‘offspring’ of the article ‘Mothers’ published in the LRB on 19 June 2014 (36:12). So my first thanks go to Mary-Kay Wilmers for the idea and to Paul Myerscough for his, as always, scrupulous editing. Thanks to Mitzi Angel at Faber and Eric Chinski at Farrar, Straus and Giroux for persuading me that this topic could, or should, be a book, for their encouragement, and to Mitzi especially for her editorial attention and care. I am fortunate to have Tracy Bohan as agent, and much appreciate her unfailing enthusiasm, perception and kindness.
The book has been written since I had the privilege of joining the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities in 2015. I am indebted to Esther Leslie and Madisson Brown for their solidarity and support. My visits to the Institute for Social Justice at the Australian Catholic University in Sydney have also provided a stimulating intellectual backdrop to the book.
Cora Kaplan, Sally Alexander, Alison Rose and Elizabeth Karlsen have read all or part of the manuscript, each with their customary fine eye and insight. I am grateful to Edith Hall and to Esther Eidinow for their comments on chapter 2. All remaining errors are, of course, my own. Mia Rose made some crucial corrections to the final chapter, key moments of which she also inspired.
A number of friends and acquaintances provided one or more of the anecdotes scattered throughout the book, where they remain unnamed. In the hope that it will not lead to a flurry of detective activity, it seems right to name them here (in no particular order, as they say): Lisa Appignanesi, Selma Dabbagh, Livia Griffiths, Katie Fleming, Monique Plaza, Lawrence Jacobsen, Braham Murray. One other gave me much in body and spirit, for which I am thankful. Gillian Rose is more present in this book than I could have imagined when I started writing it.
The book is dedicated to my mother, Lynn Rose, and my stepmother, Jeanette Stone, with whom it all, or so much of it, began.
London, July 2017
NOTES
SOCIAL PUNISHMENT: NOW
1 Amelia Gentleman, ‘Fear of bills and Home Office keeping pregnant migrants away from NHS’, Guardian, 20 March 2017.
2 Amelia Gentleman, Lisa O’Carroll, ‘Home Office stops transfer of Calais child refugees to UK’, Guardian, 10 December 2016; Diane Taylor, ‘UK turns back hundreds of refugees’, Guardian, 17 December 2017; Alan Travis, ‘PM accused of closing doors on child refugees’, Guardian, 9 February 2017.
3 Bernard Cazeneuve, ‘The UK must fulfil its moral duty to Calais’s unaccompanied children’, Guardian, 17 October 2016.
4 Lisa O’Carroll, ‘Teenagers’ stories’, Guardian, 28 October 2016.
5 Personal communication, Sue Clayton, award-winning independent documentary film-maker, whose crowd-funded film, Calais Children: A Case to Answer, was released in June 2017 (footage from the film was aired on ITV and Channel 4 News).
6 Diane Taylor, ‘Samir, 17, thought he was finally about to reach the UK. Now he’s dead’, Guardian, 19 January 2017.
7 Bertolt Brecht, ‘Appendix A: Writing the Truth: Five Difficulties’, in Galileo, trans. Charles Laughton (New York: Grove Press, 1966), p. 139.
8 Colm Tóibín, The Testament of Mary (London: Viking, 2012), p. 102.
9 Judith Shklar, The Faces of Injustice (New Haven: Yale, 1994), chapter 2, ‘Misfortune and Injustice’.
10 All quotes from Gillian Slovo with Nicolas Kent, Another World: Losing our Children to Islamic State (London: Oberon, 2016).
11 Angela McRobbie, ‘Feminism, the Family and the New “Mediated” Maternalism’, New Formations (special issue, ‘Neoliberal Culture’), 80/81, 2013; ‘Notes on the Perfect: Competitive Femininity in Neoliberal Times’, Australian Feminist Studies, 30:83, 2015.
12 Sandra Laville, ‘Revealed: the secret abuse of women in the family courts’, Guardian, 23 December 2016.
13 Denis Campbell, ‘Female doctors may be forced to quit over new contract, experts say’, Guardian, 1 April 2016.
14 Nina Gill, ‘The new junior doctors’ contract is blatantly sexist – so why doesn’t Jeremy Hunt care?’ Daily Telegraph, 4 April 2016.
15 Alexandra Topping, ‘Maternity leave discrimination means 54,000 women lose their jobs each year’, Guardian, 24 July 2015.
16 Karen McVeigh, ‘MPs urge action to fight “shocking” bias against mothers’, Guardian, 31 August 2016.
17 Joeli Brearley and Greg Clark MP: ‘Give new and expectant mothers six months to pursue discrimination claims’, Change.org, 4 March 2017.
18 Press Association, ‘New mothers “facing increasing workplace discrimination”’, Guardian, 2 May 2016.
19 Karen McVeigh, ‘MPs urge action’; Rowena Mason, ‘Review of law to protect pregnant women’s jobs’, Guardian, 26 January 2017.
