and ain't I a woman?: The myth of motherhood
As part of the backlash against women living their lives beyond the home and family responsibilities, stories about the inadequacy of public child-care and the importance of care by the mother have dominated the media in recent years.
Many of Bettina Arndt's regular articles in the Sydney Morning Herald, for example, condemn mothers who placed their children in child-care. Public child-care users are not all sole-mother families, yet one never hears fathers being criticised for using this service.
Many other "examples" of working women placing their children "second" (i.e., after their own needs) have contributed to the near hysteria being whipped up by the tabloids, and well respected media also, about children missing out on their "mother's love".
Now the humble laboratory mouse has become a tool for pushing the idea of "natural" motherhood in humans. New Scientist (October 3) reports that researchers in the UK and Canada claim to have found a gene for "motherhood skills".
The gene is passed on from males to their offspring. Female mice without the gene, called "mutant mothers" in this study, were found to neglect their pups more often than their "normal" counterparts.
The article suggested that these findings may have implications for humans. (Even the wording of the headline — "Daddy knows best: Maternal instincts may be rooted in a gene from your father" — implies that the subject of discussion is people.)
But all animal behaviour, including care of the young, is based on instinct. In contrast, human parenting, like every other conscious human behaviour, is no longer an instinctive response.
While it is women who bear children, caring for the young is learned behaviour; it is not restricted to the mother, nor to the biological parents for that matter.
Different human societies have had very different systems for rearing the next generation. It seems from the evidence of historians and anthropologists that many societies, both in the past and present (such as post-capitalist societies), carry out child rearing in a much more collective way than advanced capitalist societies, involving a number of adults in the care of each child.
The current assertion by the media that mothering is some sort of biologically determined necessity for women and society is just one more assault on women's right to lead lives which are not confined to full-time parenting, but include children if they wish.
After almost three decades of women demanding, winning and exercising their right to be independent individuals, governments' desire to push back these gains and cut public expenditure on the services that the women's liberation movement has won has become urgent.
With its agenda of redistributing wealth to the rich from the rest of us, the government is seeking every means possible to avoid paying for the care of the sick, the young, the elderly — there's no profit in that.
Driving women back into the role of unpaid full- or part-time carers can allow the government to achieve these aims with minimum public outcry and electoral backlash.
But to do so successfully, the ideological push is vital. "Reports" of neglected children and selfish mothers in the press, on television and even as fodder for film-makers help this process. While images of women as full-time mothers never really left the media, they are back with a renewed intensity.
As we fight the material attacks on women's life choices (such as the cuts to social services funding) we must also, at every opportunity, fight the ideological onslaught against women's right to choose if and when, and in what circumstances to become a mother. Without those choices, women will not have a choice in any other aspect of their lives.
By Margaret Allum