Motherhood: Power and Oppression

MOTHERHOOD: POWER AND OPPRESSION

Marie Porter Patricia Short Andrea O’Reilly Editors Women’s Press

MOTHERHOOD

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MOTHERHOOD POWER

AND

OPPRESSION

Edited by Marie Porter, Patricia Short, and Andrea O’Reilly

Women’s Press Toronto

Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. Motherhood: Power and Oppression Edited by Marie Porter, Patricia Short, and Andrea O’Reilly First published in 2005 by Women’s Press, an imprint of Canadian Scholars’ Press Inc. 180 Bloor Street West, Suite 801 Toronto, Ontario M5S 2V6 www.womenspress.ca Copyright © 2005, Marie Porter, Patricia Short, Andrea O’Reilly, the contributing authors, and Canadian Scholars’ Press Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be photocopied, reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmi
ed, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise, without the wri
en permission of Canadian Scholars’ Press, except for brief passages quoted for review purposes. In the case of photocopying, a licence may be obtained from Access Copyright: One Yonge Street, Suite 1900, Toronto, Ontario, M5E 1E5, (416) 868-1620, fax (416) 868-1621, toll-free 1-800-893-5777, www.accesscopyright.ca. Every reasonable effort has been made to identify copyright holders. Canadian Scholars’ Press would be pleased to have any errors or omissions brought to its a
ention. Canadian Scholars’ Press/Women’s Press gratefully acknowledges financial support for our publishing activities from the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP). Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Australian International Academic Conference on Motherhood (1st : 2001 : University of Queensland) Motherhood : power and oppression / edited by Marie Porter, Patricia Short, Andrea O’Reilly. Papers originally presented at the Australian International Academic Conference on Motherhood held at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland in 2001. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-88961-454-7 1. Mothers--Social conditions--Congresses. 2. Motherhood--Congresses. I. Porter, Marie, 1938- II. Short, Patricia, 1950- III. O’Reilly, Andrea, 1961- IV. Title. HQ759.A97 2005

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Cover design by Susan Thomas/Digital Zone Cover photo © Tomaz Levstek Page design and layout by Brad Horning 05

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Dedication To our own mothers, and to all our foremothers who have shown strength and courage in confronting limitations and obstacles.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .xi Foreword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .xiii 1

Introduction Andrea O’Reilly and Marie Porter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

EMBODIMENT 2 The Kindest Cut? The Caesarean Section as Turning Point, Australia 1880–1900 Lisa Featherstone . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 3 Narrating Breasts: Constructions of Contemporary Motherhood(s) in Women’s Breastfeeding Stories Susanne Gannon and Babe
e Müller-Rockstroh . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 4 Scandalous Practices and Political Performances: Breastfeeding in the City Alison Bartle
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 REPRESENTATION 5 “Pax Materna” or Mothers at War with the Empire? Canadian and Australian Perspectives on the Motherhood Debate in the British Empire during the Great War Karin Ikas. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77

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Mothering and Stress Discourses: A Deconstruction of the Interrelationship of Discourses on Mothering and Stress Erika Horwitz and Bonita C. Long . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97

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A Lesser Woman? Fictional Representations of the Childless Woman Enza Gandolfo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111

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(Mis)Conceptions: The Paradox of Maternal Power and Loss in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Paradise Andrea O’Reilly. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125

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Human and Divine Mothers in Hinduism Tamara Ditrich . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137

PRACTICES 10 Resistance Narratives from Mothers of Married Daughters in Singapore Hing Ai Yun . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Survival Narratives of Ethiopian-Jewish Mothers and Daughters in Israel Ruby Newman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 Down Under Power? Australian Mothering Experiences in the 1950s, 1960s Marie Porter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 Mothers at Home: Oppressed or Oppressors or Victims of False Dichotomies? Elizabeth Reid Boyd . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Mothers at the Margins: Singular Identities and Survival Patricia Short . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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195 205

SEPARATION 15 Naming Maternal Alienation Anne Morris . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223 16 Women of Courage: The Non-Custodial Mother Julie Thacker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237 17 Abandoning Mothers and Their Children Anita Pavlovic, Audrey Mullender, and Rosemary Aris . . . . . . . . . 251

18 When Eve Le the Garden: A Modern Tale about Mothers Who Leave Their Families Petra Büskens . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265 19 Conclusion: Reflections on Motherhood Patricia Short . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 285

List of Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .295

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

M

otherhood: Power and Oppression is the tangible outcome of the first Australian international academic conference on mothering held at the University of Queensland in 2001. As such, many people helped in the production of this volume. We would like to begin by thanking the organizing commi
ee for that conference, Julie Kelso, Judy Connolly, Bernardine Lane, and Marie Porter, who all worked voluntarily. We thank the academic and office staff at the University of Queensland who supported and encouraged the commi
ee: Philip Almond, Head of the School of History, Philosophy, Religion and Classics, for his unfailing support, his wise advice, and his willingness to support a new venture; Ed Conrad, for his continued encouragement, support, and belief in the need for research in the field of mothering; Tamara Ditrich and Lynne Hume, for their support and interest; and the office staff from the School of History, Philosophy, Religion and Classics. Our sincere thanks to the contributors whose work forms Motherhood: Power and Oppression and who so passionately believe in the need for scholarly research on mothering. Because of their research, new areas for study have been identified. They have patiently wri
en and rewri
en, updated and reforma
ed their work, and believed in the importance of this book. We also recognize, and are grateful for, the patience and generosity our children (and their families), our husbands and partners, and our friends have shown as our involvement in this project limited our time with them. Our deepest gratitude to our research assistant, Judy Connolly, who has spent countless hours, many on a voluntary basis, assisting in the preparation of the manuscript and the search for a publisher—all carried out with a meticulous eye and good humour; and to Elspeth

Motherhood

Mead and Jenny Chesters for their intensive work in assisting us to meet our date for the submission of the manuscript. To Althea Prince and her co-workers at Women’s Press we express thanks for their patience and wise advice. We are indebted to the Association for Research on Mothering, and in particular Cheryl Dubinson, for practical advice and assistance, and encouragement on both the personal and professional levels; and we acknowledge, with thanks, the monetary and in-kind support of the School of History, Philosophy, Religion and Classics, the School of Social Science, and the Graduate School of the University of Queensland.

xii

FOREWORD

W

e all come into this world being born of woman and cloaked in a safe environment until our emergence. It is what happens aer this that will determine our lives forever and set us on the path of discovering who we are. One of the most complex relationships any of us has is that shared with our mother. Every one of us has a different story about motherhood. For those of us who become mothers ourselves, motherhood can prove to be an identical pa
ern inherited from our mothers and passed down to our own children. On the other hand, it can be a relationship that is quite opposite to the one shaped by our mothers. Examples here could be alcoholic and drug-addicted mothers whose children grow up to be sober and free of substance abuse, or religious mothers who produce atheists. Be it positive or negative, our earliest contact is with our mothers, who spend the majority of time caring, nurturing, and providing comfort. Some of us share a history of oppression that binds us closer to our mothers. Indigenous women and women of colour are particularly aware of the limits and boundaries that surround our world. How our mothers have fought the struggle that subjugated them primarily by their race is something to be commended. In certain cultures, grandmothers and mothers have been the backbone of society, quietly going about their business, neither seeking reward nor recognition. Their toil is seldom celebrated, while their power is all consuming. When one knows the love of only one parent, one is showered with every aspect of parental love. In the case of daughter–mother love, the relationship becomes intense and in many ways different to the daughter–father relationship. Women who have lost their mothers

Motherhood

in infanthood and puberty are vulnerable to the absence in their lives arising from being motherless. So many women tell of the pain of losing their mothers so young: “It stays with you forever,” they say. Then there are those mothers who never have good relationships with their children. Feelings of rejection and being cheated out of the experience can therefore linger and sometimes never be resolved. There are also those who never will know the love of their mothers. Adopted children and children who have been taken through forced removals tell of the pain and suffering they have had to endure throughout their lifetimes. While we all have mothers, a minority of women will never become mothers for various reasons, among them infertility and personal choice. However, it would be unusual for women to be so isolated as not to form nurturing relationships with other children in their families and friendship structures. Monitoring and role-modelling can occur naturally, mirroring mothering characteristics. In conclusion, mothering is a diverse phenomenon having its highs and lows as in any other profession. It is under-rated and undervalued; however, it is one thing none of us could ever be without. Jackie Huggins

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CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION Andrea O’Reilly and Marie Porter

The Genesis of Motherhood: Power and Oppression The development of Motherhood: Power and Oppression bears similarities to the motherhood experience of many women. As the idea for the book grew and changed, so too did all of us who worked on it. The specific content of the book is the result of the first Australian International Academic Conference on Motherhood, which was itself the unexpected outcome of a small planned conference on motherhood. When the call for papers for a conference with the theme of Motherhood: Power/Oppression was posted, the response amazed and inspired the commi
ee, and turned the event into a three-day international conference. Some of the papers were the work of early career scholars while others were presented by senior academics. During and aer the conference the commi
ee received a lot of feedback remarking on the high standard of the papers. As a result of this encouragement and the requests for copies of the papers, Marie Porter and Patricia Short decided to compile an edited collection of the best. Andrea O’Reilly joined as a third editor. The result is the book you are reading.

Why Feminism and Power/Oppression? Why did we decide on power/oppression as the theme of our conference?1 The reasons were varied. Power is an important concept for feminist and maternal scholars. In the early stages of second-wave feminism, consciousness-raising groups worked to make women aware

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Motherhood

of the influences of power, in the form of patriarchal domination and the resulting oppression, in their lives (Bartky; Frye; Friedan). Early feminist literature targeted the oppression of women by patriarchal structures (Bartky; Birke; Frye; Smith; Wearing). Frye’s description of oppression is appropriate: “The experience of oppressed people is that the living of one’s life is confined and shaped by forces and barriers which are not accidental or occasional and hence avoidable, but are systematically related to each other in such a way as to catch one between and among them and restrict or penalize motion in any direction” (4). Because women’s reproductive capacity historically had been used to define and confine them, motherhood was rightly seen as the paramount source of oppression (Badinter; Firestone). Once women became mothers and accepted the responsibility for bearing and rearing children, they became vulnerable. In highlighting the dangers of motherhood, a seemingly anti-motherhood perspective emerged in early feminism. Feminists argued, and still argue, about whether the early stages of feminism actually were anti-mother (Umansky; Freely). However, what is certain is that many women who were already mothers felt that feminism itself was not sympathetic to their experiences (Oakley 21). By the mid-1970s maternal scholars began to examine the positives of motherhood. While it was generally acknowledged that mothers were oppressed in a culture where men held power, these scholars began to draw a
ention to the positive dimensions of mothering as well as forms and dimensions of patriarchal power. Adrienne Rich’s landmark book Of Woman Born was one of the first examinations of maternal experiences and how the male-defined institution of motherhood affected such experiences (O’Reilly 2004b).2 Rich also claimed the positive aspects of her maternal experiences, making the distinction between motherhood and the experience of mothering. Her argument drew a
ention to the complex nature of motherhood. As the body of work on motherhood increased, theorizing on motherhood became more complex and contested (Abbey and O’Reilly; Bassin et al.; Brown et al.; Caplan; Collins; Di Quinzio; Freely; Glenn et al.; Harper and Richards). The work on motherhood was usually undertaken by feminist writers who drew on their personal experiences, and/or their research. These feminist academics came from many different disciplines. Scholarship on motherhood thus emerged as an

2

Introduction

interdisciplinary field in which particular themes are studied from a multitude of perspectives. Theories of power, like theories of motherhood, are problematic (Allen 1996, 1999; Bartky; Giddens; Go
lieb; Isaac; Janeway; Miller; Smith; Wartenberg 1990, 1992a, 1992b, 1992c). Allen acknowledges the diversity of power theories and suggests a theory of power useful for feminists. Her theoretical stance on a theory of power suitable for feminists consists of three expressions of power: power-over, power-to, and power-with. These concepts enable a clearer exploration of power pertinent to feminist investigations. The 1970s feminists focused on power as it was expressed in powerover, with the outcome of oppression. In their quest for equality they perpetuated an understanding of power that had its origin in older patriarchal definitions. In that era of feminism the second form of Allen’s theory, power-with, can also be observed. Feminists, working together, formalized groups to obtain greater privileges for women. Both concepts of power emerged from the perspective of a strong, or more specifically, an individuated or unencumbered subjectivity, because the feminists were often young women with no children. Janeway was one of the first theorists to claim power for “the weak.” She argued that the actual expressions of power by women (or by any oppressed group) were significant and produced a different kind of power. Janeway argued that the concept of power looked very different from the perspective of those who have experienced the consequences of power-over. Other feminist theorists agreed and began to argue that “motherwork” could be understood as a way in which women exercised power (Johnson). Psychologists Gilligan and Miller argue that power from women’s perspectives is quite distinct from patriarchal power. Their writings draw further a
ention to how men and women may differ in their perceptions of power, of identity, and of maturity. Gilligan argues that while a
achment/separation is a motif of human life, women’s voices are silenced in favour of the dominant patriarchal expression of power as separation. In her words: “A new psychological theory in which girls and women are seen and heard is an inevitable challenge to a patriarchal order that can remain in place only through the continuing eclipse of women’s experience” (Gilligan xxiv). She drew a
ention to the silencing of women’s voices, which results in the maintenance of theories based in men’s experiences.

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Motherhood

Miller claims that women’s experiences of the dominant patriarchal forms of power lead to feelings of inadequacy, fear of being destructive, fear of destroying relationships, and disempowerment. She also a
ests that the “traditional” use of the power that women have exercised is to foster the growth of others. This expression of power is not generally recognized: I believe this is a very powerful thing to do, and women have been doing it all the time, but no one is accustomed to including such effective action within the notions of power. It’s certainly not the kind of power we tend to think of; it involves a different content, mode of action, and goal. The one who exerts such power recognizes that she or he cannot possibly have total influence or control but has to find ways to interact with the other person’s constantly changing forces or powers. And all must be done with appropriate timing, phasing, and shiing of skills so that one helps to advance the movement of the less powerful person in a positive, stronger direction. (Miller 1992 242)

Her general definition of power, as “the capacity to produce a change” (Miller 241), understands power in terms of agency—the power to make a difference. As Miller acknowledges, this is not how “the ‘real world’ has defined power” (Miller). Nonetheless, when women act as they have acted in their nurturing, whether that is mothering or other forms of nurturing, they exercise power to alter present circumstances; they are active agents. The power Miller describes has similarities to Allen’s third expression of power, which she calls “power-to” (Allen). By this term Allen understands power to encompass resistance and to create empowerment, which is common in all nurturing. Allen contends that the feminist ideas of empowerment focus on presenting power as a positive force that enables an agent to do something creative, to have the capacity and ability to do (Allen 1999). Women’s use of their power to transform others and themselves, the exercise of empowerment, has been referred to as transformative power, although some theorists see this term as problematic (Wartenberg 1990 183–201). The diverse academic positions on power reflect the realization among maternal scholars that motherhood cannot be summed up as either oppression or power. Adding to the complexity of the academic representations of power is the realization on the part of some women, who were participants in the early phase of second-wave feminism, that

4

Introduction

they had fostered patriarchal values of independence, achievement, and success. Some feminists revealed that, in rejecting the negatives in the lives of their mothers, they sometimes also rejected their mothers. As older women, they acknowledge the context in which their mothers lived and appreciate their mothers as strong women who skilfully used what power they had (McFarland and Watson-Rouslin). Theories of power remain diverse (Wartenberg 1992a, 1992c). No agreement exists on what power is, what form it takes, how it is expressed, or what power can or cannot achieve. What is certain is that structures of power have been created and maintained, and, until recently, defined by men for the benefit of men. As Miller argues, concepts of power have been defined in traditional patriarchal terms, and new definitions of power are needed—definitions that arise from women’s experiences and perspectives. Since we cannot escape this historical context, we must acknowledge it and work with it. Allen makes a similar point and is critical of some definitions of power. In her feminist theory of power, Allen claims that power is far too complex to put into well-defined boxes. She points out that different expressions of power are intertwined, and she accepts this intermeshing (Allen 128). We contend that her assertion that it is be
er to understand power concepts as representing “analytically distinguishable features of a situation” than as different forms of power, is particularly valuable (Allen 129). Allen’s concepts of power are a more useful representation than are rigidly defined patriarchal forms of power. Also absent in patriarchal theories of power is the intense love that women who are mothering usually feel for their children. This intense love calls forth other intense feelings such as dislike, joy, ambivalence, wonder, resignation, happiness, rage, satisfaction, anxiety, pleasure, fear, and sometimes even a desire to be rid of this child forever, which is usually followed by remorse and guilt. As Ruddick argues, mothers can run the gamut of feelings from intense love to an intense desire to be rid of a child, but it is their actions that count and these actions are a result of their commitment to their relationship with their children—their “preservative love” (Ruddick 70–71). This commitment to preserve, grow, and train the child to take her/his place in society3 ensures that the nurturer thinks about her/his feelings and the child’s possible feelings, comes to a reasonable interpretation of the situation, and then bases his/her actions on her/his understanding of both feelings and reflective thought (70–1). Ruddick argues that: “It is not possible to understand preservative love ‘purely’ intellectually, nor can protective

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Motherhood

mothers understand themselves and their children without calling on and understanding feelings” (69). Feelings of love, responsibility, and altruism are as present in life as is power, and they inform mothers’ thoughts and actions. This power that mothers do have in nurturing the next generation and the strengths it displays were particularly evident to African-American scholars. In reacting against general theories of motherhood put forward by white, middle-class academics, several such scholars stress the power that African-American mothers have in their community and the necessity of taking context into account in any theorizing about motherhood.4 There can be no generalizable theories of motherhood because mothers come from all strata of society. Their socio-cultural position and their historical era, including their race, class, age, sexuality, economic position, family structure, and religion, affect both the mother as an individual and her mothering of her children. This concept of diversity within commonality is a central theme in this collection. The commonality in mothering is the commitment to the nurturing of children. This commitment does not have to be made by the biological mother, but someone must commit to it if the child is to survive and grow into an acceptable citizen. We contend that this expression of power as it is present in nurturing can be viewed as an analytically distinct expression of power and we refer to it as transformative power for the following reasons: • •

•

•

It is a positive expression of power that seeks its own obsolescence. It is a complex and diverse expression of power that cannot be represented wholly by any one expression of power as outlined by Allen. While influence, force, and coercive power are common both to “power-over” and to “transformative power,” as Wartenberg argues, influence, force, and coercion are focused and exercised differently in transformative power. Moreover, while power exercised in mothering is a particularistic power in that the expression of transformative power in the relationship is peculiar to that relationship, the commitment to care for the next generation is a constant feature of transformative power as it is expressed in mothering. We claim that transformative power is, in practice, a complex and qualified mix of power-over and power-to on a continuum