20 Grace Chang, ‘Undocumented Latinas: The New “Employable” Mothers’, in Mothering: Ideology, Experience, and Agency, ed. Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Grace Chang and Linda Rennie Forcey (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 273.
21 Bryce Covert, ‘Woman allegedly fired for being pregnant after boss told her “pregnancy is not part of the uniform”’, Think Progress, 4 May 2016, https://thinkprogress.org/woman-allegedly-fired-for-being-pregnant-after-boss-told-her-pregnancy-is-not-part-of-the-uniform-4d11d29a2c24#.gaajkhtxn.
22 http://www.maternityaction.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/WomenandEqualitiesCommInquiryEv2016.pdf.
23 Sarah Boseley, ‘British maternity pay is among worst in Europe’, Guardian, 24 March 2017.
24 T. J. Matthews, Marian F. MacDorman and Marie E. Thomas, ‘Infant mortality statistics from the 2013 period: linked birth/infant data set’, National Vital Statistics Reports, 64:9, 6 August 2015.
25 Centre for Maternal and Child Enquiries, cited in Hattie Garlick, ‘Labour of love’, Guardian magazine, 17 December 2016.
26 John Donne, ‘Death’s
Duell’, in The Sermons of John Donne, ed. Theodore Gill (New York: Meridian, 1958), p. 265, cited in Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 6.
27 Nicholas Kristoff, ‘If Americans Love Moms, Why Do We Let Them Die?’ New York Times, 29 July 2017. See also Nina Martin, Emma Cillekens and Alessandra Freitas, ProPublica, 17 July 2017. https://www.propublica.org/article/lost-mothers-maternal-health-died-childbirth-pregnancy. Thanks to Eric Chinski for drawing my attention to Kristoff’s article.
28 Ibid.
29 Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York: Norton 1976, 1995), p. 11 (emphasis original).
30 Ben Morgan, ‘Netmums founder tells advertisers: Stop peddling the myth of the perfect mother,’ Evening Standard, 11 September 2017.
31 Kirsten Andersen, ‘The number of US children living in single-parent homes has nearly doubled in 50 years: Census data’, LifeSite News, 4 January 2013, https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/the-number-of-children-living-in-single-parent-homes-has-nearly-doubled-in.
32 Pat Thane and Tanya Evans, Sinners? Scroungers? Saints?: Unmarried Motherhood in Twentieth-Century England (Oxford: OUP, 2012), p. 4.
33 Michelle Harrison, cited in Diana Ginn, ‘The Supreme Court of Canada and What It Means to Be “Of Woman Born”’, in From Motherhood to Mothering: The Legacy of Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born, ed. Andrea O’Reilly (Albany, NY SUNY Press, 2004), p. 36.
34 Polly Toynbee, ‘Our future is being stolen. Be brave and take it back’, Guardian, 20 December 2016.
35 Thane and Evans, p. 5; Kirsten Andersen.
36 Pat Thane, ‘Happy Families? History and Family Policy’, British Academy Policy Centre, 2010.
37 Harriet Sherwood, ‘Catholic church apologises for role in “forced adoptions” over 30-year period’, Guardian, 3 November 2016.
38 Patricia Hill Collins, ‘Shifting the Center: Race, Class, and Feminist Theorizing about Motherhood’, in Glenn, Chang and Forcey.
39 Chang, ‘Undocumented Latinas’.
40 Thane and Evans, pp. 16–17.
41 Ibid., p. 69.
42 Ibid.
43 Ibid., p. 77.
44 Gail Lewis, ‘Birthing Racial Difference: Conversations with My Mother and Others’, Studies in the Maternal, 1:1, 2009, pp. 1–21.
45 Thane and Evans, p. 3.
46 Elisabeth Badinter, The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women, trans. Adriana Hunter (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2012), p. 150.
47 Laurie Penny, ‘Women shouldn’t apologise for the pitter-patter of tiny carbon footprints’, Guardian, 28 July 2017.
SOCIAL PUNISHMENT: THEN
1 Angeliki Tzanetou, ‘Citizen-Mothers on the Tragic Stage’, in Mothering and Motherhood in Ancient Greek and Rome, ed. Lauren Hackworth Petersen and Patricia Salzman-Mitchell (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012); Paul Cartledge, ‘“Deep Plays”: Theatre as Process in Greek Civic Life’, in The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy, ed. P. E. Easterling (Cambridge: CUP, 1997).
2 Cynthia Patterson, ‘Citizenship and Gender in the Ancient World’, in Migrations and Mobilities: Citizenship, Borders and Gender, ed. Seyla Benhabib and Judith Resnik (New York University Press, 2009), p. 55.
