The specifics of the maternal imperative have shifted over the decades, yet the notion that a woman can succeed as a mother only if she is single-mindedly devoted to her offspring has remained remarkably consistent. Photo / Getty Images
Hannah Zeavin, Nancy Reddy and Alex Bollen take on the bad science and stubborn cultural norms behind motherhood myths.
When the writer Shirley Jackson went to the hospital to give birth to her youngest son in 1951, a clerk at the front desk asked for her personal information.
“Age?” the clerk chirped. “Sex? Occupation?” “Writer,” Jackson replied. “Housewife,” the clerk countered. “Writer,” Jackson insisted. “I’ll just put down housewife,” the woman told her.
That Jackson’s best fiction is about the debasements of domesticity is a cruel irony, one the dismissive hospital clerk no doubt failed to appreciate.
This infuriating anecdote seems to me to shed light on an obsession within America: dwindling birthrates, which in 2023 fell to an all-time low, much to the chagrin of conservatives.
Although some liberals have suggested that we might reverse the trend by offering women more material support, the preponderance of evidence suggests that resistance to parenthood is not economically motivated.
A Pew Research Centre study from July of last year revealed that 57% of American adults under 50 who do not want to have children “just don’t want to,” and that 44% “want to focus on other things”.
Economic concerns were the fourth-most-cited reason to forgo children, mentioned by 36% of those surveyed.
Would-be mothers were particularly adamant: they really “just don’t want to”. Sixty-four per cent of the women in the study cited that as their primary reason, compared with 50% of men.
Why might so many women just not want to? Declining birthrates are clearly a multicausal phenomenon, but Jackson’s pointed reduction to helpmate suggests one partial explanation.
Seventy-four years after the author of The Lottery was cast as a housewife against her will, a woman who is a mother is still not permitted to be much of anything else.
As three new books about the unforgiving pseudoscience of motherhood show, the specifics of the maternal imperative have shifted over the decades – yet the notion that a woman can succeed as a mother only if she is single-mindedly devoted to her offspring, often at the cost of her own interests and personhood, has remained remarkably consistent.
One of these books, the historian Hannah Zeavin’s Mother Media: Hot and Cool Parenting in the Twentieth Century, traces the relationship between motherhood and technology from the turn of the century through the 1990s (although its findings have obvious relevance to the present day).
The other two – the poet Nancy Reddy’s The Good Mother Myth: Unlearning Our Bad Ideas about How to Be a Good Mom and postnatal practitioner Alex Bollen’s Motherdom: Breaking Free from Bad Science and Good Mother Myths – combine memoir and history to show how punishing expectations continue to devastate new mothers.
Zeavin, Reddy and Bollen cover some overlapping ground: all three books, for instance, make mention of attachment theory and the popular mid-century paediatrician Dr Spock.
But they also have distinct preoccupations, and their tones differ markedly. Zeavin, who is interested in how technology both augments and threatens motherhood, is the most academic and the most philosophically demanding of the three. Her book is by far the most intellectually rewarding and is full of fascinating forays into historical byways about, among other things, experimentation on incarcerated populations and social panic about comic books.
Reddy’s book, in contrast, is the most approachable. The Good Mother Myth is a tender and moving case study of the effects that bad theories have when they breach the bounds of the clinic: each chapter investigates a strain of pseudoscience from the perspective of intellectual history, then from the perspective of a new mother forced to contend with its influence.
Even as attachment theory and its contemporary offshoots conspired to convince Reddy that “there can be no substitute” for a mother, she tried to give a talk at the department where she was pursuing her PhD with her fussy baby in tow – and was shocked and relieved when a professor offered to care for the infant for the duration of the workshop.
Bollen’s Motherdom tackles more contemporary misconceptions – those popularised by neuroscience, those enjoining women to breastfeed so as to avoid “harming their babies for life,” and many more – but its dutiful arguments can be somewhat plodding. It is filled with fusillades of references that give it the air of a term paper. Still, it is a thorough, if clunky, investigation into the intense pressures mothers face.
“Before I had a baby I was good. For a long time, as a new mother, I was certain I was bad,” Reddy confesses. Bollen echoes her almost exactly: “After my son was born, I was dismayed to find that I felt like a bad mother, a very bad mother.”
In an era replete with novels and memoirs about the difficulties of motherhood, these three books offer something new: a tour of the dubious and often downright irresponsible science that has reinforced sexist conceptions of the maternal role.
Zeavin’s overarching framework is a helpful buttress. In her view, the norms governing motherhood hinge on the negotiation of boundaries. When the nuclear family became the dominant mode of social organisation in the early 20th century, “older forms of multigenerational family life were newly understood as impinging upon young families”. Now that the immediate family was supposed to function as an impermeable unit, outsiders became suspect. Who counted as an intruder, and who was embraced as endogenous?