6

Introduction

that ranges from strong to weak. Hence the balance in transformative power is extremely fluid. This balance is in constant flux from hour to hour, day to day, and over the years. Transformative power is distinct because it must be in constant flux over the child’s life. The mother strives to nurture in a way that grows the child into an independent adult. Balancing the power mix is very important for both the nurturer and the nurtured. In sum, where a power relationship is marked by fluidity—by a need to understand and work with the dependent agent taking into account her/his position physically, intellectually, and emotionally; where power-over and power-to are both analytically observable; where the aim of the power relationship is supportive, seeking to nourish and create the “other” into an equal—this expression of power is what we refer to as transformative power. We draw on Miller’s description of a power that is commonly found amongst women, but is not recognized as such because its content and aim are different. This description of a power that does not totally control, that needs to be both interactive and constantly changing, with the changes being timed appropriately, and that is used for another’s good, applies to transformative power. Thus the first expression of power discussed in this book is power-over, which emerges in the form of constraints and limitations that usually lead to oppression. Dimensions of oppression as a result of power-over are present, to some degree, in every chapter in the book. For example, in Chapter 10, Hing Ai Yun argues that the status of Singaporean-Chinese mothers is still one of subordination. Despite be
er access to education, most young women still feel the need to marry and have children, and that path leads to increased oppression. Second, the expression of power apparent in power-to accounts for women’s own agency and resistance. Numerous examples can be found in the chapters that explore mothers striving to make life be
er for themselves and their families. Julie Thacker’s work is a good example of this power. Other examples of mothers using what power was available to them can be observed readily in every chapter of the section on Practices. Power-with, the third expression of power, enables women to act as a group. This mode of power is not so obvious in this book. Women in general, and mothers in particular, have historically been

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Motherhood

sequestered. Nonetheless, when mothers can congregate, informal examples of power-with emerge. The outstanding example of such power can be found in Chapter 11, in which Ruby Newman describes the incredible decision made by Ethiopian-Jewish mothers to trek to Israel. This research highlights the strength, resistance, and agency of a group of mothers who worked together to lessen oppression and to give their daughters a be
er life. In their very actions and a
itudes, the mothers empowered the daughters, who in turn recognize their mothers’ heroism. As well, evidence of this may be found in Toni Morrison’s fiction, most notably her novel Paradise, as examined by Andrea O’Reilly in Chapter 8. The fourth expression of power, transformative power, is present and observable in the nurturing relationships explored in this book. The amount of power over the child that the mother has in the mother/child relationship, and the timing and method of le
ing go of that power, will be different for every child. Nonetheless, the mother’s decisions in this area in the transformative power relationships is critical to the child’s growth into a responsible and acceptable citizen of the society in which she/he lives. Simultaneously, the mother must exercise her power to preserve and grow the life of her child (Ruddick). That transformative power is not adequately represented by power-over is observable in Thacker’s research. She demonstrates how the mothers continued to strive, and to succeed to some degree, to maintain their transformative power relationship even when their children were removed from the mother by the state. In Short’s research the mothers she interviewed, in their determination to keep their transformative power relationship with their children, “told how their qualities of self-reliance and endurance, and their preparedness to take risks, underpinned their capacities for control (over circumstances), resistance (to domination), and empowerment (to act).” Hence both oppression and power, in complex interrelationships, are found in mothering. Many questions emerge when mothering is examined from this perspective. Few academics have a
ended to the duality of power and oppression in the many positions of mothers. This book aims to expand academic knowledge of mothering from a feminist perspective, looking particularly at how mothering is simultaneously a site of power and oppression. It will examine the oppressive and empowering dimensions of motherhood as well as the complex relationship between the two. It provides a new perspective in that it

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Introduction

focuses on oppression and power in motherhood, and the selected papers develop this focus through the lenses of diversity and commonality. The contributors to this volume have wrestled with the complexity of different examples of power and oppression and have come to different conclusions. They bring to the reader’s a
ention the many ways in which mothers, even as they experience oppression, are not passive victims. Oppression does not equate to the absence of agency. As mothers, women are portrayed throughout this book as active agents creating the best conditions they can for themselves and their families in the variety of contexts. Lowinsky has argued that women need to connect to their motherline, and that the exposing and claiming of maternal power is important to document as part of our “motherline.” The papers included in this volume are all predicated upon the value of knowing the wisdom and agency that comes from the experiences of real mothers. Thus, the volume not only covers a wide range of subject ma
er but also illustrates ways of conducting feminist research and practice. The book is enriched by the cross-cultural diversity of contributors and of their work, and it examines four locations wherein motherhood is simultaneously experienced as a site of oppression and power: embodiment, representation, practices, and separation.

Section One: Embodiment In the first section, the chapters focus on the female body. The body and its many representations have come under increasing scrutiny by feminist scholars (Martin; Moltmann-Wendel; Reiger; Shildrick). Many feminists have pointed out that the female body has been represented in opposition to the mind, with woman associated with the body while man has occupied the higher plane of the mind (Ortner; Shildrick). Other feminists have highlighted how, in different cultural and historical contexts, women’s bodies have been seen as unclean (Kitzinger 45–60). This idea of the unclean female body has served as a way to control women (Griffin 83–95; Ranke-Heinemann). The medicalization of women’s bodies is another form of this control (Ehrenreich and English; Reiger). In all three chapters in Section One, the authors argue that there is evidence of the oppression of women in the bodily functions of motherhood. Lisa Featherstone focuses on the medical system in her chapter, “The Kindest Cut? The Caesarean Section as Turning Point, Australia

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Motherhood

1800–1900.“ While these caesareans were usually performed only in desperate cases where the mother was in a close-to-fatal situation, Featherstone argues that the practice of caesarean section was the turning point when the mother’s life no longer became the dominant concern. Moreover, in Australia, the caesarean was presented as evidence of the technology and skill of the surgeon in question and thus male control of the female body was implicated in the successful caesarean. It worked to enforce the male control of birthing, the emphasis on the child, and the mother being regarded as the conduit of reproduction. In Alison Bartle
’s, and Susanne Gannon’s and Babe
e MüllerRockstroh’s work contemporary connections between breastfeeding and oppressive social constructions of the female body reveal another facet of male definition of the female body. In both chapters the writers argue that, while breasts are overwhelmingly evident in the media, in texts, and advertisements in western society, talk about real breasts, especially the nurturing breast, is, by comparison, missing both in the public arena and in general discussion. The portrayed and discussed breast is the sexual object rather than the lactating breast. This oppression of the lactating breast results in a lack of knowledge about breastfeeding. As Bartle
argues, when mothers choose to breastfeed in public, it is regularly been depicted as a “scandal.” The response to this “scandal” has been outrage. Such “scandals” can be construed as a critical social moment when certain cultural values about what women do with their bodies in public might be considered political and feminist, and thus a challenge to the status quo. Whose values are promoted when the sexualized breast with its erotic messages is so commonly on display, while the real breast, feeding a baby, even in a discreet manner, is a “scandal”?

Section Two: Representation The second section looks at how mothers and motherhood are represented in various literary and cultural discourses. Looking at discourses as diverse as literary fiction, parenting magazines, and religious texts, the chapters examine how the dominant ideology of a “good” motherhood is both constructed by popular culture and contested by mothers in practices and representations. While the normative discourse of motherhood is unequivocally oppressive to mothers in that it creates an impossible ideal, mothers may, as

10

Introduction

documented in this section, reinterpret and re-script the patriarchal narrative of motherhood to make mothering a site of agency for women. The nurturance and peacefulness associated with “good” motherhood, for example, becomes the means by which mothers may empower themselves and resist. Central to this redefinition of motherhood is a dismantling of its most oppressive mandates: namely, to be a good woman, one must be a mother and to be a good mother one cannot be a woman—that is, have a self outside of motherhood. In other words, as the chapters document the oppression of patriarchal motherhood, they likewise make evident the possibility of empowered mothering. The chapter that opens the section, “Women’s Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood, and Politics in English Language Drama” by Karin Ikas, examines the theme of motherhood and peace in posters, poetry, and fictional works of Australian, American, and Canadian women writers between 1890 and 1920. In particular, she examines the writing of Canadian author Nellie McClung. Ikas argues that women’s association with peace is a highly contested theme; however, the ancient creed “Pax Materna,” mother’s peace, remains a dominant theme in public discourse. To this day, mothers are associated with pacifism and the negotiating of conflicts in times of war. Yet, not all women are inherently peaceful. She points out that there are many examples of women warriors in different historical, cultural, and geopolitical contexts. Women’s role in the war context needs to be discussed beyond the traditional scope of essentialist gender roles. Particularly insightful here is an analysis of women’s changing roles in the High Empire Period (1890–1920). Dominated by the Great War as the first war to be total in scope, but also by women’s struggle for suffrage and independence, this period is acknowledged as a major breakthrough for women’s emancipation. By focusing on the relationship between motherhood and war as illustrated in various texts of this period, Ikas examines the ways in which traditional motherhood and the demand for an independent female subjectivity intertwined with various war experiences of women in the High Empire. Erika Horwitz and Bonita C. Long, in their chapter, “Mothering and Stress Discourses: A Deconstruction of the Interrelationship of Discourses on Mothering and Stress,” explore the interrelationship of two dominant discourses—mothering and stress. These discourses, which have multiple social consequences, reflect forces that shape a mother’s sense of self and how she understands her own and others’ behaviours. The authors identify the dominant discourse on mothering

11

Motherhood

(for example, mothers are responsible for how their children develop; mothers “need” to seek expert advice) by reviewing several recent critiques of mothering. Next, to identify the stress discourse as it relates to mothering, Horwitz and Long selected three articles from popular parenting magazines and ten parenting articles found on three Internet sites. The analysis revealed four themes: (a) a mother’s stress can harm her child’s health, (b) stress is damaging to mothers’ health and well being, (c) stress can affect mothers’ personal relationships, and (d) mothers should be able to cope because there are many options. The researchers found that the stress discourse has similarities with the intensive mothering discourse and serves to reinforce the myths and messages in the mothering discourse. In particular, the socio-political context of women’s lives is absent from both the stress and mothering discourses; it is reduced to women’s biological and psychological experiences. In Chapter 7, “A Lesser Woman?: Representations of the Childless Woman,” Enza Gandolfo takes an interdisciplinary approach that combines literary theory, creative writing, and personal reflection to explore the ways that childless women are represented in Australian fiction, and how these representations both reflect and contribute to the construction of cultural and historical perceptions and experiences of childlessness. The first section of the chapter reviews the current psychological, sociological, cultural, and feminist literature on the “childless woman” to provide an outline of the dominant discourses of childlessness. The second section moves on to analyze the representation of the childless woman in fiction, with a specific focus on three wellknown Australian novels: Eleanor Dark’s Prelude to Christopher; Patrick White’s The Aunt’s Story; and Elizabeth Jolley’s The Sugar Mother. The third section discusses the author’s own fiction writing, and the extent to which her experiences as a childless woman, and her commitment as a feminist to articulating the diversity of women’s experiences and to challenging the dominant discourses of childlessness, inform and shape her writing. This final section concludes with an extract of Gandolfo’s novel, Swimming, a work in progress. “(Mis)Conceptions: The Paradox of Maternal Power and Loss in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Paradise” by Andrea O’Reilly explores the theme of motherhood in Morrison’s two novels. Motherhood is a central theme in Morrison’s fiction and is a topic she returns to time and time again in her many interviews and articles. In her reflections on motherhood, both inside and outside her fiction, Morrison articulates a

12

Introduction

fully developed theory of African-American mothering that is central to her larger political and philosophical stance on black womanhood. Building upon black women’s experiences of, and perspectives on, motherhood Morrison develops a view of black motherhood that is, in terms of both maternal identity and role, radically different from the motherhood practised and prescribed in the dominant culture. Morrison defines maternal identity as a site of power for black women that has as its explicit goal the empowerment of children. Motherhood, in Morrison’s view, is fundamentally and profoundly an act of resistance; it is essential and integral to black people, and, in particular, black women’s fight against racism (and sexism) and their ability to achieve well being for themselves and their culture. In this chapter O’Reilly examines instances wherein motherhood, as a result of an individual or a community’s loss of African-American values, does not become a site of power for women or empowerment for children. In particular, the emphasis is upon how this inability or failure is signified metaphorically in images and experiences of failed reproduction and fractured relationships. This theme will be examined in Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye, and her second-to-last novel, Paradise. In The Bluest Eye, reproduction, in particular birth, signifies a black mother’s inability to experience motherhood as a site of power and her subsequent failure to empower/nurture her daughter because of her assimilation into the values of the dominant culture—in particular its definitions of female beauty—and the resulting rejection of the black values that would empower her. In Paradise, reproduction signifies a black community’s failure to grant women power in motherhood and allow them to nurture/empower their children because of the town’s identification with the values of the dominant culture, wherein power and ownership are valued over those of community and care. The final chapter in this section, “Motherhood in Hinduism” by Tamara Ditrich, examines the position and role of motherhood in Hinduism, focusing on the interrelatedness between Hindu religion and Hindu society. The chapter outlines some of the prominent issues of power and oppression relating to motherhood and, as well, explores the status of mothers in Hindu society. Special a
ention is given to the ambiguous role of goddesses in Hinduism. Goddesses are presented either with a strong maternal nature or as completely devoid of it. As well, Ditrich draws a
ention to the importance of examining the position of motherhood within an historical framework, looking in particular at the oldest source of Hindu law, The Laws of Manu—the

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Motherhood

source of authority in orthodox Hinduism, prescribing social and religious duties of the Hindus.

Section Three: Practices We turn in this section from representations of mothers/mothering to the experiences of mothers. Research that is emergent from women’s experiences, that heeds the voices of women, is of basic importance in feminism (Belenky et al.; Brown et al.; DeVault 1991; Glenn et al.; Harding; Smith). As mothers, we must self-define and self-evaluate if we are to be freed from what mothers should be/ought to be—that is, the definitions and the ideologies of others. In the following five chapters, the research shows mothers who are subjected to varying degrees of oppression, and who find diverse ways to resist—how, when, and wherever this is possible. The mothers are thoughtful, strong agents within the context of their lives, and they find ways to help themselves and their daughters/sons. The voices are diverse and cross-cultural, but their commonality is that the mothers seek to empower themselves and, in some cases, other women, and to use their transformative power wisely, despite their oppression. The researchers have privileged the mothers’ voices. The first two chapters are intergenerational and reveal how mothers resist their oppression in any way they can while seeking to help their daughters cope with the context in which they will, in turn, mother. These chapters highlight the importance of the “motherline” to the empowerment of women (Lowinsky). Hing Ai Yan investigates three-generational families to note changes that have occurred across the generations. Despite the changes, most women are still faced with having to become the subservient homemaker or, if working, do the double shi. If the mother should have to move from the subservient role of wife/mother/housekeeper to the dominant role of breadwinner, she has great difficulties. Her experience of oppression in no way prepares her for this leadership role. In Chapter 11, Ruby Newman’s “Survival Narratives of EthiopianJewish Mothers and Daughters in Israel,” we again hear the voices of mothers and daughters talking about constraints and agency. The Ethiopian women Newman interviewed trekked by night to the Sudan and then to Israel, where they now live. Both mothers and daughters recalled their formidable journey, the hardships they endured, and

14

Introduction

their rese
lement. Here the importance of power emerges, as does the determination that results from the mothers’ collective desire to ensure their daughters benefit from the transformative power relationship. The women travelled with young children; some were pregnant; some gave birth on the way; some died. They had to journey by night and had to pretend they were not Jewish when they were in the Sudan. Upon arriving in Israel, they faced the difficult task of beginning life with few material goods, in a strange environment with different laws and culture. They now live—a black Jewish minority—on the margins of Israeli life with their children. These women refused to be viewed as victims or as refugees. Instead they see themselves as survivors who, by their own agency, completed this Herculean journey to bring their children and themselves to a relatively safe haven. Daughters spoke of their mothers’ strength and heroism in completing such a difficult, dangerous mission and of their admiration for the way their mothers continued to strive and adapt to the new way of life. In remembering and valuing their mothers’ stories, the daughters have a survival model of enormous power. Their motherline is strong. In the next three chapters, mothers’ agency and resistance to oppression is obvious in different historical and social contexts. These mothers have diverse problems, but a common desire to mother well. In her research, Marie Porter has examined constraints on Australian mothers in the 1950s and 1960s. This mothering style had helped to spawn feminism. Like the Singaporean women in Hing’s study, Australian women in this period were channelled to one subject position—that of wife/mother. All of Porter’s interviewees followed this path and stayed at home to care for their children. Analysis of the interview material confirmed that the women were oppressed in many ways, but in common with the outcome of the above chapters, the interviewees did not identify with the role of victim. They saw themselves as mothers who, by their transformative power, made a valuable contribution to society while also being aware that society did not share this assessment of their motherwork. In contrasting Elizabeth Reid Boyd’s contribution with Porter’s research, the change in context and expectations around Australian mothering in the last half of the 20th century is evident. Whereas the participants in Porter’s study expected to be the child-bearers and -rearers, staying at home to carry out these tasks, Reid Boyd found that some of the stay-at-home mothers she interviewed saw themselves as having to resist pressure to return to paid work. The debate about

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Motherhood

whether to be in the paid workforce or at home doing the motherwork (unpaid, of course) when children are young, is alive and well in Australia. In “Mothers at Home: Oppressed or oppressors or victims of false dichotomies?” Reid Boyd argues that the debate is falsely positioned between the different groups of mothers, when the problem is one that stems from the privileging of male norms of caring and in the paid work environment. Forms of oppression are unmistakable in contemporary society and mothers have to cope. In Patricia Short’s chapter, “Mothers at the Margins: Identities and Survival,” the themes of survival and strength again emerge. The mothers whose experiences are recounted in Short’s chapter are in extreme financial need, but have developed practices of endurance, self-reliance, and strength that enable them to cope. These practices are profoundly connected to the women’s identities. Although the participants are in a precarious situation, by identifying themselves as mothers who can cope, they strengthen their ability to survive. Unfortunately, through their responses to their situation, they seem to further marginalize themselves. While the degrees of oppression and of constraints vary, common in all five chapters are the different prescriptive conditions of mothering that the women have to face. In all cases these conditions result in oppression. The mothers recognize the oppression and the constraints upon them, but have responded with an agency that is based on resistance, strength, and endurance, and the value they place on their need to nurture their children as well as possible. Such a
itudes have been crucial to their ability to cope and, at times, to their survival. These mothers, by example, have passed on an empowered motherline. In the general sense all mothers can claim these women’s powers. We can read of their feats and, while not condoning the oppression, can draw courage from their agency.

