All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion (43 page)

By the early eighties a new ‘Madonna’ had entered the sphere of popular iconography and partly overshadowed her earlier namesake, to give the world a ‘material girl’ whose only interest in virginity was to lose it. But the pop-cultural desacralization of Mary and her motherly qualities was never altogether secure. Throughout that decade, while the battle for equality and rights at work went on, and ‘having it all’ seemed a possibility worth aiming for, various forces once more came together to essentialize women’s difference in terms not only of her biology, but of the attributes that biology was purported to give rise to.

Back in the 1870s, Charles Darwin had extrapolated from animal observation and women’s primary and most culturally cherished activities during the Victorian epoch to argue that women with their small brain size, intermediate between child and man, were, owing to their maternal instincts, more tender and less selfish than men and had greater powers of intuition and rapid perception. They extended these properties, grounded in the biology of mothering, to those around them.

Some of these premises echoed through the essentialist and initially American wave of the women’s movement during the 1980s and 1990s, the high point of identity politics. This coincided with a renewed interest in evolutionary thinking and the (re)invention of evolutionary psychology, a discipline that understands human psychology as a direct product of our biology. Within these optics, woman in her maternal guise was effectively naturalized; her ‘natural’ motherly properties, her ‘nesting instinct’, foregrounded. She emerged as more caring and less egotistic than the male of the species, more attentive to the vulnerable, the relational and the specific. As such, in the feminist literature of the period, she became a moral model, indeed an ethical ideal, for both sexes. The care model first took hold in an America that had never had a welfare state, or what the French call, with the full force of Christian values despite their adamant republicanism, a ‘providential’ state. The model is a laudable one, as are the ethics of care which have grown out of it.

However, a difficulty arises when care is essentialized as feminine. The closeness to older thinking invoking the ‘maternal instinct’ boomerangs back on women, particularly when married to evolutionary premises. Held up as a moralizing ideal, the model of woman as naturally a maternal carer locks men out of the pleasures of the nursery while liberating them from the burdens of care. For mothers, who are cut from many different cloths, it can provoke anxiety, it can stigmatize, particularly when the individual woman may have few overriding maternal impulses, or if her initial feelings for her baby don’t coincide with the desirable norm.

The last twenty years have seen something of a re-enshrinement of women in their motherly loving role. This has been abetted by the rise and rise of the new neuroscience, ever quick to leap to adventurous cultural pronouncements from the evidence of microscopic events in the brain translated by algorhithms into brightly appealing computer images. The difference between the genders has once more been essentialized to reinvigorate the kinds of hoary stereotypes John Stuart Mill objected to over a hundred and forty years ago. In
The Essential Difference: Men, Women and the Extreme Male Brain
, the leading Cambridge psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen writes: ‘The female brain is predominantly hard-wired for empathy. The male brain is predominantly hard-wired for understanding and building systems.’ This makes possessors of female brains pre-eminently suited for such tasks as caring, counselling and teaching primary school children. And, of course, mothering.

In pop culture, the motherly role is now rendered covetable by its paradoxical twinning with sexiness, as if the latter in our hypersexualized culture conferred the ultimate value. Stars with rounded tums increasingly appear in glossy mags. Hollywood’s Demi Moore launched the trend in 1991 when, nude and seven months pregnant, she graced the cover of
Vanity Fair
. The pregnant sex symbol provoked controversy: some attacked this newly demeaning objectification of women; others hailed it as a sign of women’s empowerment.

In the two decades since, babies have increasingly appeared with their celebrity mothers in the glossies, marking a new line both in fashion accessories and in marketing tools. But they also signal a return to the pre-eminent importance of maternity. To indicate her participation in the reborn faith of mother and baby which Madonna had already joined, a pregnant Britney Spears–once America’s most cheekily slutty virgin–featured pornographically semi-nude in
Harper’s Bazaar
in August 2006. The spread blatantly evoked the iconography of Virgin and Child. Loving motherhood now seemed to have once more become supremely important even to the most liberated and famous of women.

Air-brushed pictures are pictures, and life is life. Few heavily pregnant women feel particularly sexy; mothers with newborns, even less so. But the circulation of these images in our public sphere turns these into a desirable, though rarely attainable, norm. They also simply advertise maternity, something our politicians, too, are now increasingly prone to do, trotting out their children for the cameras far more than they ever did. The pressure has been mounting, particularly on working women, to breed–ever more so because those who have sought a career first are constantly reminded of the ticking of that now media-noisy biological clock. Babies have emerged as both increasingly covetable and increasingly delayed, because the wanting of them is such a major enterprise.

All this has taken place against a background of long-term falling birth-rates in most countries throughout Europe–until very recently when, particularly in Scandinavia, they have been rising. This is not surprising, given that Norway and Sweden have the best provision now for both partners on parental leave and on early childcare. The picture in America is slightly different. Though the secular middle class fails to reproduce itself altogether adequately, the religious and the poor make up the numbers.

It seems that, given the choice, plus a liberated sexual ideology prioritizing the pleasures of youth, which makes men in particular loath to take on the responsibilities of commitment–women have over the last decades chosen work first–out of desire or financial need. In Britain, almost two-thirds of women with children work. Now, failing economies and unemployment or low wages, which generally induce women back into the home, are marking a swing. And the pressure is on from various sources, popular and ‘scientific’, for mothers to give up work for ever longer periods so that they can tend adequately to the important task of child-rearing. Mother-love has reasserted its cultural centrality–even if many women, judging from the statistics, are not particularly eager to take on motherhood, or to take it on too soon.

