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Guest Posts International. Share this: Twitter Facebook Email Print. Like this: Like Loading Leave a Reply Cancel reply Enter your comment here Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:. Email required Address never made public. Name required. This was exactly how I saw my mother, because she functioned daily under the whims and caprices of my Dad.
Never questioned or challenged him. I was disappointed in her because I expected more from an educated woman like her. To me, she acted like a robot and a slave.
Yet I never reflected on the dynamic way in which she flourished in our home. The smooth running of things, raising us into remarkable women and men. Rather, motherhood appeared to me as inherently and profoundly oppressive to women. This course was an incredible eye-opening experience because I can now see that it is the patriarchal institution that causes motherhood to be seen in this manner. Feminist mothering, in contrast, affords women power and enables them to affect the societal changes they seek for themselves, their children, and the world at large.
It is this that I now believe, and that I will use to enlighten my clueless friends and colleagues. For me, I totally agree with Adrienne Rich, that if we understand this important distinction between motherhood and mothering and foreground the empowerment inherent in mothering once freed from the institution of motherhood, the identities of mother and feminist are no longer oppositional, but rather, complimentary. The two terms are, however, inextricably linked in that the practices of mothering in any society are performed and experienced in the context of the meanings and ideologies of motherhood.
The difference between mothering and motherhood has consequences for understandings of both mothering and motherhood. For example, the focus on mothering as performance of the tasks essential to child rearing meant that those who studied child development in the s and s extended the term mothering to include child rearing done by men who nurture children. This usage of mothering has diminished as the importance of fathering and the need to understand better what fathers do with children gained increased emphasis beginning in the s.
In most societies a central feature of motherhood is that it should ideally occur within a heterosexual relationship where a man and a woman are cohabiting and preferably legally married.
The rearing of children is supposed to be the major task of this unit, which is idealized as bound together through mutual ties of affection, common identity, and relationships of care and support.
This model is often assumed to be the natural and normal as well as ideal form of social organization and to be stable over time. In the s Bernard and other feminists in Europe and North America, such as Adrienne Rich, argued that the institution of motherhood was oppressive in making most women feel that they should become mothers and stay at home in segregated gender roles rather than, for example, pursuing employment and careers. At the same time researchers such as the sociologist Ann Oakley pointed out in Becoming a Mother that the idealized image of motherhood is unattainable and causes women to feel guilt, unhappiness, and anxiety about their failure to measure up to the ideal in their everyday practices.
While it is often assumed that motherhood is historically stable, it has changed a great deal. For example, Linda Nicholson, a historian of ideas, suggests that it was only in the economic boom of the s that it became possible for working-class women in Western countries to stay at home with their children as many more privileged women had been doing although working-class mothers did not have servants to do the housework and look after the children.
As the technology for housework and cooking became more sophisticated, motherhood came to be idealized as the institution responsible for entertaining and ensuring the optimal development of children—morally and academically. As researchers have pointed out, this situation still does not pertain for poorer women in countries where there continue to be high rates of maternal and child mortality as well as higher birthrates. Access to efficient contraception and abortion in the more affluent countries led to markedly decreased birthrates from the late s, with a few exceptions, and mothers have been expected to devote more time and effort to caring for and developing their children.
Since the s, motherhood— the condition in which women mother—has changed markedly and become more complex in many societies. In particular, as Fiona Williams makes clear in Rethinking Families, demographic changes in many societies mean that women in the early twenty-first century are more likely to be single mothers than previously and to live in reconstituted, blended families or stepparent families with children sometimes being shared across households. Mothers in European and North American society and affluent mothers in any society are likely to be older when they have their first child and to have fewer children.
There has also been an increase in the number of affluent women who have only one child or no children and an increasing number who give birth through assisted reproduction techniques or as surrogates for other women. In addition governments frequently intervene directly or indirectly in motherhood to limit or increase population size or to attempt to guarantee the quality of the population.
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