Section Four: Separation The common theme of the final section is maternal separation. These chapters analyze situations where, for one reason or another, mothers and their children are separated for some or all of the time. As we noted above, one a
ribute of the “good” mother is that she is there for her children. Consequently, the mothers in these chapters are frequently branded “bad” mothers without consideration of the difficulties the

16

Introduction

individual mother may face or the context in which she does her motherwork. Such a response is not unusual, as mother blaming is a well-worn response to many social problems (Caplan; Eyer). Blaming the mother is an easy option for society; it is a way of constructing problems as personal and the responsibility of mothers, rather than as a societal responsibility. Anne Morris’s chapter, “Naming Maternal Alienation,” begins the section. Morris coined the term maternal alienation to describe the form of male abuse of women and children in which the father of the children deliberately sets out to alienate the children from their mother. On the basis of her research, Morris asserts that this form of abuse is a deliberate male strategy used to destroy the relationship between the mother and child, and build up the father as a heroic figure. As she points out, a broader discourse of mother blaming enables maternal alienation by making the practice one that is easily overlooked. This form of separation of mother and child can have lasting effects, and in some cases, completely destroys the maternal relationship. It gives lie to the popular image of the family as the safe haven. “Women of Courage: the Noncustodial Mother” by Julie Thacker takes the theme of maternal separation a step further in her exploring of the physical separation of the mother and child. Thacker observes that society treats non-custodial mothers as if they do not exist, as if their motherhood ceases when their child no longer lives with them. As she notes, these women are mothers in trouble, not non-mothers. They experience oppression at the hands of a society that allocates blame to the mother if she does not fit the “always available, able to cope with any situation mould.” Proper consideration of the context of her motherwork, of the problems she has, is missing. These mothers, in common with the mothers in the group of chapters in Section Three, learned to resist societal pressure in any way possible. Thacker outlines their resistance strategies, one of which is to find spaces where they can nurture their children, if only for a short time. Thacker, and many of the other authors in this book, in examining the situation of noncustodial mothers, sees these mothers as women of courage who were victimized, rather than seeing them as victims. Annie Pavlovic, Rosemary Aris, and Audrey Mullender are researching an area of maternal separation that is more associated with Victorian times than with the present. Their chapter, “Abandoning Mothers and Their Children,” sets out preliminary findings from their British research, which aims to explore the increasing rate of

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Motherhood

abandonment of children under the age of two. Here, as in the previous two studies, mothers are judged against the “good” mother ideal and so are found wanting. In common with the mothers who are the subjects of the previous chapter, societal judgement moves them from the category “mother” to that of “non-mother” without taking into account the circumstances of their motherwork. To use the author’s words, “[i]n apparently abandoning motherhood they become, by definition, ‘unnatural’ and, by implication, ‘immoral’ women who somehow stand a ‘world apart’ from ‘real’ mothers.” The problem, of course, is that the mothers are not judged against “real mothers,” but against an ideal that is impossible for any mother to maintain. In exploring the mother’s action and her circumstances, the researchers challenge this and suggest that “many social acts of abandonment might be experienced by women and more broadly understood as a reasonable response to unreasonable circumstances.” The mother may be expressing her transformative power in the only way she can envision. The final chapter in the section is Petra Büskens’s “When Eve Le the Garden: A Tale about Mothers Who Leave Their Families.” Büskens’s chapter focuses on maternal separation, but on a particular form of maternal separation: Büskens’s mother chooses to leave. She is in control. She exercises her “freedom and self-determination” and, in doing so, she “reinvents” motherhood by her action. The mother in Büskens’s research does not want to be in the confining role of mother as defined in western culture. She has no true freedom in that role, so she chooses freedom by leaving the role behind her. This leaving mother returns in some capacity to her children, because it is not the relationship with her children she finds stifling but the way the institution of motherhood defines and confines her. Büskens argues that it is this “free” mother who challenges the patriarchal dichotomies of male/female, public/private, and autonomy and care. This mother is unconventional in her approach to mothering and by her action exposes the falsity of the concept that mothering problems are personal, not social.

Conclusion Although oppression takes different forms, it emerges as a commonality in the articles in this collection. Oppression takes different forms because it arises from the context of mothering, from the socio-cultural norms and values of the particular society in which the mother and her

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Introduction

children are embedded. It is possible to see that mothers are victimized and influenced by societal, and their own, expectations. There is a vast difference between being victimized and being a victim. The research in this book highlights mothers’ oppression, but also mothers’ agency, their power. It documents how, using what power they have and their ingenuity, strength, adaptability, and courage, mothers have looked for the spaces where they could achieve change, no ma
er how small, for themselves and their children, and where they could improve their transformative power relationship with their children. While in all instances forms of oppression are present, so are forms of creativity and resistance. Hill Collins (1994) argues that theories of motherhood are always partial perspectives because of the diversity that exists in mothering. She then goes on to claim that “shiing the center to accommodate this diversity promises to recontextualize motherhood and point us toward a feminist theorizing that embraces difference as an essential part of commonality” (62). This book is an example of “shiing the centre” so that many different forms of oppression and of power are manifested.

Endnotes 1. 2. 3.

4.

We thank Dr. Angela Coco for the suggestion of the actual form of the title. See Andrea O’Reilly, ed., From Motherhood to Mothering: The Legacy of Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2004b. This statement does not deny that some mothers train their children to be resistant to societal norms. That this training is not the dominant training is evidenced by the lack of sudden changes in the social system. For a discussion of this see Andrea O’Reilly’s Toni Morrison and Motherhood: A Politics of the Heart. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2004c.

References Abbey, S., and A. O’Reilly. Redefining Motherhood. Toronto: Second Story Press, 1998. Allen, A. “Foucault on Power: A Theory for Feminists.” Feminist Interpretations of Michel Foucault. Ed. S.J. Hekman. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University, 1996. 265–281.

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Allen, A. The Power of Feminist Theory. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1999. Badinter, E. The Myth of Motherhood: An Historical View of the Maternal Instinct. Trans. R. DeGaris. London: Souvenir Press, 1981. Bartky, S.L. Femininity and Oppression. London: Routledge, 1990. Bassin, D., M. Honey and M. Kaplan, eds., Representations of Motherhood. London: Yale University Press, 1994. Belenky, M.F., M.C. Blythe, N.R. Goldberger, and T.J. Ma
uck. Women’s Ways of Knowing. New York: Basic Books, 1986. Birke, L. Women/Feminism and Biology. Brighton, Sussex: Wheatsheaf Books Ltd., 1986. Brown, S., J. Lumley, R. Small, and J. Astbury. Missing Voices: The Experience of Motherhood. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1994. Caplan, P.J. “Take the Blame Off Mother.” Psychology Today 20 (Oct. 1986): 70–71. Collins, P.H. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge, 1990. Collins, P.H. “Shiing the Center: Race, Class, and Feminist Theorizing about Motherhood.” Mothering: Ideology, Experience, Agency. Eds. E.N. Glenn, G. Change, and L.R. Forcey. London: Routledge, 1994. 45–65. DeVault, M.L. “Talking and Listening from Women’s Standpoint: Feminist Strategies for Interviewing and Analysis.” Social Problems 37.1 (Feb. 1990): 96–116. DeVault, M.L. Feeding the Family. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991. Di Quinzio, P. The Impossibility of Motherhood. London: Routledge, 1999. Ehrenreich, B., and D. English. For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts’ Advice to Women. New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1978 and 1979. Firestone, S. The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. London: Paladin, 1970. Freely, M. What About Us? An Open Le
er to the Mothers Feminism Forgot. London: Bloomsbury, 1995. Friedan, B. The Feminine Mystique. New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1963. Frye, M. The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory. New York: Crossing Press, 1983. Giddens, A. The Constitution of Society. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984. Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women‘s Development. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993. Glenn, E.N., G. Chang, and L.R. Forcey, eds. Mothering: Ideology, Experience, and Agency. New York: Routledge, 1994.

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Gottlieb, R.S. “Mothering and the Reproduction of Power: Chodorow, Dinnerstein, and Social Theory.” Socialist Review 14.5.77 (Sept.–Oct. 1984): 93–119. Griffin, S. Woman and Nature. London: The Women’s Press, 1978. Harding, S. “Subjectivity, Experience and Knowledge: An Epistemology from/for Rainbow Coalition Politics.” Development and Change 23.3 (July 1992): 175–193. Harper, J., and L. Richards. Mothers and Working Mothers. Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1979. Isaac, J.C. “Beyond the Three Faces of Power: A Realist Critique.” Rethinking Power. Ed. T.E. Wartenberg. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992. 32–55. Janeway, E. Powers of the Weak. New York: Alfred A. Knoff, 1980. Johnson, M.H. Strong Mothers, Weak Wives: The Search for Gender Equality. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Kitzinger, S. Ourselves as Mothers. London: Transworld Publishers, 1992. Lowinsky, N.R. Stories from the Motherline. Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher Inc., 1992. Martin, E. The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction. Boston: Beacon Press, 1987. McFarland, B., and V. Watson-Rouslin. My Mother Was Right. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Inc., 1997. Miller, J.B. “Women and Power.” Rethinking Power. Ed. T.E. Wartenberg. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992. 240–248. Moltmann-Wendel, E. I Am My Body. Trans. J. Bowden. London: SCM Press, 1994. Oakley, A. From Here to Maternity: Becoming a Mother. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1981. O’Brien, M. The Politics of Reproduction. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., 1981. O’Reilly, A., ed. Mother Outlaws: Theories and Practices of Empowered Mothering. Toronto: Women’s Press, 2004a. _____, ed. From Motherhood to Mothering: The Legacy of Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2004b. _____. Toni Morrison and Motherhood: A Politics of the Heart. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2004c. Ortner, S. “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?” Eds. M.Z. Rosaldo and L. Lamphere. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1974. 67–88. Ranke-Heinemann, U. Eunuchs for Heaven: The Catholic Church and Sexuality. Trans. J. Brownjohn. London: Andre Deutsch, 1990.

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Reiger, K. Our Bodies, Our Babies. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2001. Rich, A. Of Woman Born. London: Virago Press, 1977. Ruddick, S. Maternal Thinking: Towards a Politics of Peace. Boston: Beacon Press, 1989. Shildrick, M. Leaky Bodies and Boundaries. London: Routledge, 1997. Smith, D. The Conceptual Practices of Power. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1990. Umansky, L. Motherhood Reconceived. New York: NY University Press, 1996. Wartenberg, T.E. The Forms of Power. Ithaca: Cornell, 1990. _____. Introduction. Rethinking Power. By Wartenberg. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992a. xi–xxvi. _____. Rethinking Power. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992b. _____. “Situated Social Power.” Rethinking Power. Ed. T.E. Wartenberg. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992c. 79–101. Wearing, B. The Ideology of Motherhood. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1984.

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EMBODIMENT

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CHAPTER TWO

THE KINDEST CUT? THE CAESAREAN SECTION AS TURNING POINT, AUSTRALIA 1880–19001 Lisa Featherstone

I

n September of 1883, MN, a small, fair woman of 21 years went to the Prince Alfred Hospital in Sydney, concerned by an abdominal enlargement. MN was single, but feared the rather prominent lump may have been a pregnancy, as she had been “indiscreet” on a number of occasions. For two years, she had suffered from pain in the pelvic region, especially over the right ovary, and for the past months she had noticed some swelling. The lump had rapidly grown, the pain had become more acute, and her periods had ceased. The Honorary Surgeon George Fortescue examined MN and diagnosed her as having an ovarian cyst. Pregnancy was deemed unlikely and the cyst was tapped, causing great pain and weakness to the patient. She was told to go home and convalesce. In January, she returned to the hospital to be operated upon for the cyst. Again, pregnancy was ruled out. During the abdominal section, however, it became clear that the cyst was not alone—there was a fetus of some size. The surgeons held a hurried consultation and together decided the best treatment was to remove both the child and the uterus, in an a
empt to prevent septicemia. The operation, lasting one and a half hours and performed without antiseptic spray, was deemed a success. While the fetus was too young to survive, the mother made a full and fairly speedy recovery (Fortescue). Fortescue’s operation was one of the first caesarean sections performed in Australia. The advent of the caesarean section was an important surgical milestone. Adopted at a time when medical dominance over childbirth and infant care was being established (Featherstone; Reiger), the caesarean marked a new stage of technical and clinical control over mothers. The caesarean section, however, can

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Motherhood

be read as much more than this. It is a powerful symbol of change and of the movement from medical interest centering on the life and health of the mother, to a more profound and sustained interest in the child. Caesarean sections were an effort to save the life of both the infant and the mother, but at a time when abdominal surgery was extremely dangerous, the risks to the mother were high. This chapter will examine early uses of the caesarean procedure, in Australia in the 1880s and 1890s, through case notes and doctors’ descriptions in contemporary medical journals. Using the caesarean section as a case study of medical attitudes and ideologies, this analysis will explore changing a
itudes towards mothers and babies in late 19th-century Australia, and the consequent repositioning of the woman/mother in the field of obstetric practice and the wider, moral order of society. In many ways, historical accounts of the caesarean are limited. Much of what is wri
en falls into the category of hagiography, with the caesarean uncritically rendered “the greatest operation” (Thoms). Those works wri
en from a medical viewpoint tend to remain within the scientific framework, offering a notion of progress from the horrors of the difficult and protracted labour to the clean and simple caesarean (Young; Forster). Such texts are rather uncritical of the role of the doctor and have sustained an unquestioned belief that the operation was both a necessity and an exciting and successful step in the history of medicine. Further, these texts have served to make gender invisible, considering the performance of obstetrics and gynecology without any understanding of how sex and gender may have shaped the disciplines. Although a more recent account (Churchill) shows more awareness of gender as a category of analysis, it presents a somewhat sketchy historical analysis, based largely on secondary sources. In this chapter, I will endeavour to add to and complicate these discussions. I begin by drawing on Irvine Loudon’s idea that the caesarean section was bound “not only [by] clinical, but also by moral and religious considerations” (Loudon 133). Stemming from the argument that medicine, science, and technology do not operate in a vacuum, this reading of the caesarean section enables an analysis of the procedure within both the field of medicine and the wider social world. Further, in situating the performance of this particular surgery in wider social and political contexts, I draw upon historiographical considerations of gender to offer a more complex interpretation of the relationship between female patients and male obstetricians.

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The Kindest Cut?

The Caesarean Section in the 19th Century The second half of the 19th century was the great era of exploratory surgery and saw a proliferation of operations involving both the genitals and the reproductive system of women. As Moscucci and McCalman have described, there was a range of surgical innovations including ovariotomy (the removal of cystic ovaries), hysterectomy, repair of vesico-vaginal fistulas, and operations for relief of both vaginal and uterine prolapse (Moscucci; McCalman; McGregor). While early abdominal surgery was treated with mistrust, by the mid-1870s surgery such as ovariotomy had been legitimized and even made routine (McGregor 301). The relative success of such surgery, and the availability of anaesthetics, encouraged the medical profession to continue to refine other less successful operations, including the caesarean section. In this period, caesarean sections took two forms. Initial operations were the classic section, the removal of the child from the uterus via a cut in the abdomen. Under chloroform, ether, or a combination of both, the surgeon made an incision, about five inches long, extending vertically from the umbilicus to the pubis. The peritoneum was opened and then a small incision was made in the uterine wall. This was torn into a hole of about five or six inches. The membranes could then be slit and the child extracted, generally quite easily. The uterine cavity was thoroughly cleansed and the area was then sutured and the woman bandaged with plaster and flannel (Garde). In 1882, the German surgeon Max Sanger (1853–1902) refined the operation by ensuring that the uterine cavity was fully closed, using a combination of deep and superficial stitches, which reduced the risk of infection and hemorrhage (Forster). Just as common as the classic section was Porro’s operation. Following the extraction of the fetus, the surgeon removed the uterus and its appendages, including the ovaries, leaving only the cervical portion of the uterus (Godson). Internationally, Porro’s operation was viewed as much safer than the classic caesarean, though evidence for this was spasmodic. The advantages to Porro’s operation were twofold. First, with the uterus removed there was less chance of bleeding and hemorrhage. Second, with the reproductive organs removed, there was no chance of a subsequent pregnancy. The caesarean section was oen perceived as an incomplete operation, for it “dealt only with the

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effects,” leaving the cause undisturbed and the woman vulnerable to future pregnancies (Godson; Chambers). This was the site of some contest. Many doctors disliked Porro’s operation for this very reason, believing it “unsexed” the woman (Chambers). The idea of “unsexing” is indicative that Victorian notions of maternity and femininity were intertwined with scientific and medical theories. The social and medical construction of woman tied her so firmly to reproduction and child bearing that it would be unthinkable to knowingly separate the two. The hysterectomy, by rendering her infertile, was an assault on her femininity and indeed her whole purpose and being. Porro’s operation was not opposed on the grounds that it was dangerous, but rather because it interfered with women’s perceived role in society. Other moral and cultural forces came into play within the medical discussion over the caesarean. In the doctors’ medical notes on caesarean section, there are echoes of notions of the passivity of women and the action of men, so central to Victorian constructions of gender. The caesarean, through its combination of anaesthesia and medical management, overrode the mother’s own body, leaving the practitioner as both performer and controller (Murphy-Lawless). The caesarean allowed the optimum amount of socially desirable passivity during childbirth, in effect, taking the labour out of labour for mothers. Thus cultural constructions of Victorian femininity were enhanced and reinforced by the new technology, with medical men as agents and mothers as inert receptors of doctors’ operative “skills.” Despite the seriousness of abdominal surgery, the operation was itself remarkably easy for the surgeon, especially when compared to the management of a difficult or protracted labour. By the 1890s, some operations were as quick as 20 minutes (Corbin), though very real risks to the mother remained (Godson). The pain and suffering of individual women is clear, even in the understated and technical discourses of the medical profession. Following the operation, most women were severely ill with vomiting and stomach disorders, probably due to shock, or infection, or as a reaction to the anaesthetic. Also, in these early days it was not unusual for women to be hospitalized for three months or more (Corbin; Godson; Garde; Haynes; Foreman). Despite this, in the medical journals, doctors a
empted to depict positive experiences. One woman was recorded as feeling “easy and delightful”—though perhaps this was the morphine (Haynes 371). Another claimed she felt

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The Kindest Cut?

“quite well” and asked for a chop to eat—although by the following day she was dead (Chambers 30). During this period, caesarean sections had a horrifying maternal mortality rate and it is sometimes difficult to understand the perseverance of the medical profession. Using Godson’s statistics, while Porro’s operation provided be
er results than the classic caesarean section, international success rates before 1884 were still relatively low (Godson). Italy, for example, where the majority of early operations took place, had a maternal survival rate of well under 50 percent: of 53 recorded operations, 23 women recovered, while the remaining 30 died; of the infants, 45 recovered (including one set of twins), while 9 were stillborn. In Great Britain, of the five operations performed by 1884, the mother died in four cases, while the child survived in four cases (Godson). The major causes of death were, in order, septic peritonitis, shock, peritonitis, and septicemia (Godson). Taken across the board, success rates recorded in Europe and Great Britain between 1750 and 1939 suggest a mortality rate of almost 80 percent (Young). Australian medics closely followed international debates and added their own statistics. Of 19 cases recorded in the Australasian Medical Gaze
e (AMG) and the Australian Medical Journal (AMJ) between 1875 and 1900, 13 mothers survived. It appears, however, that such a sample is inherently flawed, as doctors preferred to report successes rather than failures. In contrast, the eminent Melbourne gynecologist Walter Balls-Headley quoted that in 1877 the maternal mortality was 85.7 percent but that by 1881, mortality from the operation was 55.8 percent (Headley 1886). Other Australian contemporaries described maternal mortality rates as high as 85 percent (Hooper). Success rates of the various forms of caesarean sections depended in part on the condition of the mother when the operation was performed. If the operation was performed aer a long labour, when the mother was already exhausted, her chance of survival was much lower (Godson). Women were also be
er off when preoperative examinations were kept to a minimum, thus reducing the chance that infection had already been introduced. Some doctors performed caesarean sections without the use of antiseptic measures. Some relied on cleanliness rather than antiseptics, while others used antiseptic water, but not carbolic spray (Godson). There was no consensus on these ma
ers. Moreover, the operation was not without practical difficulties. Despite the claimed ease of the cu
ing operation, the most material of considerations could cause difficulties. Haynes, when operating on a woman in her home, complained that the operation began well, but “unfortunately the

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evening was very dark” (Haynes 370). Other doctors exhausted supplies of equipment such as sutures and thread with alarming regularity, reflecting both the emergency status of the operation and the state of surgery in the period (Garde). In Perth, Haynes found it difficult to get nurses to assist in the caesarean, so great was the “terror of such an operation” (Haynes 370). With the initial prognosis of the caesarean as risky for the mother, it was not immediately a popular operation. In the early years doctors almost universally performed it on women with a malformed pelvis who, without assistance, could die in labour, of shock, exhaustion, or a ruptured uterus (Godson; Loudon). The caesarean was also performed for suspected extra-uterine pregnancies, where the woman would most likely die either before or during labour (Hardie; Worrall; Rowan; Haynes; Corbin). Some women were operated upon when a cancerous growth or cyst was blocking the birth canal (Backhouse; Foreman; Barrington; Chambers). Although in Europe the reasons for the operation multiplied in the 1890s, in Australia, generally, it was used only when all other options had failed (Young).

