Mothers and children
Mary Kenny
The Myth of Motherhood: an Historical View of the Maternal instinct Elisabeth Badinter (Souvenir Press £8.95, £5.95)
It is evident that our attitudes towards motherhood are ambivalent. On the one hand, we have the Virgin Mary, ever tender, loving and merciful: the whole history of Western art is built around this theme. In Russia, one passes through gallery after gallery, in which ikon succeeds ikon showing this alone — Madonna and child. A creature from Mars would have to conclude, looking at our pictures, that this civilisation has a very long and widely held tradition of admiring motherhood and wor- shipping babies.
On the other hand, we have the goddess Kali the destroyer, the terrifying Artemis, the Snow Queen, the Wicked Stepmother, the Bad Fairy — the written mythology is rich in images of the powerful, destructive, malevolent mother-figure: she who must be Obeyed. The psychoanalytical interpreta- tions are obvious. As young children, we all stand within the power of the mother; hers to give or to withold love; indeed, hers to give or to withold life itself — if the mother does not care for the child, in the primitive state, the child perishes. From this stems the fear of women and the emotional Powers that women can display to such ef- fect: few are the men who can withstand a really well staged female 'scene' whether it be tears, nagging, emotional blackmail, the witholding of warmth and favours, and so on,
In ordinary life, the ambivalence in motherhood is manifest in the practical behaviour of women as mothers. Women may be 'good' mothers or 'bad' mothers; it is most likely that they are both, or 'good" and 'bad' at different times of their mother- ing span.
There is the mother who is wonderful with babies but hopeless with teenagers; the mother who talks, teaches and plays educa- tional games with her ten year-old but who has a physical repulsion of breast-feeding. People have such different criteria. There are children dressed in jumble-sale cast-offs because their parents are making the supreme sacrifice: independent education. There are mothers who haven't had a de- cent holiday for years, but the children's hair has to be cut at Harrods.
Elisabeth Badinter's book was a great succes de scandale in France when it first appeared there a couple of years ago; it sold more than 200,000 copies and has had 15 foreign-language translations. I had read all about it in the Gtardian woman's page where else? Mme Badinter's thesis is that the maternal instinct is a myth, by which she means an untruth (to some, remember, a myth means an elliptical truth transmitted through folk wisdom or allegory). Mother love, she adduces, is a feeling which is variable, conditional and contingent upon many different factors. There is no absolute or universal natural law governing maternal love. If your mother loves you, you are lucky: you must not infer from this, that everyone is loved by his mother.
In evidence of this, she looks at 18th- century France and the appalling practice
of farming new-born infants out to wet nurses which became fashionable in the early decades of that century and continued until the ideas of Rousseau and the reform- ing Mme de Rebours gained circulation in the early part of the 19th century. In 1780, in Paris, out of 21,000 children born, fewer than one thousand were nursed by their own mothers. Another thousand — from royal or noble families — were suckled by live-in nurses. All the rest — 19,000 babies — were sent away to wet nurses in the country.
Many of the wet nurses engaged for this task were extremely poor, badly nourished and attempting to suckle two or even three babies at once. A quarter of French infants thus died within the first year of life. The suffering of these children was, in their short lives, dreadful. Packed into carts on the journey from Paris to the provinces, they were exposed to all weather; they were crushed to death, fell out of the carts, got lost or simply died from hunger on the way. 'The nurses were sometimes sick, in a weakened condition . . . or had picked up smallpox in the city, or were covered with scabs or carrying scrofula. Their illnesses tainted their milk and contaminated the baby . . . Sometimes they gave the babies mashed chestnuts, truffles or coarse bread soaked in vinegar.' One witness reports: 'Soon the whole [infant's] belly is clogged,convulsions set in, and the little one dies.'
Understanding of basic hygiene was low. 'Nurses often let weeks pass without chang- ing the baby's clothes or the straw mattress on which he lay.' Swaddled tightly, sometimes hanging from a nail (out of the
reach of farm animals) . . the skin of these poor children was completely inflam- ed,' wrote a contemporary doctor Jean- Emmanuel Gilbert. 'They were covered with filthy ulcerations . . . Their sobs would have pierced the fiercest heart. Their sores left them all but skinned alive.'
In the face of such social conditions, Mme Badinter claims, the natural mothers of these children remained largely indif- ferent. In 18th-century France it was simply not the fashion to be maternal. Women considered 'they had better things to do with their time' than care for children: for the aristocracy, it was the pursuit of pleasure, for the blue-stocking, the pursuit of learning, and for the rest, the earning of a living. The death of children was dif- fidently regarded by both parents, writes Mme Badinter, citing an Englishwoman who, 'having lost two of her children, pointed out that she still had a baker's dozen in her.'
A large section of Elisabeth Badinter's book is simply the repetition of feminist doctrine, using the same sources that prac- tically every feminist writer has used over the past 20 years in ritual denunciation of male authority from the early church fathers to Freud. But her work on the 18th century is fascinating because it is specific and uses real sources from the time; in this, her book is valuable for the information it provides, and her scholarship, for this period, is impressive.
But does that make her central thesis that there is no such thing as maternal in- stinct per se — plausible, just because a sizeable number of women in 18th-century France seemed cold, distant and without marked affection for their children? Mme Badinter acknowledges, for example, that maternal tenderness had been 'the fashion', as she puts it, in the Middle Ages (not, coin- cidentally,at the height of devotion to the Virgin Mary). And therein lies one's first doubt: the author takes the now fashion- able view that all human behaviour is en- vironmental — nothing arises in men and women which has not been determined by economic, political or social circumstances; so everyone's destiny is shaped by those who control circumstances. This is Marxism out of Calvinism, and it is unacceptable to anyone who believes in free will and the sheer quirkiness of the individual. The se- cond doubt lies in the polemical nature of the lady's writing: it is good scholarship, but it is selective, scholarship. Cannot all sorts of theories be built upon selected ex- amples of human behaviour at particular times in particular places? There was an en- tire generation in post-famine Ireland where more people were celibate than mated; does this mean that there is no fundamental sex- ual instinct? Does the repulsion for food among American teenagers manifested in the widespread condition (sometimes refer- red to as 'epidemic') of anorexia nervosa mean there is no fundamental instinct for eating? I remain unconvinced of all these generalisations. I only conclude that there is nowt so queer as folks.
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