Mother of All Myths. Aminatta Forna
extraordinary cruelty towards and neglect of children, almost any kind of change would have been for the better. French women began to breastfeed and to find a renewed interest in their children and Rousseau’s ideas became popular in England too, although it must be said that wet-nursing continued in France until the 1920s and breastfeeding continues to go in and out of fashion. The next man to make a career out of taking issue with women who did not breastfeed would be Truby King in the 1920s. Nevertheless and overall, attitudes towards children began to change from the beginning of the 1800s, according to Edward Shorter. It would still take some time for mothers to become totally responsible for childcare. Most early tracts were aimed at men. The ‘good mother’ as we know her, with her natural propensity for self-sacrifice, her universal and automatic love for her children and her total fulfilment in the tasks of mothering, had not yet been invented but she was well on her way.
From the Reformation onwards, Europe had been undergoing almost continual political shifts. A new middle class began to emerge which no longer owed loyalty to the clan, but directly to the king. They spent their new-found wealth on the immediate family, the home and their lives. By the time of the Industrial Revolution in England, followed by France, Germany and the post-Civil War United States, the nuclear family comprising a man, his wife and their offspring had emerged as the central family unit. It is interesting to note that while the ‘traditional’ nuclear family is today seen as the basis and seed-bed of values such as sharing and community responsibility, there are historians who now regard its evolution as arising out of exactly the opposite disposition: the wish to lessen commitments and to restrict the benefit of new gains and profits to a small number of people.
The revolution in industry in the first half of the nineteenth century is commonly agreed to have set in motion massive social shifts, the aftershocks of which we are still feeling today. There are many excellent and detailed accounts of that period, but what concerns us here is what happened to home life and the family, and the effect of such changes upon women’s lives. In a short space of time, a rural way of life which had persisted for centuries and in which the home was the centre of production with the entire family participating in yarn-spinning, cheese-making, the sowing and reaping, ribbon-weaving – or whatever occupation the family derived its income from – was wiped out. In its place came factories which fed on human labour – preferably adult, male labour but often child labour and that of women, too – and forced a reliance on wages determining the fate of entire communities. Home life could no longer be combined with working life, and this schism between public and private took its toll, mainly upon mothers. Elinor Accampo, a family historian, writes:
It put women in a particularly difficult bind because they could not combine household responsibilities with wage earning activities in the same manner as they had in the past. Even if they continued to perform productive labour in the home, this labour brought such meager compensation that they had to work long hours. Men’s absence from the home, furthermore, meant that fathers had a much reduced role in the socialization of their children.15
The lives of women were transformed. The family became a separate entity, a private sphere with fierce loyalties and impermeable defences. Sex roles became exaggerated so that instead of women being mostly in charge of children and the domestic sphere, and men being mostly in charge of earning but with duties in the home too, women became responsible for all that lay within the walls of the home and men all that was on the outside. Home became an enclave away from the sweat and filth of daily toil on the railroads, in the factories or down the mines (for the working classes) or the office (for the middle class). It was the woman’s job to create that place of sanctuary, to become the ‘hearth angel’ who created a nest for her children and a refuge for her husband. Gradually, men’s involvement with children tailed off entirely until the responsibility for moral teaching was taken away from them and placed in the hands of women. The metamorphosis from the indifferent mother, absorbed in politics and culture, of whom Rousseau wrote, into the Victorian maternal ideal, the good woman at home with her brood, her piano and her principles, was complete.
The split between the private and public worlds saw an end to the political aspirations of upper-class women. Instead of aspiring to active engagement in decision making, women became ‘the hand that rocks the cradle’ and ‘the power behind the throne’. And men encouraged women to find contentment in their new sphere of influence by assuring them of the power of this uniquely feminine role. By being convinced of this inimitable, maternal role women were, and are still, discouraged from encroaching on external male domains where the real political, social and economic gains are to be made.
Women of the bourgeoisie took on a decorative role not seen since the heyday of the Italian Renaissance. Victorian writers, clergy, politicians and poets, especially the Romantics such as John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold and Alfred Lord Tennyson, were quick to eulogize women, especially mothers, and place them on a pedestal from which they have collectively never quite succeeded in descending. The matriarch, in the form of Queen Victoria, rose to prominence. Among the burgeoning middle class the measure of a woman became her ability to master the feminine arts – quiet conversation, needlepoint, dancing – rather than the speed with which she could milk a cow. Nurturing skills, not household budget management, became the qualities a man sought in a wife. Women wore crinolines and hoops, fainted at swear words, covered up the legs of pianos and became prone to mysterious fits of hysteria, a condition some modern psychologists consider to have been produced by the tight stays, the isolation and the emotional constraints of their circumscribed lives. As women and mothers, their ability to sacrifice themselves apparently knew no bounds, as one particularly ghastly offering from the period testifies:
There was a young man loved a maid
Who taunted him. ‘Are you afraid,’ She asked, ‘to bring me today Your mother’s head upon a tray?’
He went and slew his mother dead
Tore from her breast her heart so red Then towards his lady love he raced But tripped and fell in all his haste
As the heart rolled on the ground
It gave forth a plaintive sound And it spoke, in accents mild: ‘Did you hurt yourself, my child?’16
Not the kind of sentiment inspired by Christopher Hibbert’s story of Lady Abergavenny, one imagines.
Of course, this was a deeply hypocritical period. Upper-class women still left most of the physical care of their children to paid servants. Men revelled in uxoriousness and treated women (of their own class and race) like delicate vessels while satisfying their more earthly needs with women from the lower orders. It is extremely important to remember that the saintliness of motherhood was only accorded to women of a certain class. In England, although the crimes of Jack the Ripper (thought by many to be a nobleman) dominate our memory of the period, many working-class women on their way home at night were kicked to death by gangs of men in one of the vilest expressions of the misogyny of the culture of that period. In America the glorious days of the antebellum bore witness to the savage treatment of black women who worked in the cane fields up until the onset of labour pains, gave birth to their masters’ bastard offspring only to have them taken away. Sojourner Truth, the abolitionist and feminist who was born a slave, saw her own thirteen children sold into slavery. The contrast in the experience of womanhood from the perspectives of black and white is the theme of her most famous speech, in which she asks the question ‘ar’n’t I a woman?’
The cult of the ‘good mother’ depended (and still does) on money, and on a male wage that was sufficient to support a wife and children, which was (and is) frequently not the case. The many women who continued to work during the Industrial Revolution found themselves caught in the trap, now so familiar to working women, of trying to match the requirements of work and motherhood. Many tried to limit their families or to stop having children altogether because pregnancy posed such a threat to the family’s income and survival. Accampo’s studies of specific communities during the period show that, among the poor, the rates of abortion and infanticide soared. Children of the poorer classes were sent out to work as soon as possible and usually were ruthlessly exploited, as described in the work of Dickens,