Those who do may be caught up in a cult of idealized motherhood so assiduous and competitive that it might have disconcerted even their Victorian forebears. The toll in guilt and anxiety, which can easily percolate into their children’s lives, is great. If there is indeed no more important and wonderful task than making new lives, the weight of advice which now bears down on parents, the tick-lists that monitor good and bad parenting, can make love itself–never conducive to quantification and targets–a chore. Working at love, here, may be as joyless as it is in adult relationships.

Indeed, mothering today can appear more challenging than running the World Bank–perhaps because so many of the women who undertake it once more or less did, or could have. It seems in any event to require equivalent investment, time and skill. The list of middle-class maternal tasks and duties in the name of love is formidable and calculated to rob mothering of its pleasures. There’s an onus on stimulating the child, on providing extra lessons, on keeping her ever busy with a schedule that would challenge executive diaries. There’s the added imperative of bolstering, at every possible instant, the child’s self-esteem–a notion rolled out from the delusional positive-thinking and well-being industries—so that children develop a false sense of life and themselves. There’s the task of precluding any possibility of boredom–a state which, arguably, feeds both imagination and thought. And so on and on, even before the worries about risk and danger–of unsafe streets and playgrounds, of poor schooling, of ‘unsuitable’ friends. Advice once acquired in the local park, in the nursery and in face-to-face chats between mothers now also comes from science (ever-changing in its recommendations) and from that global powerhouse, the World Wide Web. Sites such as Mumsnet and Netmums are just a click away, to provide guidance, support, online conversation and experience-sharing. Yet, however helpful they may be, the conflictual and competing voices on these sites, as Lucy Cavendish, a mother of four, attests, can induce more rows and anxiety than a coven of visiting mothers-in-law. In Britain, Mumsnet also functions as a lobbying site, hosting visits from leading political contenders. Women as mothers are now a powerful force, and not only in the home.

One of the many areas of maternal contention is breast or bottle, and for how long. Ever a symbol–though never a fact–of instinctual mother-love, the flow, value and long-term attributes of mother’s milk have now even generated their own science wars.

The French philosopher Élisabeth Badinter has argued that the rise and rise of the ‘breast is best’ movement has coincided with a modish evolutionary biology–which sees all animals’ primary task as that of reproducing the species–to promote women’s full-time return to the home. Biology with its reductive imperatives has once more emerged as the best destiny for women.

Badinter charts a history of La Leche League to underline how ideology can, with some help from science, become the potent ally of ‘nature’ and thus influence our understanding of maternal love. La Leche began in a meeting of like-minded, breast-feeding mothers in a Chicago suburb in 1956–a time when 80 per cent of American babies were bottle-fed and the word ‘breast’ could not easily appear in newspapers. The initial seven members were Catholic and adherents of the militant Christian Family Movement. Making links with doctors propagating ‘natural’ childbirth, the League grew to become a worldwide movement with chapters in sixty-eight countries, its precepts gradually adopted by the medicoscientific establishment and eventually by Unicef and the World Health Organization. The guiding tenets of the movement are:

The fact that the League’s principles–with their subtle moral undertow of encouraging mothers back to the home and their sidelining of partners to the role of protective onlookers–now seem commonplace and are recommended by most doctors, is evidence of the distance the movement has travelled. In the early 1970s only 24 per cent of American mothers breast-fed; by 2010 this had risen to nearly 75 per cent. In the Scandinavian countries, from the same low, the percentage is now between 95 and 99 per cent, with Germany lagging only slightly behind; Britain comes in at about 70 per cent, while France and Ireland have proved most recalcitrant and have reached only 50 and 30 per cent respectively. Largely gone is the moment when co-parenting from a babe’s earliest days was heralded as an ideal. Gone, too, is any element of choice. Working mothers, who constitute the majority, are catapulted into a state of permanent guilt-ridden conflict, deemed somehow unnatural if they don’t continue breast-feeding for the recommended span of at least a year. Pump rooms (where mothers can express milk) in large workplaces in the US have been campaigned for and won.

But must love flow mainly through milk?

Major scientific claims have been made to underpin the ‘breast is best’ message. Some of these are indubitably proven. During the first few days after the child’s birth, mother’s milk is less milk than colostrum, a substance rich in antibodies which help develop immunities in the child as well as stabilizing his blood sugar and lining the gut. But that the child’s eventual psychological well-being as well as his or her intellectual accomplishments can be linked to the single fact of mother’s milk, as some of the claims contend, is very doubtful. In 2006 British scientists published the results of a longitudinal study of 5475 children, the offspring of 3161 mothers, compared siblings with the same DNA and conclusively showed that despite propaganda to the contrary, there were no links between a child’s IQ and his history of breast-feeding. If breast-fed middle-class children had better cognitive development, it was likely to be linked to a host of other factors.

Loving may figure amongst these. Infants, of course, benefit hugely from touch, skin-to-skin cuddles and affection, but the breast is only part of a much wider environment. Those seven out of ten British mothers who give up the breast for a variety of factors after six weeks have not failed in their ‘natural’ duty or proved themselves less loving than those who carry on feeding for a year or three. Nor is breast-feeding for women as ‘natural’ as the eulogies make out; certainly, at the outset, many women experience difficulties. New mothers are not unnatural if the symbiotic plenitude with babe at breast is something they fail to live out in ideal fashion. Nor have they failed in parental love which feeds the child far beyond its first infancy.