The Alternatives to the Caesarean If the caesarean was usually a last resort, there was a range of other options that could be used to treat a contracted pelvis. Of these, perhaps the most favoured was the early induction of labour. When a woman knew she was to have a difficult or protracted labour, many doctors would perform either a therapeutic abortion or an induction to save the life of the mother. A consultation of obstetricians in London in 1756 had deemed the operation moral and ethical, and even into the early 20th century some British doctors stressed its superiority over alternative operations (Churchill). Such an operation depended on several factors. It required the mother’s knowledge that her birth was to be problematic. It needed a sympathetic doctor, and it demanded prenatal care. It also required co-operation from the patient—in some cases women refused to seek medical care, knowing it would end the pregnancy (Byrne). If it was too late for an induction, there were other surgical options. The first was symphysiotomy, the dividing of the symphysis bone, in order to gain additional room to deliver the head of the infant. Symphysiotomy, developed in France in the 1760s, underwent somewhat of a revival in the 1890s. It was a ghastly operation, resulting

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The Kindest Cut?

in a long convalescence period. It was achievable only when the pelvis was mildly or moderately contracted, not for the most serious of cases. Its a
raction was the low risk of death to the mother, with estimates of maternal mortality of from 7 to 10 percent. When it occurred, mortality resulted from hemorrhage or extensive laceration. Also, the risk to the child was considered to be “moderate.” comparing favourably with other options (Adam 1894; Smyly; Lewers). While the mortality rate arising from symphysiotomy was relatively low, there was a fairly high risk of some damage to the maternal body, particularly incontinence and infection of the joints, which could lead to long-term impediment to movement. The mother may well survive, only to suffer from a debilitating disability or deformity (Smyly). While symphysiotomy was seen as safer to the mother than the caesarean section, it does not appear to have been very popular in Australia, perhaps because of these risks. An incontinent or immobilized woman was not the heroic outcome desired. The more common alternative was craniotomy. During a craniotomy, which was done vaginally, a crochet was fixed into the head of the infant, crushing the infant’s skull, and the body was removed piece by piece. When this was done, the infant may have been dead or still alive. The popularity of craniotomy arose from its relative safety to the mother. While there was some chance of lacerations or tissue damage, maternal mortality was extremely low, and in some hospitals nil (Lewers; Obstetrical Society 1894). Craniotomy could also be performed repeatedly on the same woman, if she required assistance in future labours (Nyulasy; Pairman; Warren). Most likely for these reasons, in the late 1890s, caesarean section still had not entirely replaced craniotomy, particularly in cases where the woman had been in labour for some time and was considered too exhausted to undergo abdominal surgery. In other cases, the apparent simplicity of craniotomy, with less risk involved than in a “serious cutting operation,” appears to have been persuasive. There was much debate over the relative worth of the various operations for difficult labour. The medical profession was unable to agree, and within their debate we can see the changing emphasis of the scientific community in consideration of the risks for the mother and the infant. In symphysiotomy, there was a moderate risk to the infant and high risk of long-term complications for the mother, including an extensive convalescence. It was rarely the operation of choice. Craniotomy was a low-risk operation for the mother and, within the

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moral strictures of the day, the death of the infant was perceived to be, not welcome, but acceptable, in return for the safety of the wife and mother. In 1892, William Byrne, an Honorary Physician at the Brisbane General Hospital, claimed the public favoured craniotomy over the section, and while they expected some maternal mortality during difficult births, they did not approve of the risks of the caesarean (Byrne). For those doctors advocating caesarean section, there were three main arguments in its favour. First, some claimed it held li
le more danger than a difficult birth, though this does not appear to be borne out by accounts in medical journals of the time or by other evidence, anecdotal or statistical. Second, it was maintained that, if Porro’s operation or the removal of the ovaries was performed at the same time, the mother would not be subject to the dangers of pregnancy again. Third, and most important, it was argued that the child’s life was saved. This is the crux of the ma
er. At this point in time, there appears to be an alteration in beliefs about the ideal relationship between the mother and child. This was not a purely Australian phenomenon. In Britain, disparate risks in the mother-child dyad had always been resolved on the basis of preserving maternal life at all costs (Hooper).2 In a period of high infant mortality such as the late 18th century, the loss of the child during labour was considered to be insignificant. In contrast, the death of the mother was “considerable,” and to those close to her, an “irreparable loss” (Osborn 42, 47). A century later, a
itudes towards the infant had soened, though the value of the mother remained primary. In a textbook of obstetric medicine wri
en in 1856, Francis Ramsbotham, the obstetric physician and lecturer on obstetric and forensic medicine at the London Hospital, wrote that craniotomy was “terrible,” “destructive,” and “heart-rending,” but nevertheless the life of the mother was “paramount.” In practical terms, if the mother died, the infant was likely to perish too, for this was a time before safe replacements for breast milk. But the reason why mother was chosen over baby was more than that. The mother had “social, moral, and religious ties” to the community, while the infant had “no affections, no dependents.” Further, Ramsbotham believed doctors were justified in political terms in preserving the “strong to the weak, the healthy to the diseased, and the mother of the family to the unborn foetus” (Ramsbotham 303–304). Other eminent doctors agreed. Robert Barnes, the obstetric physician to the St. Thomas Hospital, and an examiner on midwifery

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The Kindest Cut?

to the University of London, the Royal College of Physicians, and the Royal College of Surgeons, believed it was the mother’s “right” to have “precedence over her unborn child.” Replicating the words of Ramsbotham, Barnes claimed, “Our first and paramount duty is to preserve the mother, even if it involves the sacrifice of the child” (Barnes 289). Thomas Radford, the Consulting Physician to St. Mary’s Hospital, was more circumspect. In his examination of obstetric operations he claimed to dislike destructive ones, finding them difficult for men of “high moral feeling.” He was also concerned at the high wastage of infant life. Nevertheless, he believed the fetus to have no social, moral, or religious ties, and nor did it have a “distinct or separate life.” Thus it was “li
le more than a member of the mother.” Only in cases where the mother was terminally ill should the life of the infant be favoured over the mother (Radford). Such views continued to change over time. In Australia, the president of the Medical Society of Victoria, G. Rothwell Adam, claimed that in the mid-1870s medical doctrine suggested that fetal life must be absolutely “sacrificed to avoid all risk to the mother. In other words, maternal safety was paramount, and the life of the infant entirely secondary” (1894). By 1896, he noted this had changed, and the fetus had been accorded equal rights to the mother. He claimed that “since an improved technique has materially lessened the risks to the mother … the obstetrician is duty bound to become more conservative of foetal life” (Adam 1896 43). Adam’s reference, in this comment, to “improved technique”as justification for increased “duty” to the child, is problematic and, thus, a ma
er of interest. The initial operations were performed before the risk to the mother decreased and, if the maternal death rate was over 50 percent, this does not compare favourably to craniotomy, where even in the worst of cases the maternal death rate was well under 10 percent. Moreover, when it was suggested that the caesarean section was best performed before the fetus became too large, at, say, seven months, there was much protest. To a
empt the operation at seven months may have been preferable for the mother, but it defeated the ultimate purpose of the operation—to save the life of the child (Godson). This evidence indicates that a shi had occurred in the balancing of risks to the mother and the infant, with survival of the infant taking precedence over minimization of risks for the mother. An account provided by Thomas Chambers, a gynecologist from Sydney Hospital, of an operation he performed in 1886 is also

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instructive. Chambers had operated on Mrs. H, a 29-year-old woman whose entire vagina had been closed off by scar tissue from a previous forceps delivery. It was believed that even a mutilated child would not fit through the birth canal, and it was felt that only the caesarean section would save the mother’s life. Unfortunately, Mrs. H died within 32 hours of the operation, from shock, exhaustion, and perhaps septicemia (Chambers). Aer performing this operation, Chambers noted that caesarean sections had “not been a
ended with any great amount of success.” His justification of the use of the procedure was twofold. First, he believed the operation would more likely be successful if performed before the case was hopeless and the woman exhausted. He blamed many of the failures of the operation on its being “uniformly deferred until the patient’s vital powers have been so depressed by delay, exhausting and useless attempts to deliver, that all prospects of success were gone” (Chambers 32). Second, he felt it was worthwhile a
empting if the vaginal birth would be even more perilous. He wrote “our duty is clear enough, viz., to do the best we can for her and her offspring if it is still living” (Chambers 31). Chambers thus stayed within the standards of medical discourse, pointing to ways to improve the operation and justifying its practice. He moved the critique, and the terms of the critique, away from the operation itself and its lack of success, to ways of improving the procedure. Chambers claimed that if the operation were to be performed earlier, before the mother became exhausted, there would be be
er maternal outcomes. He was no doubt correct to suggest maternal exhaustion and infection did affect mortality, but his argument was, primarily, an a
empt to vindicate his practice and defend the new technology. Chambers and other doctors advocated more regular use of abdominal surgery, at an earlier stage of confinement. They a
empted to spread the technology to other cases that may well have been suited to destructive operations, though they continued to look for new and be
er ways to perform the operation and extend its usage to women early in labour.

Marriage and Maternity Perhaps not coincidentally, of the first three Australian cases of caesarean section recorded in journals, all were performed on

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The Kindest Cut?

unmarried women. Single women occupied a particular place in society, standing at the boundary of order and disorder (Swain; Swain and Howe; Reekie; Twomey). Having stepped outside the boundaries of acceptable (chaste) femininity, the single mother was both a practical outcast and a symbol of female degeneracy. The situation of the single mother was precarious, both in wider society and within the confines of the hospital, and their marginality appears to have impacted on their treatment by medical staff. In two of the three initial cases of early caesarean, the women sought medical assistance assuming they were pregnant. In both instances, the doctors dismissed pregnancy as the cause of the abdominal swelling (Hillas 33; Fortescue 167–172). It would seem that doctors naively believed the women’s single status le them immune to pregnancy. When pregnancy was dismissed as a factor, a more complicated diagnosis ensued, requiring abdominal surgery. The situation of these women indicates the reluctance of medical staff to believe and act upon the women’s understandings of their own body. Instead, all three single women were hindered with misdiagnosis and were then given emergency caesarean sections. A range of reasons explains this phenomenon. Most working-class and poor women received no official medical care until the birth was imminent, if at all. Single women were the predominant users of the public hospital system, for women who could afford it were confined at home (Coghlan 988). It may have been, also, that due to the social stigma of single motherhood, unmarried women were less likely to have any form of prenatal care, and only sought medical advice when the situation became serious. In large public and charity hospitals, doctors were be
er able to perform surgery, and this is likely to have increased the probability of such an operation. Although more difficult to prove, it is also possible that single women were seen as more appropriate models for experimental surgery. Those without responsibilities to a husband and family were perhaps seen as more expendable. In the American South, abdominal surgery was frequently trialed on slaves. As the historian John Duffy pointed out, “southern surgeons and physicians were far more willing to try new procedures upon slaves than upon other women” (McGregor 1998 77). In Australia there may have been a similar element of experimentation. As single women were less valued members of the community, they may have been the “natural” choice for such surgery; early experimentation with the procedure, necessary for later, wider spread adoption, may have been rendered more acceptable.

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The Kindest Cut? The caesarean section thus offers a complex reading of a
itudes towards women, mothers, and maternal bodies. The conventional feminist view has been that the caesarean section was a form of outrageous experimentation on the bodies of women. It appeared that medical men undertook these complex and dangerous operations as a site of both power and oppression. Just as the speculum had become an instrument of power, a device that enabled men to visualize, and hence control the interiors (and exteriors) of women, abdominal surgery was a means to an end. It would result in increased scientific knowledge and, in a society where knowledge was power, increased ownership or colonization of the female body. It would mean greater power to the medical profession, and limits to female ownership of their own bodies. Even birth, once a purely female initiative, had to be controlled by masculinist, scientific means. The caesarean section was viewed as simply another device in the history of male ownership of the female body (Murphy-Lawless). The situation is more complex than this. The women given caesarean sections in Australia were certainly in a desperate state. Natural childbirth, if such a thing exists, was not possible for these women, and generally other interventions such as forceps had been tried, and had proven unsuccessful. Oen these women were unsuitable candidates for craniotomy. Without intervention, death—and a slow and agonising death—would certainly occur. Thus the desire to perform caesarean section cannot be put down, simply, to experimentation and a thirst for knowledge/power, though this was evident. Women were dying, they were in pain, and the caesarean section was perhaps their only hope. Even so, the caesarean section can certainly be read as a turning point in a
itudes towards women and children. Both in ideological and practical terms, no longer was the mother’s life the only point of value to the obstetrician. In the rejection of craniotomy, which was gruesome but effective, we can see the increase in value of the life of the child, and the renegotiation of the importance of the mother. This occurred not only in cases that were unsuitable for craniotomy, but also became common in the wider medical discourse. The caesarean crossed a boundary, both the physical boundary of the uterus and the ideological boundary of what was possible and acceptable in terms of the bodies of women. The advent of the

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The Kindest Cut?

caesarean marks the end of the pre-eminence of the mother, and the increasing importance of the child. This change was fraught with difficulties, and there are certain tensions evident within the medical debates. Nevertheless, the caesarean offers a striking turning point: the increasing interest in the child as an individual body, an object of importance in his or her own right.

Endnotes 1.

2.

This chapter forms part of a more detailed discussion of caesarean sections which is included in my thesis Breeding and Feeding: A Social History of Mothers and Medicine in Australia, 1880 to 1925, Macquarie University, 2003. This was in contrast to Catholic nations, where abdominal section was preferred, as the life of the unbaptized child was seen as supremely important. Italy led the way in the development of the caesarean. In France, craniotomy was preformed only once in every 2,000 to 3,000 births, while in England it was used in 4 to 6 out of every 1,000 deliveries (Loudon). For a brief commentary on the religious debates over caesarean section in Australia, see Featherstone.

References Adam, G. Rothwell. “Symphysiotomy.” Australian Medical Journal 20 (May 1894): 213–219. _____. “Presidents Address Medical Society of Victoria.” Intercolonial Medical Journal of Australasia 1 (Jan. 1896): 45–51. Backhouse, J. Burder. “Case of Caesarean Section for Carcinoma of Vagina— Successful Removal of Child—Recovery of Mother.” Australian Medical Journal 15 (May 1885): 219–221. Barnes, Robert. Lectures on Obstetric Operations, Including the Treatment of Haemorrhage and Forming a Guide to the Management of Difficult Labour. London: J.A. Churchill, 1871. Barrington, Fourness. “Labor Obstructed by an Ovarian Tumor Incarcerated in the Pelvis—Caesarian Section—Recovery.” Australasian Medical Gaze
e 20 (Jan. 1900): 27–30. Byrne, William S. “Caesarean Section (Sanger-Leopold Operation).” Australasian Medical Gaze
e (Mar 1892): 147–149.

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Chambers, Thomas. “A Case of Caesarean Section—Plus Oophorectomy—Death in 32 Hours.” Australasian Medical Gaze
e (Oct. 1886): 29–32. Churchill, Helen. Caesarean Birth: Experience, Practice and History. Cheshire England: Books for Midwives Press, 1997. Coghlan, T.A. The Wealth and Progress of New South Wales, 1900–01. Sydney: Government Printer, 1902. Corbin, Thos W. “Case of Ectopic Gestation.” Australasian Medical Gaze
e (Dec. 1891): 81–82. Featherstone, L. Breeding and Feeding: A Social History of Mothers and Medicine in Australia, 1880 to 1925. PhD thesis. Macquarie University, 2003. Foreman, J. “Notes on Two Cases of Caesarean Section.” Australian Medical Journal 20 (Sept. 1900): 401–402. Forster, Frank M.C. “Caesarean Section and Its Early Australian History.” The Medical Journal of Australia 4 (July 1970): 33–38. Fortescue, George. “Case of Ovarian Disease, Complicated with Pregnancy— Ovariotomy—Accidental Puncture of the Uterus—Removal of Uterus by Porro’s Operation—Recovery.” Australasian Medical Gaze
e (Apr. 1884): 169–172. Garde, H.C. “A Case of Porro’s Operation for Rachitis of the Pelvis.” Australasian Medical Gaze
e (Mar. 1888): 139. Godson, Clement. “Porro’s Operation.” British Medical Journal 26 (Jan. 1884): 142–160. Hardie, David. “Case of Extra-uterine Pregnancy—Operation at Eight Months—Child Lived Six Hours—Placenta Removed During Sixth and Seventh Week—No Haemorrhage—Recovery.” Australasian Medical Gaze
e 20 (June 1896): 263–267. Haynes, E.J.A. “Abdominal Extra-Uterine Foetation of Eight Months Duration— Operation.” Australasian Medical Gaze
e (Oct. 1892): 369–372. Headley, W. Balls. “Case of Porro’s Operation on a Ricke
y Dwarf—Recovery.” Australian Medical Journal 15 (Dec. 1886): 547–552. Hillas, Thomas. “A Case of Ovariotomy, Complicated with Pregnancy. Caesarean Operation. Cure.” The Australian Medical Journal (Feb. 1875): 33–34. Hooper, J.W. Dunbar. “Case of Pregnancy with Carcinoma of Cervix, Involving Question of Caesarean Section.” Australian Medical Journal 15 (Sept. 1889). Lewers, Arthur H.N. “A Case of Symphysiotomy.” The Lancet 5 (Aug. 1893): 300–301. Loudon, Irvine. Death in Childbirth: An International Study of Maternal Care and Maternal Mortality 1800–1950. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. McCalman, Janet. Sex and Suffering: Women’s Health and a Women’s Hospital. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1998.