The answer has long been in flux. The figure of the nanny, ubiquitous at the turn of the century, “was no longer understood to be an acceptable stand-in for mother” by the 1930s, according to Zeavin; technologies like the mechanically rocking cradle and later the television set were cast sometimes as viable surrogates, sometimes as pernicious and even dangerous outside influences.
Both Zeavin and Bollen note that, in the early 1900s, the dominant paradigm was that of “scientific mothering”. Its acolytes adhered to what Bollen describes as “strict routines of feeding and sleeping”. But in 1946, Benjamin Spock inaugurated a slightly more forgiving tradition. In the first line of his blockbuster bestseller, The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, he counselled anxious parents: “Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do.” Still, Bollen writes, “calamitous warnings that women could ruin their children endured”.
The stakes of satisfying social standards around motherhood are high: Often, outdated theories are “deployed to uphold decisions around revoking custody,” according to Zeavin. Women of colour in particular live under the constant threat of separation from their children, a practice that Bollen terms “unmothering”. It is especially alarming, then, that the good mother role is all but impossible to fulfil.
For one thing, the majority of mothers have always been obliged to work and have therefore struggled to provide the “constant, uninterrupted devotion” that Reddy describes as the perennial standard. For another thing, Reddy continues, the figure of the good mother is generally “imagined as white, straight, married, and middle class,” a model that excludes the majority of parents by default.
In addition to these practical barriers, there is also a conceptual one. Women are urged to “trust yourself,” yet instructed to rely on experts like Spock; per Bollen, they are pushed by one camp to undergo natural birth, by another to medicalise their pregnancies; directives around feeding and sleeping conflict sharply. In the 1950s, Zeavin points out, women were faulted for both frigidity (which turned them into “refrigerator mothers”) and excessive affection (which turned them into “smother mothers”).
No matter what they do, Bollen writes, “women can always be found wanting”.
Zeavin, Reddy and Bollen converge in identifying three central motherhood myths.
The first is that anything less than total, all-consuming maternal dedication will destroy a child for the rest of his or her life. The only thing that virtually all of the researchers and theories surveyed share is a commitment to the idea that a mother is the only one responsible for her child’s wellbeing. As Zeavin puts it, Spock and his predecessors agreed that “mother was crucial, central, and determinate in child outcomes”.
The second myth is that motherhood – and motherhood alone – is a woman’s true vocation. This myth is so powerful that Reddy, after having a child, was shocked to find that she “hadn’t been made milder, willing to give up sleep, ambition, the time to finish writing a sentence because I loved the baby so much”.
Finally, and perhaps most perniciously, bad science tends to treat a mother and an infant as an isolated dyad. “This was one of the myths I had absorbed from the mommy blogs and the parenting advice books I consumed alongside my prenatal vitamins and leafy greens throughout my pregnancy,” Reddy writes in her book’s opening chapter. “Motherhood was an individual pursuit.”
This fiction guides the methods of many of the most seminal studies in the field. The psychiatrist John Bowlby, the originator of attachment theory, got his start researching child criminality – but his study on the subject did not contain any “information about the father or the extended family, and he did not take into account anything about the children’s housing conditions, school attendance, or family income,” Reddy writes.
Thus, as Bollen observes, “the focus on individual relationships between mothers and children diverts our attention away from societal ills such as poverty and racism”.
All three books gesture at an alternative in the form of child rearing that is by far the most common across cultures and epochs: “alloparenting,” or communal child rearing, a practice that conscripts extended family networks and other community members to work together to perform the difficult work of parenting.
It is tempting to dismiss the brutal motherhood myths outlined by Reddy, Bollen and Zeavin as artefacts of the past. But a quick glance at the world suffices to reveal their staying power. Near the end of his life in the late 1980s, Bowlby was an advocate of shuttering daycare centres, a move that he hoped would force women to reprise the role of primary and near-exclusive caregiver. Just four years ago, JD Vance made nearly the same point in a co-written opinion column opposing President Joe Biden’s childcare policies on the grounds that “children are clearly happier and healthier when they spend the day at home with a parent”.
“We cannot get away from the fact that a child is hard-wired to bond with mom,” Vance’s co-author recently told the New York Times. The conservative strategy for reversing declining birthrates is evidently to double down on the sort of myth that has made motherhood so unappealing in the first place.
I doubt these tactics will be successful. After all, who can blame the women who “just don’t want to” when wanting to is a matter of being swallowed whole? Anyone serious about bolstering birthrates will one day have to recognise that it is only by allowing women to be more than mothers that we can induce them to be mothers at all.
Ideal for morning or afternoon tea, served with greek yoghurt and berries.