Mother of All Myths - Aminatta Forna

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is today, it is perhaps not all that surprising that both mothers and fathers took such news in their stride. Edward Shorter, though, concludes that their behaviour had less to do with stoicism than with indifference. Women frequently were unable to remember their children’s names and ages, referred to infants as ‘it’, and, most remarkably, could not even remember how many babies they had given birth to. Nor, as he indicates, did they have the excuse of ignorance in matters of hygiene and basic childcare:

      Now by the late 18th century, parents knew, at least in a sort of abstract way, that letting newborn children stew in their own excrement or feeding them pap from the second month onwards were harmful practices. For the network of medical personnel in Europe had by this time extended sufficiently to put interested mothers within earshot of sensible advice. The point is that these mothers did not care, that is why their children vanished in the ghastly slaughter of innocents that was traditional child-rearing.9

      In addition, infanticide, often by exposure, was a common method of ‘family planning’. It was the sight of dead and dying infants heaped in the gutters of London that led Thomas Coram to establish a foundlings hospital in the eighteenth century. (In Macbeth, one of a range of objects the three witches throw into their pot is the finger of a strangled infant.) Not all these children could have been the offspring of the poor; descriptions of their clothes indicate that some clearly came from wealthy families.

      The attitude of women towards their offspring in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries could not be more different from approaches to motherhood today, which view children with enormous sentiment and place immense value on them. Seen from a historical perspective, women’s behaviour in the eighteenth century must cast doubt on current theories of biological motherhood such as Richard Dawkins’s ‘selfish gene’ theory, which posits that women are more committed than men as parents because they have already invested much more in a child whom they have carried for nine months and then laboured to bring into the world. What we now know is that, for several centuries in Europe, mothers like everybody else frequently saw children as, at best, amusing but more likely as enervating and time-consuming and, at worst, unwanted. What is particularly hard to comprehend is that these attitudes, although generally held, were not fostered or forced on women by men. Among the very poor and those unwed mothers who left their children to die, perhaps the instinct to survive outweighed maternal instincts, but there is no such rationale for the attitudes of middle-class and upper-class women.

      All this information is tremendously uncomfortable, and the ramifications of historical knowledge are not always clear. One thing is certain: motherhood has worn very different guises at different times. The politics of maternalism which later flourished in Britain and in America in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries could never have taken seed, or indeed made any kind of sense at all, at a time when motherhood was linked with negative and not positive qualities. Fairytales told during the period, such as Snow White, indicate how mothers were generally seen, for in the original tale Snow White was persecuted by her natural mother. It was the Brothers Grimm in the nineteenth century (by which time the cult of motherhood was at its height) who later changed the character to a stepmother.

      Much of the research on wet-nursing and childcare has been undertaken by French historians, but that does not mean that their findings do not apply to England, where Puritan dogma urged parents to eradicate sin from children by beating the devil out of them, and where an infant’s cries were interpreted as expressions of anger rather than distress. Wet-nursing was endemic here as well, as was cruelty. In The English, Christopher Hibbert recounts this story of an upper-class mother: ‘Lady Abergavenny whipped her daughter so savagely for so long that her husband was drawn into the room of punishment by the child’s shrieks, whereupon the mother threw the girl to the ground with such force that she broke her skull and killed her.’10 According to Hibbert, it is only towards the end of the eighteenth century, due to the eventual spread of the humanitarian ideas of John Locke, that children came to be treated a little better as evidenced by, for example, the appearance of toys for the first time and of books specially written for children.

      Motherhood came with no special status, duties or assumptions. A woman gave birth and that was the fact of the matter. She was not presumed to love the child, unless she chose to. It wasn’t even assumed that she would take care of the baby. Indeed, in instances of divorce in England, France and America it was usually the father who kept custody of the child, often at the mother’s behest. In colonial America it was fathers, not mothers, who were in charge of the children, not just in matters relating to discipline and moral rectitude as one might imagine, but they were also the parent who got up in the night to comfort a crying child.11 Women were considered too amoral, too inferior and too weak to be given such responsibilities. In this context, given the task of building a nation, children were valuable and regarded as too important to be entrusted to mothers. In Europe the opposite was true. Children had no value and therefore nobody, including women, could be persuaded to care for them. That view was set to undergo a radical change in the course of the next century.

      The creation of maternal love

      Europe in the eighteenth century underwent a massive shift in the way that people thought. It was the most significant change since Martin Luther jettisoned notions of Original Sin during the Reformation and the Italian Renaissance elevated art, music, poetry and the finer human sensibilities. These served as the background to another smaller, yet in its own way (certainly as regards the history of motherhood) equally important, change in values. This was a ‘revolution in sentiment’12 for which one catalyst was the Enlightenment movement, a school of philosophy which emphasized man’s right to happiness, his true noble character, romantic love, freedom and nature. This change would eventually lead to love (rather than status or social obligation) becoming the principal reason for marriage and children being regarded as the fruit or gift of that love. Maternal love arose out of all of this.

      Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a leading light in the world of philosophy and already a darling of French intellectual life, published Émile in 1762. It is a fictional account of the education of a young boy and it projected a new vision of childhood and of children themselves. To Rousseau, children were naturally good, not the sinful little monsters they were generally presumed to be. Many of his ideas echoed those of England’s John Locke who, in the 1690s, spoke of children as ‘tabulae rasae’, blank slates upon whom parents and educators could write. Unlike Locke’s, Rousseau’s ideas spread like wildfire and attracted a popular following. He urged parents to give their children freedom – first and foremost from swaddling clothes – and education, as well as encouraging self-expression in which he anticipated Maria Montessori by two hundred or so years.

      Most importantly, Rousseau took issue with mothers who sent their infants away. He told them to breastfeed and to care for their children, and he chastised them for preferring to pursue other interests. ‘Not satisfied with having given up nursing their children, women give up wanting to have them,’ he wrote.13 ‘The result is natural. As soon as the condition of motherhood becomes burdensome, the means to deliver oneself from it completely is found.’ It was Rousseau who made, and elaborated upon, the vital link between motherhood and morality which has been a cornerstone of maternal ideology ever since: ‘But let mothers deign to nurse their children, morals will reform themselves, nature’s sentiments will be awakened in every heart, the state will be repeopled. This first point, this point alone, will bring everything back together. The attraction of domestic life is the best counterpoison for bad morals.’14 His comment about the state being ‘repeopled’ is a reference to a nascent interest in demography and the view held during the Enlightenment that the European races were in danger of dying out. With the perspective of hindsight, Rousseau’s words are prophetic, for, as we shall see, ideas about ‘motherhood’ are wheeled out every time there is a perceived social crisis, whether in eighteenth-century France or Thatcher’s Britain in the 1980s.

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