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McGregor, Deborah Kuhn. Sexual Surgery and the Origins of Gynaecology: J. Marion Sims, His Hospital and His Patients. New York: Garland Publishing Inc., 1989. McGregor, Deborah Kuhn. From Midwives to Medicine: The Birth of American Gynaecology. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998. Moscucci, Ornella. The Science of Woman: Gynaecology and Gender in England, 1800–1929. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Murphy-Lawless, Jo. On Reading Birth and Death. A History of Obstetric Thinking. Cork: Cork University Press, 1998. Nyulasy, Frank A. “Notes on a Case of Craniotomy; Subsequent Successful Induction of Premature Labour—Child Incubated.” Australasian Medical Gaze
e (1898): 347. Obstretrical Society of London. “Report of the Obstretrical Society of London.” The Lancet (March 17, 1894). Osborn, William. An Essay on Laborious Parturition in Which the Division of the Symphysis Pubis is Particularly Considered. London: T Cadell in the Strand, 1783. Pairman, Thomas Wyld. “Decapitation by a Primitive Method.” Australasian Medical Gaze
e 20 (Sept. 1898). Radford, Thomas. Observations on the Caesarean Section, Craniology, and Other Obstetric Operations with Cases. 2nd ed. London: J.A. Churchill, 1880. Ramsbotham, Francis H. The Principles and Practice of Obstetric Medicine and Surgery in Reference to the Process of Parturition. London: John Churchill, 1856. Reekie, Gail. Measuring Immorality: Social Inquiry and the Problem of Illegitimacy. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Reiger, K. The Disenchantment of the Home: Modernizing the Australian Family, 1880–1940. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1985. Rowan, Thomas. “A Case of Extra-uterine Pregnancy.” Australian Medical Journal 15 (June 1887): 307–312. Smyly, W.J. “A Case of Symphysiotomy.” The British Medical Journal 29 (Apr. 1893). Swain, Shurlee. “The Concealment of Birth in Nineteenth Century Victoria.” Lilith 5 (1988): 139–147. Swain, Shurlee, with Renate Howe. Single Mothers and Their Children: Disposal, Punishment and Survival in Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Thoms, Herbert. Our Obstetric Heritage: The Story of Safe Childbirth. Hamden: The Shoe String Press Inc., 1960. Twomey, Christina. Deserted and Destitute: Motherhood, Wife Desertion and Colonial Welfare. Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing Pty Ltd., 2002.

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Warren, W. Edward. “Notes Upon Three Successful Craniotomy Operations, All in the Case of the Same Patient.” Australasian Medical Gaze
e (Aug. 1884): 245–246. Worrall, Ralph. “Ectopic Pregnancy Complicating Normal Pregnancy— Abdominal Section—Recovery.” Australasian Medical Gaze
e (Jan. 1893): 3–5. Young, J.H. Caesarean Section: The History and Development of the Operation from Earliest Times. London: H.K. Lewis and Co. Ltd., 1944.

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CHAPTER THREE

NARRATING BREASTS CONSTRUCTIONS OF CONTEMPORARY MOTHERHOOD(S) IN WOMEN’S BREASTFEEDING STORIES Susanne Gannon and Babe
e Müller-Rockstroh

Introduction Breasts as the sine qua non of female a
ractiveness are central to women’s feelings about their bodies and also influence women’s and girls’ selfpositioning in a given society. Breasts, however, are not just part of each individual woman’s body. Not only do we have a relationship with our breasts but also, it seems, does everybody else: our partners, our children, friends, work colleagues, and casual acquaintances, as well as institutions such as biomedicine and the media. In many parts of the world, for example, women’s breasts are part of the urban landscape—so ubiquitous are they in billboard advertising. Revealed or concealed, large or small, bound or free, women’s breasts, more oen than any other part of the human body, seem to be public property. This means that alongside the lived somatic “truth” of each individual woman’s experience of her own flesh, a number of diverse, competing, or similar discursively produced meanings of breasts co-exist. Yet, the origins and sometimes even the very existence of these discourses that construct breasts—and women—in culturally specific ways, are so deeply embedded in knowledge and language systems that they have become naturalized and therefore invisible.

Researching Breasts Confronted by visual representations of multiple breasts in our everyday lives, we nevertheless experience a conspiracy of silence around literal breasts. We all have them and every day we make decisions about them:

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whether to reveal them, hide them, incarcerate them within the item of clothing deliberately designed for this purpose—the bra, whether to enlarge or reduce them, even whether to have them cut off. We hate them or we love them—oen simultaneously—but we rarely talk about them amongst ourselves. Meanwhile we leave their representation to popular culture and other institutions where consequently, because of their physical and symbolic visibility, breasts easily serve as the “bodily focus for the policing of women” (Carter 154). As breasts operate as a “microcosm of the wider world” (Maher 2000), nurturing breasts and, associated with these, the topic of breastfeeding, are ideal subjects to foreground a study of social and cultural reconstruction of the (m)other body in society. Untangling the complex discourses around nurturing enables us to begin to explore the contemporary policing of women and mothers, mothering, motherhood. Our interest in extending a broader study of women and breasts into the complex field of mothering and women’s lives and bodies was reinforced by two phenomena that coincided with our data-gathering in Hanover.1 One was a billboard advertisement in railway stations for a local radio station. The advertisement depicted a bare breast directed at the face of a grinning baby, mouth open, ready to feed. This advertisement clearly generates associations with nurturing in breastfeeding, further enhanced by the slogan reading “For breakfast, the latest mega hits!” Yet, the breast shown in profile not only was young and firm and clearly did not belong to a breastfeeding woman, but also was completely disembodied and decontextualized from the woman herself. Of course, this is only an advertisement and breastfeeding is meant metaphorically, yet the memories of women in our study oen emphasized disembodiment and objectification as characteristic of our memories of nurturing breasts. Additionally, one of the greatest issues for the women a
ending the Internationale Frauenuniversität was the problem faced by the mothers. Although women with children had been encouraged to bring them to Hanover, no adequate child care had been arranged and even tiny babies were explicitly excluded from the lecture theatres. An ambivalence towards motherhood as a legitimate subject position for academic women was evident right at the heart of this feminist experiment. Concerned, in particular, with valuing women’s embodied experiences as a prerequisite for women’s health and well being, we worked with a group of diverse women, including ourselves. We were a

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geographically heterogeneous group of 10 women from Brazil, Russia, the United States, Australia, Germany, Canada, Nigeria, and Papua New Guinea. Among us were five mothers with children of different ages who all had breastfed, and five non-mothers. Regardless of our nationalities and other differences, we found surprising commonalities with regard to issues such as what we believed was “natural” or what might be “best” for baby or how we felt about the convergence of sexuality and breastfeeding. Using collective memory work (Haug et al.) as our research methodology, we began to collectively map through our memories the processes by which women’s nurturing breasts become significant sites of cultural inscription. We hoped to make more transparent the body policing associated with mothering/motherhood that was remembered by women in our study.

In/visible Breasts Recent research on “nurturing breasts” in the public domain traces their potential for scandal and disruption of the social order of patriarchy (Bartle
2002b), yet silence and invisibility were the red threads that ran through our stories and were referred to by women in different ways as the layers of contradictory readings of breasts became evident in our memories. One woman who had breastfed asked about the reasons for this cultural silence when she had experienced the bodily changes she was undergoing as something to be proud of: The coming of milk was impressive as my breasts became the size of medium-sized watermelons or is this my memory exaggerating? But they fi
ed into a half-round-box for melons—how they sell them at the supermarket. My boyfriend brought home a box as a joke before we knew that my breasts would actually fit in there. They were so big and hard and full of milk. How come nobody talks about such an impressive thing in our culture?

Other women remembered this enlargement of the breasts and their filling with milk with more ambivalence, especially as it is oen unclear whether visibly becoming “mother” means a reduction or an enlargement of womanhood. The consequences of the normative silencing of breasts for some women caused complete surprise, almost shock, when the nurturing breast suddenly gave a clue of its existence

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by spraying of milk. In one of the memories, this “misbehaving breast” is given a subject position—the leaking breast, like ink on a sheet of paper, publicly writes with milk the new state of being “mother” on the clothes, thus transgressing the boundaries between the private and the public body. My just newborn nurturing breasts tended to embarrass me. Wet Tshirts, wet sweatshirts, soaking blouses. No pads could prevent me feeling out of control, in a constant flow of bodily liquids that turned my inside to the outside. In this perpetual leaking they exposed me in public, pointing out clearly the new position I now inhabited and which I was not yet fully prepared to fill out: no more just me, a woman, but this vague subject, … [a] “mother.”

Lactating, full-of-milk breasts, physiologically well-functioning breasts, seem to be erased by other cultural functions breasts (and women) have, due to the sexual fetishization of large breasts in popular culture. Thus, what has historically been regarded as the natural function of the female breast, distinguishing women from men and classifying human beings as mammals (Schiebinger), seems now to be something unknown, something a woman, even in her reproductive years, can experience as apartheid: My mother’s own breasts that suckled me 28 years ago … I have grown too detached from them and lost contact with this memory … I have difficulties remembering about “the breasts,” any breasts, as nurturing as the image becomes eclipsed by the others: the problematic baggage, the normative construction, the fetishized object.

These memories reflect the tension between individual memories and collective recognition of the discursive frameworks—relating to the reproductive capacities of women and, thus, gender—in which these stories make sense. The lactating breast can be located within a theoretical framework of corporeal feminism, where women’s leaking bodies disrupt the neat—and quite literally man-made—binaries of solid-liquid, interior-exterior, inside-outside (Grosz; Young). Whereas the general reproductive capacity of a woman manifested in the nurturing ability of the uterus is hidden inside a woman’s body, nurturing breasts are visible marks of fulfilled fertility and maternity. As discourses of sexuality and fertility became increasingly visual

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Narrating Breasts

through the 20th century, the construction of femininity became more about managing the body as an object to be looked at (Young). Exposing and performing gender by displaying the nurturing capacity in public might be perceived as polluting and, thus, shameful and problematic, and/or subversively scandalous (Bartle
2002b). Breasts signal the conflict of the feminine extremes: the “good” maternal body and the “bad” sexual body (Young). The breasts’ appearance stands in for this complexity of bodily practices and the necessity of disciplining oneself into proper behaviour. Our memories demonstrate the difficulties women face in terms of a private yet informed adaptation to the new, still undefined, “vague” identity of motherhood in times and cultures where feminine bodies are sexualized (Carter 108). One woman remembered how as a child she was at one point able to break through the silence around reproduction and by observing her cat nurturing its newborn ki
ens get a sense of what “mothering” might mean: Eventually, she herself sneaks into that dark corner. The cat looks at her cautiously, meowing, saying without words: “Can I trust you? You are not going to do us any harm, are you?” … She sits down in front of the basket watching her friend, the cat, feeding her ki
ens. Susi’s nipples are tiny and bright pink and there are so many of them!… She is lying on her side exposing her nipples so the ki
ens can easily reach them. She looks exhausted but also majestic … there is an atmosphere of peace and magic in the kitchen, in that quiet shady corner, … of awareness and sensitivity. She feels that now, she is learning about the basic facts of life, about motherhood, about the connection between mother and their kids, about the way mothers sustain and protect their children.

In this memory we hear a number of emotions that the girl/woman experiences—such as surprise concerning the perceived naturalness of the process (“there are so many of them”)—but we also hear about trust, friendship, and sympathy and—in contrast to the objectifying gaze of the first memories where the breast seems to be working on its own—a cautious awareness of a connection between several parties that all seem to have an embodied knowledge of how to act. However, while the story is initially indeed a memory, the last sentence (re)presents the wish of the woman:

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This is the way a mother and her children—be they animals or humans—have to be related, this acting in a relational context fulfils best and “naturally” the need of mothers and babies for an intimate physical and social relationship, and to know about this means to have knowledge about the basic fact of life.

Breast Expertise This basic fact of life, though, was not always so basic, at least not for human beings. Other women, in narrating their breasts, stressed the loss of this natural connection and the longing for this feeling not only for the individual but for an entire generation denied this embodied knowledge by being introduced to the most common substitute for the female breast, the bo
le: I have a memory of my childhood … when I had a strange feeling for which I didn’t know any name. So I called it: wanting to lie down on my bed and drink something.… This feeling came back during breastfeeding my daughter. I was very surprised because I didn’t have it for a long time and yet, it was so familiar to me. I wonder if it is a memory of my wish to be breastfed. I was a bo
le-fed child, as were 95 percent of our generation in the early 1970s in Germany.

The story of this woman points to a break in practice in nurturing culture. What had seemed natural suddenly disappeared when the nurturing breast was replaced by a culturally invented artifact. The 1970s were a turning point in the history of breastfeeding in Germany, as well as in the general history of child bearing in which birth was transformed into a program and a birthing woman into an institutionalized patient-body to be managed by doctors rather than midwives. By then it had become “normal” to go to hospital to give birth. In Australia, where hospital births had been the norm for longer, the 1960s saw the explosion of bo
le-feeding as the hygienic, modern alternative to the leaking unruliness of breastfeeding. During the 1970s, breastfeeding gradually increased again in popularity in Australia (Nursing Mother’s Association of Australia, now the Breastfeeding Association of Australia). The memories of the women also emphasize the time and effort spent enhancing the breast’s nurturing capacity. Yet, while one woman

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Narrating Breasts

observing her cat talked about intimacy and privacy as prerequisites of bonding, memories of hospitals as the sites where human women and their children are initiated into the physical and emotional relationship of nurturing recall exposure to cold and sterile surroundings. Here, emphasis is laid upon a disembodied product—the breast milk—and a disembodied labourer, the producer—the mother. As a real woman can be disturbing and contaminating, she therefore requires external regulation of labour control: She is around 16 when she is doing an internship in the maternity ward of a small health care centre in a small village in Espirito Santo, Brazil. It’s her first day and the parteira, the lay midwife, shows her around. The ward consists of one large room with about ten beds, each of them covered with a single clean but shabby blanket.… Four of the beds are occupied: on each of them sits a woman, all of them apparently in the same condition she can name as mothers … because each of them sits there with exposed breasts, milking.… When going outside, she asks the midwife about this procedure and is told that it is “be
er” for the baby not to drink the early milk and that in order for the “right milk” a mother would have to squeeze and then throw the milk away.… Her next stopping point is the room of the newborns: five beds are filled with crying babies: red heads, cramped fists and moving mouths which can’t even be bo
le-fed because of the midwife having to lead the girl around.

A situation such as this might seem to be most likely where women are disadvantaged by location, poverty, class, education, and access to information as was the case in the remote Brazilian village. However, another memory shows that the power structures that might reduce women’s agency in the face of medical expertise about what is best and how things should be done also operate under our so-called modern circumstances. One of the women in training to become an expert remembers lending an authoritative helping hand, while disregarding the value of embodied knowledge of the mother she was caring for: My hand on a milking breast that doesn’t belong to me. Instead it belongs to a young mother, one that in contrast to me has experienced what it means to give birth to a child.… However, we both as well as the nurses, doctors, etc., consider me to be the “knowing” among us, “the expert,” the one who has learned to squeeze out the milk in the

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“correct” way to make milking most effective, to nurture a sterilized bo
le handed out by my expert hand.

The status of an expert, the one with brain—rather than body— knowledge, legitimizes the violation of the border of intimacy, making this transgression acceptable to the configuration of “breastfeeding in hospital.” Nevertheless, the “voluntary” submission of women to the culturally constructed orders that are made natural comes as a surprise to the woman recalling this moment. Women become docile, even animal-like, bodies in these contexts. Actually, I have no memories about a nurturing breast until I became a midwifery student.… My first introduction to nurturing breasts then is that I opened the door to the children’s ward: right opposite the door I saw a young woman si
ing on a chair to whose breast is a
ached one of these automatic pumping machines that extract flows of milk right out of her breasts. “Similar to a cow,” is the thought I remember—a “milking machine.”

”Natural” Nurturing Retrospectively, it was interesting for us to observe that all these rather horrifying stories about the “caring” situation in hospitals were memories of non-mothers. Despite pain, unease, and difficulties in dealing with the new duties of being mother, all of the participating mothers had actually breastfed their children. What threads through their stories, and what is given as the explanation as to why nurturing at the breast is aer all the only option against all odds, is the notion of the natural. This is best summarized by the memory of one participant who began her text with the familiar slogan propagated throughout the western world by the World Health Organization. Meant to empower women to claim their own bodies and improve their wellbeing and health as well as that of their children, this slogan has been readily taken up by women’s movements and other feminist and self-help organizations such as the La Leche League and the Nursing Mother’s Association of Australia (now the Breastfeeding Association of Australia): “Breast is best.” Nurturing breasts for me meant to fulfill nature’s course of a woman’s life: conception in love, being born, being held in

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arms, giving birth myself, caring for a child, consoling, protecting and educating him with everything I could give him with this milk, that ran out of me forming a bond between us two. How could a plastic bo
le ever replace this living, moving, smelling, piece of a woman’s and a mother’s flesh?

Anthropologist Vanessa Maher suggests that “day-to-day decisions are made by women themselves” who may sometimes even “turn breastfeeding to their own advantage” (551). Yet, their memories also reveal that it is oen still medical institutions—highly hierarchical and imbued with the value of science as their legitimization—that structure cultural practices and, thus, individual decisions around breastfeeding. Some of our stories (for example, the cat story and the one above) demonstrate the fact that, since the 1970s, the medical model of breastfeeding that had previously propagated the bo
le re-incorporated psychological ideas and imperatives such as bonding of mother and child. It thereby integrated breastfeeding into the reproductive assembly line, consistent with metaphors of industrialization pervading medical ideas and language in the la
er part of the 20th century (Martin). Women were pressured to produce the right quantities of breastmilk, otherwise they could be replaced. From the emphasis on bonding, a new image emerged—that of the nearly body-less woman without her own needs and desires. Medical experts use authoritative voices to define what is “right” and what is “wrong.” By stigmatizing any signs of deviance, for example, with regard to “the child’s good” or health, they exert a moral discourse of what it means to be a “good” or a “bad” mother (Murphy). In doing this, they do not work alone but are helped by other actors, among them the woman herself, who incorporates the proper behaviour into the rituals of her everyday pregnant life: Early in pregnancy I start with my nurturing tasks: I expose my breasts to the sun To ‘harden’ the nipples, As my midwife told me … I put lemon juice on the areolas To learn early enough how painful a nurturing relationship can be As my neighbour has told me … I buy special bras

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To support the shape of my breasts As my doctor has told me When my baby is born I restrict my eating to a carefully balanced diet of vitamins and calories, I don’t drink alcohol Nor do I expose my nurturing sources to the smoke of public places “For the best for our baby” As my husband, the caring father, has told me. I select my clothing to fit the needs of my baby’s hunger: Every shirt is chosen in terms of the amount of time needed to unzip, unravel or pull it up To be ready as soon as demand is u
ered Wherever I am Whatever I do While no one asks me about my needs And no one nurtures me.

Thus nurturing often gave the sense that a woman no longer owned her body; rather, it became the realm of the baby and its (culturally constructed) needs as perceived and policed by society. Breastfeeding norms, however, are more than about children’s physical or psychological health; they are part of political and symbolic systems organizing gender relations and, thus, sexuality (Maher 4–5). Mothers are denied their autonomy (and oen deny it themselves) because only sacrifice counts as evidence of “goodness.” Resistance within this complex of roles, rights, and plights is difficult and sometimes only partially possible. The following memory shows how the mother’s wishes and needs are carefully balanced against the claims of babies and grandmothers in order that she not appear deviant. The mother who chooses not to breastfeed risks becoming perceived as the emblematic anti-mother: I knew that breastfeeding is very necessary for the child, that it is the best way to feed it, so I tried to breastfeed him from the first day. It became a long procedure, in the first month I felt I was most of the time breastfeeding or squeezing milk…. I was also influenced by the situation that my mother was always close to me and she also knew that breastfeeding is very important and was saying that I should feed him well.… Aer one month, I started to give my son additional food but continued breastfeeding. This combination was be
er—my child

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was receiving protection through my milk and some food also and I had some time for myself. In Russian there is a metaphor—when you want to say that somebody is completely neglecting her appearance and clothing and when she is paying no a
ention to anybody we say “You are looking like a breastfeeding mother.”… Maybe it was good when the baby was close to me but I was too tired to see it.