3 Patterson, ‘Citizenship and Gender’, p. 60.
4 Barbara Goff, Citizen Bacchae: Women’s Ritual Practice in Ancient Greece (Oakland: University of California Press, 2004), pp. 2–5.
5 Cynthia Patterson, ‘Hai Attikai: The Other Athenians’, in Rescuing Creusa: New Methodological Approaches to Women in Antiquity, ed. Marilyn Skinner, special issue of Helios, 13:2, 1986, p. 61.
6 Goff, p. 29, p. 49, p. 61.
7 Rachel Cusk, A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother (London: Fourth Estate, 2001), p. 131.
8 Melissa Benn, Madonna and Child: Towards a New Politics of Motherhood (London: Jonathan Cape, 1998), p. 19.
9 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837, 4th edn (New Haven: Yale, 2009), p. 267, cited in Shaul Bar-Haim, The Maternalizing Movement: Psychoanalysis, Motherhood and the British Welfare State c. 1920–1950, unpublished PhD thesis, Birkbeck 2015, p. 20.
10 Patterson, ‘Citizenship and Gender’, p. 52.
11 Edith Hall, Introducing the Ancient Greeks (Oxford: Bodley Head, 2015), p. 7.
12 Goff, p. 5.
13 Hall, p. 7. Also, D. Harvey, ‘Women in Thucydides’, Arethusa 18 (1985), pp. 67–90.
14 Ibid.
15 Mary Beard, The Parthenon (London: Profile, 2010), p. 43; Esther Eidinow, Envy, Poison, and Death: Women on Trial in Classical Athens (Oxford: OUP, 2016), p. 13.
16 Hackworth Petersen and Salzman-Mitchell, p. 12.
17 Euripides, The Suppliant Women, Euripides II, ed. David Grene and Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), ll. 293–94, p. 151.
18 Ibid., ll. 405–9, p. 157.
19 Nadia Latif and Leila Latif, ‘We had to change pain to purpose’, interviews with the mothers of Trayvon Martin, Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, Amadou Diallo and Sean Bell, Guardian, 22 November 2016.
20 Euripides, The Suppliant Women, ll. 767–68.
21 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 27.
22 New Society, cited in Mary-Kay Wilmers, ‘Views’, Listener, May 1972; according to the Modern Families Index, 2017, fathers who choose to spend more time with their families are now suffering a ‘fatherhood penalty’ in relation to their careers. Cited in Jamie Doward, ‘It used to be a feminist cause – but now both men and women struggle to thrive at work and still find time for their families.’ Jamie Doward, ‘“Fatherhood penalty” now a risk for men, warns charity,’ Observer, 15 January 2017.
23 Kathleen Connors, letter to the London Review of Books, 36:14, 17 July 2014.
24 Euripides, The Suppliant Women, ll. 825–26.
25 Ibid., l. 824.
26 Hall, p. 170.
27 Nicoletta Gullace, The Blood of Our Sons: Men, Women and the Regeneration of British Citizenship During the Great War (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 55–59, cited in Bar-Haim, The Maternalizing Movement, p. 21.
28 Euripides, Medea, trans. Oliver Taplin, Euripides I, ed. David Grene and Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), ll. 250–53, 1091–1116.
29 Ibid., ll. 233–34, 277–78, 231.
30 All quotes from Nicole Loraux, ‘Le Lit, la guerre’, L’Homme, 21:1, January–March 1981.
31 Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest (London: Routledge, 1992).
32 Shakespeare, Coriolanus, Arden Shakespeare edn (London: Methuen, 1976), Act 1, Sc iii, ll. 40ff.
33 Margaret L. Woodhull, ‘Imperial Mothers and Monuments in Rome’, in Petersen and Salzman-Mitchell.
34 Philip Brockbank, ‘Introduction’, in Coriolanus, p. 42.
35 Ibid., Act 1, Sc iii, ll. 2–4.
36 Ibid., Act 1, Sc iii, ll. 21–25.
37 Ibid., Act 5, Sc iii, l. 103.
38 Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York: Norton 1976, 1995), p. 279.
39 Sarah Boseley, Ruth Maclean and Liz Ford, ‘How one of Trump’s first acts signed death warrants for women all round the world’, Guardian, 21 July 2017.
40 Karen McVeigh, ‘Reversal of abortion funding puts $9bn health at risk – campaigners’, Guardian, 25 January 2017.
41 All quotes from Diana Ginn, ‘The Supreme Court of Canada and What It Means to Be “Of Woman Born”’, in From Motherhood to Mothering: The Legacy of
Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born, ed. Andrea O’Reilly (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2004), p. 29.
42 Dobson v. Dobson, cited Ginn, p. 33.
43 Tess Cosslett, Women Writing Childbirth: Modern Discourses of Motherhood (Manchester University Press, 1994), p. 119, cited in Ginn, p. 38.
44 Dobson v. Dobson, cited Ginn, p. 39
Mothers Page 16
