Mother of All Myths - Aminatta Forna

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were in place to create the background for the modern motherhood myth. Changes to work which swept in with the Industrial Revolution had left women holding the baby at home while men went to work in the new factories, mines and metal works. At the same time a burgeoning fascination with scientific discovery had begun to exercise people’s minds. In 1861 Pasteur had published his theory of germs and the spread of disease was by now beginning to be clearly understood and controlled. In only twenty years’ time Alexander Fleming would notice changes taking place in his petri dish and give the world penicillin. These developments had a radical effect upon childcare and the raising of children. If romance had characterized motherhood in the previous century, then the twentieth century gave rise to the scientific mother.

      Childcare became the subject of study, analysis and theory and was taken out of the hands of mothers and placed in the hands of men, who henceforth would tell mothers what to do. These were the childcare gurus. Suddenly babies became a matter for the experts. Popular writers emerged such as Frederic Truby (later Sir Truby) King and D. W. Winnicott in Britain; and in America John B. Watson and Luther Emmett Holt. Between them they moulded modern motherhood in their own vision, dictating every detail from the emotional relationship between mother and child down to mastering the fine art of burping or winding (a practice which, incidentally, is virtually unknown in many parts of the world).

      The legacy of the first gurus lives on both in ideas about what constitutes good mothering as well as in the continued reliance of Western societies on the words of experts and their personal philosophies. Winnicott’s lectures broadcast on the BBC were replaced by Dr Spock’s Common Sense Book of Baby and Childcare with which generations of babyboomers were reared. When they became parents, they turned to Penelope Leach’s Baby and Child. It’s a rare woman today who embarks upon motherhood without a manual in her hand, like an instruction leaflet for a new computer. Despite the fact that every mother knows that the theory and practice of raising children frequently do not coincide, there are few who dare to go it alone. The experts create and feed their own market by issuing dire and prophetic warnings of the untold damage inflicted upon children by uninformed parents who may think they know what is good for their own child. Of all the many ways guilt has been induced and exploited in mothers, the childcare gurus must rank high on the list.

      A famous author, who is the mother of several children, once told me that she had each of her children in a different decade and raised each on the popular method of the moment, with a different and conflicting set of rules every time. If after every birth, as she embarked on motherhood anew, she had believed the words of the fashionable, new expert she would only have been able to conclude that she had utterly ruined her preceding child. Truby King, who influenced many generations of mothers up until the Second World War, warned mothers against touching, petting or ‘spoiling’ their children and decreed a four-hour feeding schedule. A Truby King baby would have had a very different infancy from that of his younger sibling born in 1950 and brought up with Spock’s enthusiasm for displays of maternal affection and feeding on demand. From early on, experts emerged from various and often competing fields whose disciplines placed the emphasis on different aspects of the child’s well-being. Some were doctors whose main concern was with exercise and nutrition; others were ethologists keen to apply their observations on animal behaviour to human subjects; still others were psychologists and psychoanalysts who were far more interested in the dynamics of the relationship between mother and child.

      Early in the twentieth century, Sigmund Freud was expanding his theories of human behaviour and the development of personality. The resulting discipline of psychoanalysis has, at its core, the belief that early experiences in childhood set in place events and behaviour in later life. It is this idea, which was built upon and developed by Freud’s disciples, that is central to the tendency, which later became endemic, to blame mothers for their children’s misfortunes and to scrutinize the relationship between mothers and their children.

      Freud, however, was actually far more interested in the relationship between boys and their fathers and the resolution of the Oedipal conflict which was the foundation stone of all his theories. He did not actually delve deeply into the personality or behaviour of the mother, nor was he concerned with specific childrearing practices, believing instead that babies are driven by powerful instincts and love their mothers who are the people who feed, warm and comfort them. But he did explicitly point to the direction in which psychoanalysis was to progress by describing the mother-child relationship as ‘unique, without parallel, established unalterably for a whole lifetime as the first and strongest love-object and the prototype of all later love-relations – for both sexes’.

      Freud’s sexism is notorious and has been the subject of criticism both from within psychoanalysis as well as outside. He saw women as castrated men and wrote of their ‘sense of inferiority’ and of the blame young girls place on their mothers for their lack of a penis which has left them for ever ‘insufficiently equipped’.1 Motherhood was women’s salvation and compensation for being without a penis, particularly if they bore a male child equipped with the prized piece of anatomy.

      Only in relatively recent times, with the advent of feminist thinking in all disciplines including psychoanalysis, have Freud’s theories about women been properly addressed. In the 1970s Kate Millett, the American feminist, accused Freud and his followers of overlooking in their entirety existing social structures and notions of femininity which, rather than biology, might account for women’s social status. In other words, Millet argued that nurture rather than nature might account for gender differences.

      From within the therapy movement, psychologists Dorothy Dinnerstein and Nancy Chodorow have both powerfully reinterpreted Freud’s theories on motherhood. In The Mermaid and the Minotaur, published in 1977, Dinnerstein presents the idea that small children develop a rage against their mothers (which is never properly overcome) as the person who alone has the power to grant or withhold what the child desires. Chodorow says it is the girl’s unconscious identification with her mother, while boys see themselves as different and separate, that endlessly reproduces gendered divisions of labour and women’s exclusive responsibility for nurturing children: girls copy their mothers mothering. Both women argue that society and the position of women and mothers will improve only when men take on their share of responsibility for their children.

      So, in the first three decades of the century, while Freud was producing his theories, the essential elements which would eventually produce our modern maternal ideology were coming together. The medicalization of motherhood – the result of an increased scientific understanding – removed childcare from the hands of women and placed it in the hands of experts. Soon most babies in Britain would be born in hospital and this, added to the creation of the welfare state in the post-war period, dramatically decreased the infant mortality rate. For the first time in history, parents did not need to fear the death of their children.

      Concern for the physical health of children was immediately replaced by new considerations for their mental health and psychological well-being. The psychoanalyst John Bowlby highlighted this concern with his theory of ‘attachment’; in other words, the biological bonds between mother and child urgently required that, in the post-war period, women should return en masse from the world of work to their rightful place, as he saw it, in the home. Between them these men – and with very few exceptions they were all men – created the ideal of the 1950s stay-at-home, full-time mother.

      The gurus rose fast in their respective fields, amassing tremendous fame and influence, but one by one their theories have been reconsidered by subsequent generations and either debunked or rethought. Today, no one would dream of leaving a young baby to sleep outside on a cold night, as Truby King once advised. Bowlby’s ideas have been revisited and watered down. In modern times, Marshall Klaus and John Kennell, two Bowlby followers, presented their theory of bonding to a receptive public, only to have their methods criticized and their findings overturned by their peers. Few were unmasked as spectacularly as Bruno Bettelheim, a world-famous psychoanalyst and expert on autism. Bettelheim’s theory that autism, now recognized to have an organic genesis, was caused by extremely brutal treatment at the hands of the children’s mothers gained wide acceptance, despite the protests of the accused women. Bettelheim’s solution was to separate mother

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