The need to regain freedom and mobility was also referred to in another story suggesting the complications of functioning in the complex roles that women inhabit in their contemporary lives. The necessity to perform as the “modern woman,” connected to the outer world, has to be (and can be, however painfully) learned while at the same time the woman is constrained by the cord of maternal responsibility, the inner world that obliges her to meet the needs of the baby: I was surprised to find out that it took some time, learning and practice to get used to breastfeeding so that you could breastfeed and talk on the phone for instance. I expected it to come naturally.

Appropriating “Nurturing Breasts” To enjoyably breastfeed can be a subversive act in the sense that Maher and others have suggested—as a route to a more self-determined sense of the body, and as an alternative to patriarchal medical and public representations. One of the women remembers visiting a friend in hospital. At first glance, she seemed to have succeeded in re-embodying herself despite being fully exposed to medical surroundings and practices that contribute to the separation of the (hetero)sexual body from the maternal body despite their continual collision in daily life: She had a small room to herself in the maternity wing and kept the door and the window open to try to catch whatever breeze there was. It was incredibly hot … and there was only the fan that was pre
y ineffective. I’d seen my friend’s body growing bigger over the months and she had made jokes about at last having a cleavage as her breast grew larger.… Now she sat up on top of the bedsheets—huge breasts and belly, naked except for knickers that sat just below her caesarean section.… It was a problem for the hospital that my friend refused to clothe herself “properly” in her bed in a nightgown like other new

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mothers. The nurses were angry with her and the ward sister kept coming in and pulling the curtains so no one could see her from the corridor, but that blocked any breeze through the room, so she would demand that we pull it open again. Her partner was embarrassed when she swore at the nurses. He would tell her to “shoosh” or to “be reasonable” and then she would swear at him too. The whole time my friend was in hospital she demanded she should be able to be how she liked with her own body and her baby.

One strategy used by women to free themselves from restrictions laid upon them is to extend motherly caring and nurturing tasks to a wider social net, thus creating “milk-kinships.” Milk is the manifestation of this corporeal bonding, then, rather than the “suspect female substance” (Maher) identified by medical experts. The source of the milk, the nurturing breast, becomes a metaphor and symbol for love, life, and mothering in a more general sense. In one of the stories, for example, a woman remembered being able to nurture her friend’s baby son aer his mother died during labour. Another woman deployed milk-kinship in her relationship with her sister, allowing both mothers more freedom and increased mobility while at the same time guaranteeing their children’s needs for bonding. My niece was born when my daughter was seven months old. My sister and I lived six blocks apart and we exchanged children at least once a week. It was a relief to know that my daughter would have a breast [at which] to feed from someone who loved her when I was away. I no longer needed to be as concerned with pumping my own milk. At the same time, it was wonderful to connect [with] my niece in this way.… I felt I was not only feeding her, but giving her the warmth, affection and security which comes from this close and intimate physical contact that ordinarily only her mother gave her.… Later, when she was 16 months, I took care of her during an entire weekend while her parents travelled. It was my breast, she “held on to” to help her deal with the separation of her mother.

Conclusion We began by asking questions about the contemporary meanings of breastfeeding and the moral politics of motherhood as they are

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mentioned in these women’s stories about nurturing breasts. We cannot, of course, claim that our data represent all women’s experiences. Neither was our study intended to be comparative or anthropological, so we did not engage here in specific discussion about cultural or other differences. Yet, we believe that the complementary qualities of the memories generated and discussed at the International Women’s University enabled us all to come a li
le closer to a collective understanding of how we live as breasted women and mothers. Conversation about nurturing breasts and breastfeeding opens up much larger conversations about femininity, maternal bodies, and sexual bodies, about the body’s public obligation, body politics, processes of medicalization, and women’s private wants and needs. These conversations take place where historically and culturally specific interests and discipling practices collide with ideas of the “natural” and with the recalcitrant bodies of individual women. Because feminists have struggled to free women to determine their own embodied destinies, any argument in favour of corporeal motherhood may seem reactionary—and that is a danger of which we have to be aware. To suggest that breastfeeding might be in a woman’s interest as a uniquely relational experience—an argument that might arise from such a perspective—risks ignoring the cultural construction and mediation of embodied experience. While a positive experience is oen read as an almost inevitable outcome of nursing at the breast, the memories of the women in this study show the ambiguities raised by the power relations in which nurturing breasts are positioned (Carter). Nurturing babies at the breast may offer possibilities for revaluing our bodies and thus re-embodying ourselves, but at the same time, it represents acquiescence to dominant regimes of surveillance that may lead a woman to self-objectification (Cussins). The nurturing breast thus remains a contested area, a “social drama,” or, using the words of Alison Bartle
, breastfeeding is a never ending series of intricate and dynamic interactions that involve at the very least: hormones, nerve impulses, babies, milk, texts, other people, feelings, thoughts, histories, social conditions and relations and cultural pressures between both mother and baby at the interface of their internal and external environment. (Bartle
2002a 380)

Our goal as feminist researchers is to regain interpretive power about our embodied experiences. To do this we have to disrupt

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dominant metaphors and aim at disentangling the interwoven net of actors involved in breastfeeding as practice. Although here we have only scratched the surface of the complexity of contemporary motherhood, narrating breasts, collectively, provides us with a collective “weapon of defence” against the (self-)objectification of women’s bodies and social roles.

Endnotes 1.

This chapter reports on research undertaken during the Internationale Frauenuniversität in Hanover, Germany, a well-funded, post-graduate, feminist program involving a diverse group of women of different cultural and geographic locations.

References Bartlett, Alison. “Breastfeeding as Headwork: Corporeal Feminism and Meanings for Breastfeeding.” Women’s Studies International Forum 25 (2002a): 373–382. _____. “Scandalous Practices and Political Performances: Breastfeeding in the City.” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 16.1 (2002b): 111–121. Carter, Pam. Feminism, Breasts and Breastfeeding. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995. Cussins, Charis. “Ontological Choreography: Agency for Women Patients in an Infertility Clinic.” Differences in Medicine: Unraveling Practices, Techniques and Bodies. Eds. Marc Berg and Annemarie Mol. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998. 166–201. Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies. St. Leonards, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 1994. Haug, Frigga, et al. Female Sexualization: A Collective Work of Memory. Trans. Erica Carter. London: Verso, 1987. Maher, Vanessa, ed. The Anthropology of Breastfeeding. Oxford: Berg Publisher, 1992. _____. “Breastfeeding and Maternal Depletion.” Lecture at International Women’s University, Hanover, Germany, 26 Sept. 2000. Martin, Emily. The Woman in the Body. Boston: Beacon Press, 1987. Murphy, Elizabeth. “Breast is Best: Infant Feeding Decision and Maternal Deviance.” Sociology of Health and Illness 21.2 (1999): 187–208.

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NMAA (Nursing Mother’s Association of Australia; since Aug. 2001 called the Australian Breastfeeding Association). 1 June 2001 <www.nmaa.asn.au>. Schiebinger, Londa. Nature’s Body. Boston: Beacon Press, 1993. Young, Iris. Throwing Like a Girl. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990.

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CHAPTER FOUR

SCANDALOUS PRACTICES AND POLITICAL PERFORMANCES BREASTFEEDING

IN THE

CITY

Alison Bartle


Scene I Picture this: 388 babies in one room breastfeeding, all at the same time. Imagine the quantities of milk being produced and consumed. Imagine all those breasts in the one space. The room is in a new multi-cinema complex, Marion Megaplex at a shopping centre in Adelaide, South Australia. Is this a coincidence, that such a surreal event takes place in a cinema complex? The event has been dubbed a “Breastfest” and is organized by the South Australian College of Lactation Consultants, the Nursing Mothers Association of Australia (NMAA; now the Breastfeeding Association of Australia), and midwives from the nearby Flinders Medical Centre. It is intended to be a world record for the most babies being breastfed at any one time, aiming for inclusion in the Guinness Book of Records. Once the baby has latched on, the mother puts up her hand to be counted. It is a stunt, a media event. It is also World Breastfeeding Week. But in August 1999 when it takes place, it comes amid almost two years of media “scandals” about breastfeeding in public. I am interested in recent media “events” involving breastfeeding because they generate particular narratives about breastfeeding and most are infused with “scandal.” “Breasts are a scandal for patriarchy,” writes Iris Young, “because they disrupt the border between motherhood and sexuality” (190). As if that were not enough, I want to show how lactating breasts when they are taken outside the home are capable of disrupting the borders of morality, discretion, taste, and politics; in short, breasts are capable of transforming legislation, citizenship, and cities themselves. Lactating breasts are particularly scandalous,

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and I want to read the scandals they have recently provoked as crucial elements in cultural change. The “scandals” I have chosen to read are events between 1998 and 2000 that were given national coverage in the print media in Australia and that provoked a divided response through letters to the editors to those newspapers about women’s breastfeeding practices in public. These events and the scandalizing rhetoric used to debate women’s public breastfeeding practices can be read as marking a critical cultural moment in the contestation and renegotiation of social values. The examples of breastfeeding in public that reach the newspapers are always to do with white, middle-class urban dwellers. It is significant that indigenous, ethnic, rural, and lower socio-economic groups are not the subject of these scandals. White, middle-class women like myself are the women with the most available power in a western colonized nation like Australia. We are the ones in a position to publicly contest social values. We are usually assumed to be “average,” or normative, and so do not usually have to negotiate discourses of race or class or sexuality, which are rendered invisible. While acknowledging that we all inhabit specific social, historical, and discursive contexts, I argue that the narratives produced about these women breastfeeding in public can be read symptomatically as an historical moment when particular social values are threatened, and that this has much broader implications about the politics of women’s sexuality, use of public space, and citizenship. Public Space Breastfeeding’s “coming out” into public space is perhaps what marks these narratives as particular to a late 20th-century urban landscape. “In Australia, mothers with small babies are often seen in public places such as shopping centres and restaurants, indicating that they spend considerable time outside of the home” (McIntyre et al. 1999b 132). Women’s use of and claim to public space has certainly been on the increase. The statistics of women in paid work, for example, peaked in Australia in December 1999 at 66.1 percent (OSW). Women are increasingly delaying having children until their thirties and beyond, at which time they have already established their careers and have spent more time frequenting public space than staying at home. Literally staying “at home” with a baby now seems unusual. Part of the contestation and scandal, I argue, is to do with women’s shiing use

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of urban public space, which has, until the late 20th century, been the domain of business and a particular understanding of public citizenry. As Johnson notes, the design of modern cities and houses in the early 20th century assumed a normative heterosexuality where the man would leave the house for paid work in the inner city while the woman stayed at home in the clean, green, suburbs (94). In late capitalism, or postmodernity, cities have been identified as shiing into a post-Fordist economy in which consumption and service industries dominate in a disorganized, flexible form different from the clearly defined separation of public and private spheres that prevailed when the manufacturing sector dominated (Johnson 115). This conflation of “public” and “private” spheres contributes to the current contestations about breastfeeding “in public.” In addition, consumption is now integral to meanings of contemporary motherhood (see Cuthbert and Grossman; Sofalis), so it is no surprise to find mothers and babies frequenting conspicuous sites of consumption such as cafés and shopping centres. While these oen provide competitively equipped and homely parents’ rooms (McIntyre et al. 1999c), which keep the bodily flows of mothers and babies out of sight, it is from places without such facilities that women are being expelled. Performance In an effort to untangle breastfeeding from the usual rhetorical manoeuvres, I want to delineate a sense of performance inherent in the events and their discussion. I use the term performance following Judith Butler in her essay “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution,” where she suggests that “the acts by which gender is constituted bear similarities to performative acts within theatrical contexts” (272). Gender, she argues, is “an act that one does” (277). It is “what is put on, invariably, under constraint, daily and incessantly, with anxiety and pleasure.” In conceptualizing gender as performance, Butler insists that “gender is a basically innovative affair.” She adds, however, that “it is quite clear that there are strict punishments for contesting the script by performing out of turn or through unwarranted improvisations” (282). While Butler’s theories of gender as performance are qualified and revised in her later work, Bodies That Ma
er, I find the performance metaphor very useful at this stage for thinking through the issues of breastfeeding in public. It has several critical advantages. As breasts are “transformed” into much more active, functional, and generative

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organs with the onset of maternity, the active notion of performativity seems appropriate. It also renders breastfeeding as quite specific to each act, rather than assuming homogeneous experiences between women or even for one woman over time and place. It assumes an understanding at the representational level, rather than being restricted to women’s (oen inarticulate) experience. It also disables the particularly problematic discourse of breastfeeding as “natural,” and so enables me to consider women as having agency. Specific acts of breastfeeding can therefore be read as challenging and resisting dominant discourses—of changing the cultural scripts available. Applying a performative element also to my writing, I focus this chapter on key “scenes” that play out the links among scandal, sexuality, space, and implicitly, therefore, citizenship.

Scene II: Legal Acts and Political Theatre This scene takes place on the steps of Victoria’s Parliament House. It is April 2000, and State Community Services minister Christine Campbell stands on the steps surrounded by women breastfeeding their babies. She announces a new piece of legislation to be presented in Parliament, which she expects to be enacted during the next fortnight—by Mother’s Day she claims—which will “enshrine” in the state’s Equal Opportunity Act that discriminating against a breastfeeding woman is illegal (Kelly 7). It is a potent image of breastfeeding entering the corridors of power (unlike occupying the movie theatre), but it marks a much more ambivalent outcome than the minister’s optimistic claim that it “would eliminate the community’s ‘double standard’ towards breasts” (Mitchell 7). The breastfeeding sit-in on the steps of Parliament House marks a triumphant performance of a previous rehearsal two years earlier. In April 1998 the Herald Sun reported that “a group of breastfeeding mothers gathered on parliament’s steps” and “babies suckled at their mothers’ breasts in parliament yesterday” (Owen and Williams). This act drew a
ention to the legislative Act that Christine Campbell, then Opposition spokesperson for women and family services, introduced as a private member’s Bill to amend the state’s Equal Opportunity legislation to prevent discrimination on the basis of breastfeeding. The Bill had the public support of the powerful Australian Medical Association (AMA) and lobby group Nursing Mothers Association

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of Australia (NMAA), but the Premier of Victoria, Jeff Kenne
, had already foreshadowed that the Bill did not have his (and therefore his government’s) support. He is reported as saying, “Some people do find it offensive to have babies being breastfed in very obvious public places.… There are in many cases, facilities available for people to breastfeed elsewhere and it’s a ma
er of choice, a ma
er of taste—it’s also a ma
er of just common decency and I don’t think that is best covered by legislation” (Owen1998a 11). Performance The acts of the women and the comments of the male premier are instructive. By gathering on the steps of Parliament House and inside Parliament, the women are making a point about performing in public. They are performing their maternity and their gender in a space that is dominated not only by actual men, but also by patriarchal authority and symbolism. While Christine Campbell is frequently quoted by the media, she occupies a privileged position as a publicly elected member and as a woman in that Parliament. The women who perform on its steps and public gallery are rarely represented as speaking. In this particular act, their visual presence as breastfeeding mothers appears be much more disruptive symbolically: they are performing “out of turn” and the premier censures them for doing so. I would therefore read their performance as much more powerful than Campbell’s speech or, indeed, legislation. Gender Scripts The premier certainly sensed this and responded in a way that sought to separate mothers from the public sphere and certainly from the political sphere. In response to the parliamentary sit-in, Kenne
suggests that the women were “force-feeding” their babies “just to offend” (Owen and Williams), drawing on an easily engineered rhetoric of women as bad mothers, stifling their babies. He also draws on a discourse of (inevitably gendered) morality, reaffirming his position as arbiter of “common decency” and “taste” above, when he says, “It’s a question of how you go about personally conducting yourself” (Owen and Williams). “If you had a group of women who, to try to prove a point, occupied all the public spaces in Parliament … and they breastfeed, I think that is

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distasteful” (Reading). Not only do the women fail as mothers (forcefeeding their babies) but they fail to achieve a “common” standard of conduct in the premier’s estimation, and are thereby unfit for either mothering or public roles. Kenne
discursively disenfranchises the performing women—as mothers, as public citizens, and as mothers in public—authorized by his role as premier of the state. Politics Commenting on Christine Campbell aer his government defeated her initial request to introduce the legislation, Kenne
accuses her of “just trying to gain a political point” (Baske
and Owen 3), while effectively positioning himself as if he is not, through his recourse to “common sense” and moral imperatives. In this case it is the practice of breastfeeding that Kenne
objects to being a political issue, as indeed does the Victorian president of the AMA, Dr. Gerald Segal, who is quoted as saying “It’s an apolitical issue” while urging the government to pass the Bill (Baske
and Owen 3). This point might be supported by some critics of liberal feminism who see legislation as an inadequate means of addressing discrimination. By characterizing breastfeeding as being devoid of politics and not appropriate for legislation, however, these arguments serve to sever the practice of breastfeeding from an intricate web of social values, government policies, economic conditions, educational resources, and community support, let alone personal ideology, health, and emotional well being, all of which are well documented as impacting on a woman’s choice to (continue to) breastfeed (see McIntyre et al. 1999a; Kitzinger; Silverton). The public response of the premier clearly establishes that breastfeeding in public is political in its widest sense. Faced with women breastfeeding on the steps and in the public gallery of Parliament House, the premier’s a
empt to rearticulate symbolic order brought forth traditional patriarchal discourses on good/bad mothering, “decent” conduct and morality, as well as the separation of the spheres into public/male versus private/female. The premier’s sense that breastfeeding in public is a political act is confirmed by a Perth study of a
itudes to breastfeeding. In one particular focus group—of male university students—breastfeeding in public is explicitly associated “with le-wing radicals, greenies, and feminists” (Sco
et al. 246). In its association with women who hold particular ideological views, breastfeeding in public can be considered political.

