Mother of All Myths. Aminatta Forna
a fashion layout using pregnant models, the magazines’s offices were deluged with complaints. Mothers should not be seen. Neither should they be heard.
One rarely hears mothers complain, and then never in public. Their compliance is bought or ensured in three ways: by glorifying aspects of motherhood; by making women who don’t feel or do what is required feel guilty; and finally, and as a last resort, by punishing mothers considered actually deviant (for example, women who leave their children inspire a moral wrath not visited on the thousands of fathers who do the same; legal sanctions are being levied on pregnant women who refuse medical treatment or abuse their own bodies).
The best-known image of the ideal mother has been with us for centuries in the form of the Madonna and Child, the most compelling depiction of pale, calm, benevolent motherhood. Whether sculpted by Pisano in 1300 or painted by Dali in the mid-twentieth century, she is always portrayed cradling her child in her arms and gazing at him in a moment of private pleasure, or looking outwards contemplating the viewer with a smile of peace and fulfilment playing upon her lips. Although Christianity did not, on its own, invent the motherhood myth, the Church has been highly efficient at marketing the maternal ideal. Mary is held up to Catholic women everywhere as an inspirational figure. In parts of Catholic Central and South America there exists even today a kind of cult of motherhood named after her: Marianisma. Poor women sacrifice and deny themselves everything for the sake of their children, especially their sons, in the hope that they will one day repay their mother’s love and loyalty when she is old. Motherhood in this instance is capable of delivering earthly salvation.
Baby Jesus is never painted with his head thrown back and bawling. His mother never looks testy or tired. No one paints her trying to prepare Baby Jesus’s food with one hand while jiggling him on her hip with the other. Or ignoring him while he screams his lungs out in the next room. No one has ever painted Mary going about the mundane tasks of motherhood: giving Jesus a bath, feeding him or dressing him. The Madonna and Child are frozen in eternity in a moment many mothers experience with their babies relatively infrequently.
The image of the maternal idyll is presumably so appealing because it reminds both those who paint such images and those who look at them of a time when they were children and found comfort in a mother’s embrace. It isn’t really a comment on women’s experience of motherhood, although it is often read as one. The power of the image is derived from what society wants from women.
The ideal mother is everywhere in art, poetry, fiction, film. She is the dream for whom Peter Pan searches, a beautiful memory to Cinderella and Snow White whose stepmothers are cruel to them. She is there on the cover of Good Housekeeping and Family Circle, in television programmes such as Happy Days and Little House on the Prairie. In more contemporary depictions like the Cosby Show, a nod to modernity has allowed her a job. She is such an archetype you sometimes don’t even notice her, but there she is in Hollywood action movies standing behind Mel Gibson or Harrison Ford, vulnerable, warm yet wistful, part of the hero’s home and family life that he must protect. And be sure she exists by design and not by accident. In 1997, when Disney again adapted Dodie Smith’s The Hundred and One Dalmatians for the screen, writer-producer John Hughes changed Smith’s original version in which Cruella DeVil is an old school chum of the dalmatians’ owner Anita. Instead, he made her Anita’s former boss and owner of a fashion design company, unmarried and childless, whose motive for wanting to kill the puppies is her fury at being deserted by Anita, who gives up her job when she becomes a mother. In the first version of the tale it was Snow White’s natural mother who was her adversary.
Mothers are stereotyped and so are women who choose not to become mothers. In 1995, researchers ascertained the attitudes of a group of college students towards motherhood.5 They showed that married mothers who stayed at home were seen in a positive even sentimental light, but stepmothers were held in poor regard, divorced mothers were viewed as failures, and single mothers as deviants and losers. Traditional mothers were even thought to be nicer people. Our beliefs about motherhood are pervasive and powerful. Whether Snow White and Cinderella helped to create the myth or simply perpetuated it, they illustrate its appeal. Marketing men use it to sell feel-good movies, baked goods and cold remedies. Today the same idealized image is even being used to sell motherhood itself, as a multi-million-pound market in reproductive technology flourishes using glossy brochures containing colour pictures of mothers and their babies to sell infertility treatment to childless couples.
In the 1960s feminists rejected an overly romantic vision of motherhood and identified its silken cords of oppression. Before the changes wrought in the 1960s only one line of promotion was available in the lives of most women: from perfect bride to perfect wife to perfect mother. An oversight on the part of the feminist movement as a whole has been to ignore motherhood from that point on, believing that if all the available political energy was devoted to increasing women’s career choices and achieving economic independence, motherhood would somehow take care of itself. At the same time, another school of popular feminism actually bolstered myths about motherhood by arguing women’s moral and social superiority in relation to men and laying claim on behalf of womanhood to qualities such as creativity and emotional sensitivity.
Even the so-called ‘power feminists’, such as Naomi Wolf, author of Fire with Fire, argue that there is nothing stopping women today except their own victim mentality. In her analysis Wolf overlooked motherhood, the one area of women’s lives feminism has barely acknowledged. The dated, unchanged, narrow institution of motherhood which obliges women to mother in a certain way is the Achilles’ heel of modern feminism. Despite Wolf’s exhortations to think positively, no woman manager can compete with her male colleagues on fair terms if she is also a mother. Yet the word ‘motherhood’ does not even appear in the index to Wolf’s book, and in the page and a half of text given to the subject the author merely repeats the old feminist adage that biology is not destiny. End of story. In fact, the story of how feminism must tackle the issues surrounding motherhood is only just beginning.
It is unrealistic to suppose that the majority of women will stop having children. Many women talk, in convincing terms, of a strong, biological impulse which produces the desire to have children; others simply love children and wish to raise them; others still value family and the links created through the generations by blood ties. This vital and valuable commitment to children nevertheless means that today, while the perfect bride is no more than a one-day fantasy and the perfect wife has been consigned to the waste disposal, the perfect mother as an instrument through which women’s actions and choices can be controlled and manipulated has survived, because while men can be left to look after themselves, children cannot. And while a woman might rightly walk out on an aggressive, incompetent or uncaring man, few women would wish to forsake their children.
Working alongside the idealized depiction of motherhood is the second tool of enforcement: guilt. Guilt has become so strongly associated with motherhood that it is often considered to be a natural emotion. It is not. Guilt is not a biological, hormonally-driven response. Women feel guilty because they are made to. Mothers are told that every failure, every neglected task, every dereliction of their growing duties, every refusal to sacrifice will be seared upon their child’s psyche, will mar his or her future, and damage not only the mother-child relationship but every subsequent relationship in the child’s life. That is, if the mother who is found to be wanting doesn’t create a juvenile delinquent or a fully-fledged criminal.
A culture of mother-blaming, by everyone including children, has become so deeply entrenched in our society that bad mothering is considered to be a contributory cause in an astonishing array of contemporary problems. In America, when the Unabomber was arrested, a leading news magazine hypothesized that the rage which had caused him to wage a twenty-year bombing campaign might have been provoked by an early episode when his mother left him. The desecration of inner-city communities is laid at the door of single mothers instead of economic policies or even absent fathers. A psychologist assessing a child’s bed-wetting, or a teenager’s use of recreational drugs, will often look first to the mother – does she work, how much time does she spend at home? Maternal guilt can be elicited directly in newspaper headlines (‘What kind of mother are you?’) or indirectly, as in the advert for a company selling home-office