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Citizenship Kerreen Reiger in fact argues that mothers raising questions in the media about state policies on birthing and lactation “pose the most explicit threat to the hegemonic understandings of what is acceptably ‘political’ and fit for public debate,” as they also breach the split between what is public and private (311). Others stress that it is women’s embodied activities that pose a more powerful threat. Beasley and Bacchi take the examples of breastfeeding women and persons with disabilities in order to “loosen citizenship from its almost exclusively public location and make bodies (for example, birth, breasts, breast milk, and spinal cord damage) part of the participating subject” (347). By lactating in Parliament House—the “house” in which public values are officially codified—these women are bringing a
ention to the way they want to “do” citizenship, to how citizenship is embodied for them. Wendy Parkins argues that embodied protests are a particular form of feminist agency, citing suffrage
e dissent and the women of Greenham Common as examples of women acting out their citizenship through embodiment (rather than an assumed authority). Parkins’s observations could also apply to breastfeeding in public when she argues that: Where the specificities of female embodiment have been grounds for exclusion or diminished participation, deliberately drawing a
ention to their bodies has been an important strategy for women engaged in dissident citizenship. Such dissidents have understood their embodiment not as a limitation but as a means by which the parameters of the political domain could be contested. (Parkins 73)

In this case, then, the performance of breastfeeding in public might be read as successful in drawing a
ention to the politics of breastfeeding, as well as to its new legal status. It is worth noting, however, that the social contestation generated by collective street scenes are usually experienced very differently to individual daily practices. Personal Scenes The Victorian legislation was prompted by an unintended scene in which a woman was asked to leave the food court of Melbourne’s Crown Casino on New Year’s Eve in 1997 while having lunch with a friend. A security guard told her that there had been complaints

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about her breastfeeding her four-month-old baby—that some people considered it “offensive and distasteful” (Bowler)—and asked her to move to the baby-changing vestibule. He said it was Crown Casino policy that “women were not allowed to breastfeed in the food court,” although Crown Casino later refuted this policy (Ruben). The friend with whom she was lunching took the issue to the media and to then Opposition MP Christine Campbell. This was not an isolated incident, as media reports mention other incidents involving women being asked to leave restaurants, cafés, theatres, a racetrack, a law court, and public transport (Brammall; Owen 1998b; Shaw). The legal consequences of this particular case in Victoria will therefore be helpful to individuals whose daily practices have the potential to become unwanted public scenes. Turning such scenes into scandals might now be illegal in Victoria (and other states in Australia), but its potency to “offend” some viewers still remains. The performance of breastfeeding in public still has political potency, whether collectively organized or not. More Political Theatre: Queensland Research into public a
itudes to breastfeeding reveals that women are influenced in their choice to breastfeed or not by their perception that breastfeeding in public is not acceptable (McIntyre et al., 1999a)1. In some states of the United States it is illegal (Stearns). Legislation therefore is an unpredictable machinery that can work for or against women wanting to breastfeed outside the home. This potential in Australia was brought home in 1999 when a member of the Queensland Young Liberals prepared a motion for the State Convention proposing “on-the-spot fines for women caught breastfeeding in public areas other than designated parenting rooms” (Saunders 3). This was apparently a strategy designed to provoke media scandal in order to draw a
ention to the Convention, along with other proposals for G (for geriatric) plates for drivers over age 65, the death penalty for dangerous escapees, the banning of foreign-language signs, and increased mandatory sentences for pedophiles. One newspaper report mentions the similarity of the motions to the notorious Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party policy (Saunders 3), whose electoral power had been exercised only months before in state and federal elections. In these circumstances, the possibility that such policies could be adopted was clearly taken seriously by the press and those asked to comment. That both Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party and the Queensland Young Liberals were

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operating from Queensland, where social control and government corruption is part of its political history and reputation, was also a contributing factor to the reportage and the impassioned responses to the Young Liberals’ proposals.2 That such a possibility of fines for breastfeeding can be entertained (even as a hoax in a maverick state) reasserts the deeply ambivalent public a
itudes to breastfeeding that clearly exist in Australia still, and which are provoked by such public scandalizing.

Contesting Scripts? Such media scandals as the Queensland Young Liberals’ proposal and the Victorian legislation process brought forth a host of divided opinion in le
ers to the editor and readers’ surveys, which are instructive in the kinds of values perceived as being threatened by public breastfeeding. Those who objected to women breastfeeding in public most often cited personal taste, declaring the sight to be offensive, distasteful, and unpleasant. By far the biggest response, though, was from those defending breastfeeding in public. They utilized several narratives: of liberal democratic and God-given rights (as in Reading’s headline: “A mother’s right to breastfeed should be enshrined in legislation”); of naturalism, whereby breastfeeding is deemed to be the “natural” function of breasts (as opposed to its “unnatural” sexual objectification); and of science, espousing the proven medical benefits of breastfeeding to both mother and child. To suggestions that mothers should breastfeed in toilets, defenders drew parallels to eating lunch in a toilet; and to those who found breastfeeding offensive, it was suggested they turn the other way. One opponent contested the “natural” argument by asking, “Going to the toilet is a natural act and so is making love to create a baby. Would these women advocate that they should be performed in public?” (Sullivan). Another asks, “[W]ith so many degenerates and sex fiends on our planet is it worse to tempt them with a half-naked breast innocently feeding a baby?” (Connors). This correspondent also finds the media partly reprehensible for sexualizing breastfeeding, as “now it is in the media ad nauseam and raising more than just eyebrows” (Connors). While the readers opposing and defending breastfeeding in public might conceivably occupy dichotomous positions, surprisingly there was one point at which they met. An overwhelmingly dominant motif

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in le
ers to the editor from both sides of the debate—especially in readers’ views in women’s magazines such as New Idea and Practical Parenting—was the idea of discretion. As long as a woman was “discreet” or found a “discreet” place to sit, le
er-writers considered breastfeeding in public acceptable. This allowed a diluting of the issue into a more moderate and mainstream view, whereby women drew on the traditional performance of feminine modesty in order to maintain their claim to use public space for breastfeeding. Discretion is also a particularly middle-class concern, perhaps explaining its prominent role in these debates. It is a discourse frequently mobilized in Nursing Mothers Association of Australia (now the Breastfeeding Association of Australia) literature, and the qualitative analysis of a
itudes to breastfeeding in Perth categorized both “discreet breastfeeding” and “breastfeeding etique
e” as two of the issues arising from their focus group discussions (Scott et al.). I suspect that this rhetorical strategy may well be enabling to individual women breastfeeding in a potentially hostile climate, even if that hostility now contravenes the law. Discreetly breastfeeding in public can be seen as a warranted improvisation of the feminine script and so not subject to censure. The alternative to discretion, however, in the view of some respondents to the editor, is “exhibitionism,” suggesting more deeply held concerns about women’s sexuality.

Sexual Politics The issue of breastfeeding in public is, aer all, about women doing things with their breasts in public places. The entire debate seems covertly embedded in concerns over women’s sexuality, and sometimes reporters raise the issue frankly. Writing in the Life Magazine of the Sunday Age in 1998, Jane Freeman satirizes the west’s fetishization of breasts, implicitly suggesting (as do Judith Butler and others) that sexuality is socially constructed and subject to change over time and place. She argues that breasts should be forgo
en and another erogenous zone consciously selected to take their place, like the nape of the neck: “Pamela Anderson Lee could shi her implants around to the back of her neck, so men could gawp and slaver over her voluptuously curving nape. The fashion industry could come up with erotic garments which fla
er or even push up the nape” (8).

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Freeman’s comment employs comedy, but it also engages with the sexual mores that are being contested in this issue. Writing at about the same time in The Age, Amy Forrest provocatively suggests that “breastfeeding in public remains an issue because it is a sensuous activity.” Responding to the debate between discretion and exhibitionism, she asks herself where the difference lies, and declares that breastfeeding involves “voyeurism, pleasure, desire. We cannot insist there is nothing sensuous about it” (Forrest). This has much stronger implications than the usual arguments about breastfeeding being “natural” or medically beneficial or even a right. It is sensual. I like doing it. Forrest even admits that she likes watching it: “I have to acknowledge a voyeuristic interest in the sight of naked breasts, their soness and plenitude, and the baby’s frank guzzling delight.” What difference does it make if women like to watch breastfeeding as well as do it? Not only does this disrupt the border between sexuality and motherhood, as Young claims, it also asks us to acknowledge the oen silent sexual/sensual pleasures women experience in relation to (their) breasts and infants. Barbara Sichtermann comments that since today it is no longer a problem to rear babies on artificial food, we can quite happily forget the “duty” which breastfeeding was always made out to be for women.… I say breastfeeding means satisfying the child’s need (and the mother’s) to become one again with another body in a “physical act of love.” (62)

There may be reasons for keeping such pleasures silent, however, as Stearns reminds us in referring to the sobering case of Karen Carter, who rang a crisis line in the US when she became concerned about feeling sexually aroused while breastfeeding her two-year-old; as a result her child was removed from her care by Social Services for over a year (Stearns 309). Stearns concludes that “the construction of the good maternal body as being at all costs not sexual is taken very seriously by both the culture and the law” (309). Maternal sexual pleasure is therefore a volatile issue subject to close social regulation (see Traina), and it covertly informs debates around breastfeeding in public. Forrest also suggests that “perhaps breastfeeding presents people with the alarming evidence of our bodies’ juices and flows around which various taboos and customs have flourished.” Feminist theory has flourished in describing this aspect of women’s bodies and the symbolic threat it poses (see Douglas; Kristeva; Irigaray). There has

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also been ample critique of the ways in which social institutions and discourses act to limit, dry up, hide, pathologize, remove, and stem the flow of women’s wet, juicy, bleeding, lactating bodies, which profoundly disturbs the dichotomous biomedical logic of bodies’ inside/outside surface/depth (see Shildrick; Grosz 1994, 1995). Breastfeeding in public is surely an example of women contesting those binary divisions on an everyday basis, of claiming public space in which to leak, spill, and overflow with a baby hungry to suck it up, to ingest what comes out of our bodies. This is one of the reasons it is so scandalous, so distasteful and unpleasant to some. It means rethinking bodies, sexuality, and the changing but specific uses we make of particular urban spaces.

City Politics One of the implications of this rethinking involves the ways in which women’s sexuality is mapped onto cities. It is no coincidence that such scandals as I have read are enacted in the streets and public domains of Australia’s cities. In her analysis of urban life over time and place, Elizabeth Wilson posits that women’s presence in cities has always been problematic due to our sexuality, which is in need of either protection or control: [W]oman is present in cities as temptress, as whore, as fallen woman, as lesbian, but also as virtuous womanhood in danger, as heroic womanhood who triumphs over temptation and tribulation. (6)

As long as women are seen to represent such potential disorder, irruption, and chaos in the city, as Wilson argues, it is no wonder that women breastfeeding in public trigger such deep cultural suspicions that are inevitably concerned with female sexuality. But simultaneously, it is no wonder that the city is seen as a suitable place in which to breastfeed. While women have historically come to personify a masculinized fear of and desire for uncontrolled sexuality in the city, women’s own experience has been much more ambiguous. While some areas do pose danger (cf works in Johnson), the city has also offered anonymity, excitement, and potentially subversive activities (like sexuality and protest), which women have found liberating. New readings of modernist women writers are increasingly interpreting

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their fictional cities as embodying both danger and freedom particular to gender (see Kaplan). If the city is a place represented historically as hostile to women, then postmodern cities are being understood as more accommodating and plastic: as subject to flows, movements, and energies (Grosz 1995), as linking aspects of fantasy, desire, pleasure, entertainment, and display (see Johnson), and with the capacity to refashion/construct subjectivities. In her thoughtful essay, “Bodies—Cities,” Elizabeth Grosz suggests that we need to see the city as being both shaped by those who use it and active in shaping them: that cities and bodies are “mutually defining” (108). If the city “in its particular geographical, architectural, and municipal arrangements is one particular ingredient in the social constitution of the body,” as Grosz argues (108), then the increased presence of breastfeeding bodies might also mean that one of its flows, products, and circulations is breast milk. The city’s pollutants have already been shown to contaminate breast milk, but in what ways might we consider lactation to affect the city? How might those earlier collective scenes of breastfeeding women and babies impact on the city? If, as Grosz maintains, “the city must be seen as the most immediate locus for the production and circulation of power” (109), then it is significant that such scandals as I have read are enacted in Australia’s cities. Both individual and collective acts of breastfeeding in public still have the potential to draw deeply divided reactions, indicating its unse
led meanings in contemporary, white, middle-class Australian culture. While the media acts as a vehicle for such scandals, deeply held cultural values about women’s sexuality and public status as citizens are being contested and re-narrativized. Perhaps even more crucially, such contestations depend on a confrontation of modernist and postmodernist subjectivies and thinking about cities and their citizens. If, as Grosz argues, the city is “the site for the body’s cultural saturation, its takeover and transformation by images, representational systems, the mass media, and the arts—the place where the body is representationally reexplored, transformed, contested, reinscribed” (108) then it is the site par excellence for “indiscreet” breastfeeding “exhibitions” and the ensuing scandal. Such a cultural saturation of breastfeeding in public and the resulting legislation are only available in a city, Grosz would argue, and are a product of particular bodies’ inhabitation of that urban space:

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As a hinge between the population and the individual, the body, its distribution, habits, alignments, pleasures, norms, and ideals are the ostensive object of governmental regulation, and the city is both a mode for the regulation and administration of subjects but also an urban space in turn reinscribed by the particularities of its occupation and use. (1995 109)

The performance of women breastfeeding, whether collectively on the steps of Parliament House or individually, can be read as an act of citizenship being actively and corporeally claimed, of using urban space for political purpose.

Back to the Movies The “Breastfest” scene that I began with now seems a little less spectacular, and hardly scandalous at all, promoting breastfeeding discreetly from inside and surrounded by the more powerful visual and commercial apparatus of Hollywood cinema. But it is still a very potent image in my imagination (all those breasts, all that milk), which does have something to do with desire and visual pleasure, if not with confirmation of my own practices (see Bartle
). The sheer fecundity of such a sight—all those spurts, flows, messes, and the disruption to Marion Megaplex—is delicious to ponder. Since the first Breastfest in Adelaide, other cities and provincial towns all over Australia have contested the record during World Breastfeeding Week. In 2001, at the Tuggerah Greater Union Cinemas near provincial Gosford, 536 breastfeeding mothers reportedly “smashed” the existing record to claim their place in the Guinness Book of Records (Hartigan). The following year the contest was taken up internationally when over 1,000 women and babies in Berkely, California, set the next record.

Endnotes 1.

2.

“The possibility of a mother being asked to leave a public place (including public transport) because she was breastfeeding was a real concern to many participants” (McIntyre et al., 1999a). The site of the convention, at Queensland’s Gold Coast, was used synecdochically to signal vice and corruption, even in the title of Tame’s Breast Beating in Cuckoo Land and Smith’s Nearly Choked on Her Toast.

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References Bartle
, Alison. “Thinking Through Breasts: Writing Maternity.” Feminist Theory 1.2 (2000): 173–188. Baske
, Sasha, and Kristin Owen. “No to Breastfeed Laws.” Herald Sun 6 Apr. 1998: 3. Beasley, Chris, and Carol Bacchi. “Citizen Bodies: Embodying Citizens—a Feminist Analysis.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 2.3 (2000): 337–358. Bowler, Wendy. “Nursing a Victorian View.” Age 10 (Feb. 1998). Brammall, Bruce. “Baby Pays $32 to Nap.” Herald Sun 13 Apr. 2000. Butler, Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Performing Feminisms. Ed. Sue-Ellen Case. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1990. 270–282. _____. Bodies That Ma
er: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge, 1993. Connors, Mrs. P. “Breastfeeding Concern.” News Review Messenger (SA) 24 Jun 1998: 2. Cuthbert, Denise, and Michele Grossman. “Mamatoto: Consuming Difference.” Motherlode. Eds. Stephanie Holt and Maryanne Lynch. Melbourne: Sybylla Feminist Press, 1996. 156–162. Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966. Forrest, Amy. “Defending the Right to Bare the Breast.” Age 16 (Jan. 1998). Freeman, Jane. “Breast Intentions.” Sunday Age Life Magazine 8 Feb. 1998. Grosz, Elizabeth. “Bodies—Cities.” Space, Time and Perversion: the Politics of Bodies. Ed. E. Grosz. St. Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1995. 103–110. _____. Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism. St. Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1994. Hartigan, Julie. “Babies Pucker Up to Help Mums Set Record.” Central Coast Express 3 (August): 6. Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One. Trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985. (Ce sexe 1977) Johnson, Louise. Placebound: Australian Feminist Geographies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Kaplan, Sydney Janet. “A Gigantic Mother: Mansfield and the City.” Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction. Ed. S.J. Kaplan. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991. Kelly, Jen. “New Laws on Breastfeeding.” Herald Sun 3 Mar. 2000: 7; Australian 3 Mar. 2000: 7.

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Kitzinger, Sheila. The Experience of Breastfeeding. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979. Kristeva, Julia. The Powers of Horror: An Essay In Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. McIntyre, Ellen, Janet E. Hiller, and Deborah Turnbull. “Determinants of Infant Feeding Practices in a Low Socio-Economic Area: Identifying Environmental Barriers to Breastfeeding.” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health 23.2 (1999a): 207–209. _____. “Breastfeeding in Public Places.” Journal of Human Lactation 15.2 (1999b): 131–135. _____. “Suitability of Breastfeeding Facilities Outside the Home: An Audit of Baby Change Rooms in Shopping Centres.” Breastfeeding Review 7.1 (1999c): 17–20. Mitchell, Ben. “Minister Steps in to Answer Call of Nurture.” Australian 3 Apr. 2000: 7. Office for the Status of Women (OSW). 12 Mar. 2001. <www.osw.dpmc.gov. au/content/resources/women_aus.html#employment>. Owen, Kristin. “Kenne
No to Law for Mums.” Herald Sun 7 Apr. 1998: 11. _____. “Bid to Ban Mums Bias.” Herald Sun 6 Apr. 1998a: 3. Owen, Kristin, and Vanessa Williams. “Breast Ba
le in Vain.” Herald Sun 9 Apr. 1998b. Parkins, Wendy. “Protesting Like a Girl: Embodiment, Dissent and Feminist Agency.” Feminist Theory 1.1 (2000): 59–78. Reading, Lyndal. “Call to Protect Mothers’ Rights.” Courier Ballarat 13 Apr 1998. Reiger, Kerreen. “Reconceiving Citizenship: The Challenge of Mothers as Political Activists.” Feminist Theory 1.3 (2000): 309–27. Ruben, Amanda. “Crown States Policy.” Herald Sun 9 Jan 1998. Saunders, Megan. “Young Libs Abreast of Convention.” Australian 15 Jan. 1999: 3. Scott, Jane A., Colin W. Binns, and Ruth V. Arnold. “Attitudes toward Breastfeeding in Perth, Australia: Qualitative Analysis.” Journal of Nutrition Education 29.5 (1997): 244–249. Shaw, Megan. “Offensive? Who Me? I’m Just Trying to Have My Lunch.” Age 9 Jan. 1998: A3. Shildrick, Margrit. Leaky Bodies and Boundaries: Feminism, Postmodernism and (Bio)ethics. London: Routledge, 1997. Sichtermann, Barbara. Femininity: The Politics of the Personal. Trans. John Whitlam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Silverton, Louise. The Art and Science of Midwifery. London: Prentice Hall, 1993.

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Sofalis, Zoe. “Spacing Out in the Mother Shop.” Motherlode. Eds. Stephanie Holt and Maryanne Lynch. Melbourne: Sybylla Feminist Press, 1996. 120–128. Stearns, Cindy. “Breastfeeding and the Good Maternal Body.” Gender & Society 13.3 (1999): 308–326. Sullivan, John R. Le
er to the editor. Advertiser 24 Jun. 1996: 12. Traina, Cristina L.H. “Maternal Experience and the Boundaries of Christian Sexual Ethics.” Signs 25.2 (2000): 369–405. Wilson, Elizabeth. The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Young, Iris Marion. Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990.

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REPRESENTATION

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CHAPTER FIVE

“PAX MATERNA” OR MOTHERS AT WAR WITH THE EMPIRE? AUSTRALIAN PERSPECTIVES ON THE MOTHERHOOD DEBATE IN THE BRITISH EMPIRE DURING THE GREAT WAR

CANADIAN

AND

Karin Ikas

Introduction In Womankind Beyond the Stereotypes, Reeves describes the mythologizing of women in wartime as follows: “Women are praised as the peaceful sex and invited to become Golden Star mothers, to offer their sons in sacrifice upon the altars of the Tribal Gods” (76). And that is it—women remain far outside the arenas of decision. The poster advertising the Red Cross in the Great War (Figure 5.1) vividly a
ests to this mythic role ascribed to women during warfare. Additionally, it illustrates how maternity along with the nurturing and peaceful role of women is elevated to the realm of heroism. Leading on from this we can also note Shute’s (1995) comment that, with the outbreak of this “imperialist war the womanhood of Australia, and indeed the womanhood of the entire Western civilisation, were plunged into the age-old mythic role of saintly and peace-loving mothers” (23). In part, this can be traced back to the traditional belief that “war cultures must invest in an image of a peace worth fighting for, a peace which is imagined through images of an idealized and nostalgic pre-war Golden Age” (Cooper 16), and women are generally acknowledged as a major pillar of that idealized and romanticized imagery. The post-war poem “A Dream in Luxembourg” (1930) by British novelist and poet Richard Aldington stands as a striking and well-known literary example here: … Must fair women die? I’ll not believe it, Death is masculine. Death, like a war-lord, wants more man-power,

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Image not available

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And, by God, he gets it, I’ve seen him get it. How many yellow dead men have I seen? … Reported how many casualties? But one gets used to it, quite used to it, And it seems nothing for men to die, Nothing for one to die oneself. But for a fair woman to die, And that a woman one loves or has love— No, it is incredible, they don’t die … (5)

This connects closely to similar analyses by April Carter, Elise Boulding, Be
y Reardon, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Susan R. Grayzel, and other feminist critics (cf Oldfield; Turpin; York).1 They concede further that women’s association with peace and maternal imagery is not only an ancient theme but also a very modern one that dominates public discourse even into the 21st century. The modern version of the wellknown creed of Pax Materna—that is, mother’s peace—has its origin in the United States, created during the Vietnam War by a group of women who called themselves “Another Mother for Peace” and sent a Mother’s Day card to members of the United States Congress with the following inscription: For my Mother’s Day gi this year I don’t want candy or flowers I want an end to killing. We who have given life Must be dedicated to preserving it. Please, talk peace! (Alfonso 218)

Put simply, any case being made for war and also for peace invokes traditional gender imagery. Moreover, to this day especially mothers are associated with pacifism and se
ling of conflict in times of war (cf Ruddick). Lorentzen and Turpin’s critical anthology provides some interesting case studies from various wars and nations that support this argument. As Jennifer Turpin aptly points out, … governments a
empt to educate women as to what constitutes a “good mother” during wartime; their propaganda strategies are remarkably similar, drawing on representations of the good (patriotic) mother as one who is willing to sacrifice her sons to war. (11)

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Needless to say, not all women conform to this pa
ern of “sending, supporting, and reproducing men” (11) as it has been engendered by patriotic war propaganda—merging motherhood, nationalism, and militarism. Similarly, not all women are inherently peaceful or strong advocates of peace, as examples of women warriors in various historical, cultural, and geopolitical contexts reveal (cf Bethke-Elshtain). Subsequently, women’s role in the war context needs to be discussed beyond the scope of essentialist gender roles and “the traditional dichotomy whereby women are seen as the life givers, men as the life takers”(xiii). Particularly instructive here is an analysis of women’s changing roles in the High Empire Period (1890–1920) (Boehmer). Dominated by the Great War as the first war to be total in scope, but also by women’s struggle for suffrage and independence, this period is generally acknowledged as a major breakthrough for women’s emancipation. Focusing on this time span, I will look at the contested relationship between motherhood, and peace and war as displayed in propaganda material—such as posters and magazines—as well as literary works from Australia, England, and Canada during this period. While particular a
ention will be given to Canadian feminist writer Nellie McClung’s novel The Next of Kin, some renowned literary works of men and non-literary texts such as pamphlets, posters, and newspaper advertisements, in a period generally acknowledged as the age of the press and print media, will also be considered. I am especially interested in the ways in which motherhood and the demand for an independent female subjectivity intertwine with the experience of war and warfare for women at the home-front at the beginning of the 20th century. Some central questions to be pursued here are these: How are notions of nationalism, motherhood, pacifism, and war displayed in the documentary, propagandistic, and literary works analyzed here? Is the war considered to be a catalytic moment for women to redefine gender categories and construct femininity beyond the traditional notions of motherhood?

Contested Gender Roles in the High British Empire and the Impact of the Great War The whole time span—between the 1890s and 1920s, this so-called High Empire period—is generally acknowledged as a turning point for women in history; yet, it also figures as an historical and cultural

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paradox for most women (Fountain). While this period saw women’s foremost international campaigns for suffrage and equal rights, it was also dominated by two major international wars, the Anglo-Boer War in South Africa and the First World War, which impeded women’s striving for independence and equality. What is more, the very notion of the home-front was an invention of the First World War and, for the first time, “home” and “domestic” became adjectives that modified the military term “front.” Though suffrage had not yet been granted to women, for the first time they were asked to act as legally independent citizens. Elaborating on this issue, Tate and Rai
have convincingly illustrated that in the heyday of women’s agitation to win the vote the “war only intensified the pressure on women to inhabit a cultural, social, and sexual paradox” (5), and Gilbert goes so far as to identify the Great War as a form of sex warfare, or, as she puts it: “[The Great War is] a war between the front and the home front” and thus “a climatic episode in a ba
le of sexes” (422–450). By and large, Grayzel agrees and aptly summarizes the deep impact of the Great War period on women as follows: … the First World War looms as a historical conundrum. On the one hand, women in many participant nations gained basic voting rights in its immediate aermath that they had never possessed before. On the other hand, their overall economic and social status showed few, if any, notable transformations. (5)

Not too surprisingly, traditional constructions of women’s roles are particularly visible in propaganda material of the time. The following striking example from the Imperial War Museum in London illustrates this. Figure 5.2 refers to a painting that was reproduced for a poster design in 1916 and testifies to the fact that various nations participating in the Great War depicted women as saintly mothers, nurturers, and protectors. It is precisely due to such expectations entailed in traditional understandings of women’s roles that women came to function as the pillar within the reconstructed war-family model where the father/ husband is a wounded soldier and the child a frightened youngster— both desperate for the (overwhelming) maternal figure’s protection, comfort, and help. All warring parties used all forms of media available at the time, such as books, photos, films, postcards, posters, and poems, to shape the viewer’s and reader’s war a
itude.

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In Australia, the only country in the British Empire aside from New Zealand where women had gained the vote at that time,2 we see another interesting and quite contradictory invocation of traditional gender imagery, in particular maternity, that supports but also potentially undermines political war propaganda. While the “mother of war” on British war posters appeals to men’s notion of duty with slogans such as “Go! It’s your duty, Lad. Join to-Day” (IWM: PST 6540) or “Women of Britain Say—Go” (IWM, British propaganda poster by E. Kealy), Australian and New Zealand women were urged to vote “yes” or “no” in a referendum on conscription (Figures 5.3 and 5.4). This stimulated a provocative debate and led to contradictions in communicating the role of mothers within the nation at war. The force of this wartime mythology was such that the possession of the vote for women inflicted a new responsibility upon them in that they were asked to “defend and justify that vote by good performance” (Brisbane Courier), that is, in the context of the national war effort. In general, then, as Shute has noted, the conscription debate went hand in hand with a reassertion of the traditional dualism of women’s role in wartime—both patriotic war supporters and war-resisters engaged

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women, as mothers, in their respective propaganda (Shute; Damousi). Some accused women of forge
ing the soldiers at the front altogether. Others stereotyped them as naive, tokenized helpmates of the state, or merely as ignorant women, worshipping heroism. Figure 5.5, another poster of the conscription debate, clearly ascribes maternal imagery to suggest that female ignorance and evil are to blame for the tragic loss of male lives in the war. The title, Blood Vote, is revealing in this respect.

Maternal Imagery in Traditional War Writing In male-dominated Great War literature, renowned writers of the First World War period such as May O’Rouke and Siegfried Sassoon used these images to hold women accountable for the state of war as well as for war atrocities.3 Sassoon’s poem “Glory of Women” expresses these feelings as follows: You love us when we’re heroes, home on leave, Or wounded in a mentionable place. You worship decorations; you believe That chivalry redeems the war’s disgrace. You make us shells. You listen with delight, By tales of dirt and danger fondly thrilled. You crown our distant ardors while we fight, And mourn our laurelled memories when we’re killed. You can’t believe that British troops “retire” When hell’s last horror breaks them, and they run, Trampling the terrible corpses—blind with blood. O German mother dreaming by the fire, While you are kni
ing socks to send your son His face is trodden deeper in the mud. (22)

Not surprisingly, in Sassoon’s poem women are once again merely acknowledged as mothers, full of patriotic vigour. This implies that women are defined only through their strong, patriotic affiliation to the nation, and their male children. Moreover, the poem illustrates how “the male sexual urge was understood to be active, aggressive and spontaneous whilst female sexuality was believed to be weak, passive and responsive” (Nead 6). As Bethke-Elshtain and others have

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illustrated in their respective critical treatises, it is plausible to suggest that “the various explanations which have been given for women’s existence can be narrowed down to two—her husband and her child.”4 Nevertheless, it is also important to acknowledge that the lives of women and the wri
en realistic and fictional accounts of many women of the time prove these representations to be too limiting, distorted, and falsified.5 In the following, I turn to some literary texts of Canadian author Nellie L. McClung, a well-known woman writer of the High Empire period, to examine the ways in which she intertwines motherhood and the demand for an independent female subjectivity with women’s experiences of war and warfare at the beginning of the 20th century. The texts of interest are McClung’s novel The Next of Kin: Those Who Wait and Wonder (1917) and her critical treatise and feminist manifesto In Times Like These.

A Literary Response from Canada: Nellie McClung’s The Next of Kin (1917) The First World War has been an important topic for many renowned women novelists in Canada during the High Empire period.6 In various fictional accounts of the war, writers such as Francis Marion Beynon, Lucy Maud Montgomery, and Evah McKowan, as well as Nellie McClung, challenge the common assumption of the time, namely that war stories have to be about male heroes and should focus on male soldiers’ experiences at the front. Depicting the catastrophic impact of war on those back at the Canadian home-front, these writers not only rewrite the notion of the total war but also inscribe women into war history by pointing to women’s active role in war and also their significant pleas for peace. Coates has wri
en repeatedly about this issue and aptly points out that “these women writers are unified in protesting the social marginalization of women’s voices and values, and in forcefully reiterating that women deserve a place alongside men, not as their subalterns” (1190). Nellie McClung is generally acknowledged as Canada’s most outstanding and popular feminist author of the time. Born on a small pioneer farm in Gray County, Ontario, in 1873, as the last of six children, of Methodist, Sco
ish-Irish parentage, she grew up in Ontario and Manitoba. Later she worked as a teacher at various Canadian colleges

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and had her first commercial success as a writer with her best-selling novel Sowing Seeds in Danny. Among her various successful fictive books are The Purple Springs and her last full-scale novel, Painted Fires. Together with Sowing Seeds in Danny, these novels make up the Pearlie Watson trilogy, in which McClung tells the life of a reformist heroine in rural Canada. McClung is particularly interested in the situation of the unfortunate, downtrodden, and voiceless people of society and it seems legitimate to identify her as a “voice for the voiceless” (Macpherson). It is not too surprising, then, that McClung was fascinated by Charles Dickens’s novels and soon became very involved in various suffrage organizations and the political campaigns for enfranchisement and prohibition in Manitoba and Alberta. In 1915 she published the feminist critical treatise In Times Like These, by far the most outspoken classical statement on Canadian feminism of the High Empire period. Altogether Nellie McClung published more than 16 books, among which are two autobiographies, the war novel The Next of Kin: Those Who Wait and Wonder, four books of short stories, and numerous articles and stories in newspapers and magazines all over North America. Throughout Canada and the United States she received further praise for her brilliant and wi
y speeches, lectures, and readings.7 Her role within the Canadian cultural and literary context might best be summarized in Davis’s words: “Nellie Letitia (Mooney) McClung would have been a remarkable woman in any age, but in the repressive, patriarchal society of her day she was the leading women’s rights activist and social reformer, and she changed the face of Canada” (17). McClung is an interesting writer to consider in the war context because of her varying a
itude towards peace and war. Before the Great War she was an outspoken pacifist, yet she became a fervent supporter of Canadian enlistment during the war when her son enlisted. Her prowar stance can be traced in various of her writings such as “Men and Money” and also “Three Times and Out: A Canadian Boy’s Experiences in Germany,” a story she ghost wrote for a Canadian private who had been imprisoned in Germany during the war. McClung’s war novel The Next of Kin, however, is particularly insightful. Here, she works out in fiction some of the critical thoughts she develops in her theoretical treatise In Times Like These, her so-called “wartime a
ack upon female parasitism and what is now called male chauvinism” (Strong-Boag xvi). Throughout the novel McClung depicts mothers as having a major impact on the nation’s future, a future she believes will be more pacifist

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once women, and most of all mothers, have a say in politics. Most parts of the novel are set in rural Alberta at the early stages of the war and the pre-eminent concern of the story is with the women in the Canadian countryside and their families. Throughout the book the city is viewed through the eyes of the rural female spectator. The story opens on “a bleak day in November” in northern Alberta where “a thick, gray sky, and a great, noisy, blustering wind” hints at the tough life of women in the Canadian countryside in the early days of the war and sets the mood for the subsequent Municipal Hall Meeting of the local Red Cross Group. Due to the men having gone to the Great War to fight for the Empire it is a female-only group that gathers to listen to the speech of a suffragist about women’s social and political role and their a
itude towards the war. The meeting reveals the difficult situation Canadian women face on the Canadian home-front, torn between pacifism and support for the nationalist war efforts through essentialist gender behaviour on the one hand, and rebellious thoughts, politicized actions, and a claim for liberty and independence in the context of female suffrage on the other hand. Subsequently, the discussion moves towards the central question “What do the women of the world think of war?” as one participant aptly puts it. With recourse to the traditional essentialist track of thought regarding the supposedly pacifist nature of women, the participant continues, “No woman wanted war, did she? No woman could bring a child into the world, suffering for it, caring for it, loving it, without learning the value of human life, could she?” (9). Nonetheless, the invocation of traditional gender imagery in this opening scene is contested in the following statement, when a more politicized woman, a mother, states: Well-kept homes and hand-knit socks will never save the world. Look at Germany! The German women are kind, patient, industrious, frugal, hard-working, everything that a woman ought to be, but it did not save them, or their country, and it will not save us. (9–10)

At first, this concept might appear to be adopted from In Times Like These, where other critical lines like these appear; closer examination reveals that McClung develops more progressive and international ideas in The Next of Kin. The juxtaposition of the respective parts from both works makes this difference in Nellie McClung’s track of thought quite obvious. In Times Like These reads:

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The German woman’s ways have been ways of pleasantness, but her paths have not been paths of peace; and now, women everywhere are thinking of her, rather bi
erly.… It is not a woman’s duty to bring children into the world, as to see what sort of a world she is bringing them into, and what their contribution will be to it. (24)

In The Next of Kin, this is developed into a more placatory, intercultural notion of a cross-cultural female politics that goes beyond the dichotomies of enemies and friends through its implicit call for an alliance of women to oppose the militant and martial male war instinct: My nearest neighbour is a German, and she and I have talked these [war] things over. She feels just the same as we do, and she sews for our Red Cross. She says she could not knit socks for our soldiers, for they are enemies, but she makes bandages, for she says wounded men are not enemies, and she is willing to do anything for them. (10)

Thus, in the course of the novel, alongside subservient and traditionally minded mothers, defiant mothers, tired of having “to se
le down to kni
ing a dull grey sock or [to do] the easy task of collecting Red Cross funds from perfectly willing people who ask me to come in while they make me a cup of tea” (164), also prevail where, due to a shortage of men at the home-front, women’s involvement in public life is required. The following scene depicts this: Going over a hill, we came upon a woman driving a mower. It was the first reminder of the war. She was a fine-looking woman, with a tanned face, brown, but handsome, and she swung her team around the edge of the meadow with a grace and skill that called forth our admiration.… “Did you know I’ve lost my husband?”… It was a smashing blow … but I am all right now, and have thought things out.… I am ge
ing on well. The children are at school now, both of them… —the crops are in good shape—did you ever see a finer stand of wild hay? I can manage the farm, with one extra hired man in harvest–time.… This is a great country, is n’t [sic] it? Where you find such abundance, and such a climate, with its sunshine and its cool nights, and such a chance to make good? I suppose freedom has to be paid for. (253–254)

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In the end, the male-dominant war becomes the trigger for a more moderate and peaceful feminine future. As most of the men died in the war it is ultimately in the hands of the women to do be
er, not only to keep the home-front going but also to rebuild the country in a more feminine manner, that is, in the sense of a pacifist politics (of women) to end all wars. Thus, the Pax Materna is redefined as a Politeia Pax Feminina to replace the past and present Martial Politeia Masculina. The unnamed war widow quoted above further states: “Freedom … is worth something to have a chance to work and bring up my children—in peace—so I am living on from day to day … not grieving … not moping … not thinking too much,—it hurts to think too hard,--just living.” [The narrator adds:] Then we shook hands, and I told her that she had found something far greater than happiness, for she had achieved power. (254)

This process of “conscious-raising” about the war and women’s role at the home-front dominates the novel. The sense that maternity is always linked to patriotism and nationalism in times of war thus is disrupted and replaced by a realization that although female boundaries are not always elastic enough to accommodate alternative notions of maternal imagery, at least within one generation cultural boundaries can be successfully overcome and alternative notions of a war developed as soon as one’s individual identity is privileged to national collectivism (cf Hunter et al.). Subsequently, “the great gi that Canada [and, one might add, Australia and other colonies] had given to the Empire” is no longer understood as “the gi of men and wheat, bread and blood—the sacrament of empire” as an enthusiastic proimperial women speaker in a later suffrage meeting in the novel puts it (McClung 165). Rather, it is the “freedom kept up” by a woman who “had found something far greater than happiness, for she had achieved power,” as McClung puts it in the closing paragraph of The Next of Kin (254). The dawning of a new and rather feminine era is reinforced through the closing and rather pastoral imagery of “a western sky [which] is red now, giving promise of a good day to-morrow” (165) and as such replaces the gloomy and grey scenery that marked the patriarchal society that was dominant in the novel’s opening image.

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Conclusion As various other female authors such as Adela Pankhurst and Miles Franklin from Australia, Francis Marion Beynon, Georgina Sime, and of course the aforementioned Nellie McClung have revealed through their impressive body of war works, writing enables women to touch upon provocative subjects, here namely suffrage and a wearing away of the traditional maternal imagery of women as nurturers of the race—and erode essentialist gender-imagery perpetuated by a patriarchal nation at war. As Canadian activist Flora McD. Dennison aptly put it in the pamphlet “War and Women” (1914), wri
en for the Canadian Suffrage Association in 1914: The male human, and especially the male has thought in terms of combat and of dominance through force.... When we study history, what was the keynote of it all? Ba
les, ba
les, ba
les.… Women’s thought and action have always been constructive.… In writing this another pen than that held by Mars will have to be used. Venus must be the star in the ascendant and the monsters of the race must assist in tracing out a new code of ethics.

Thus, these works should not be read as efforts of accommodation, if by accommodation we mean simple integration into an existing social and political structure. They are grim portrayals of women’s life in times of various wars in the early 20th century in the western world, but also indicate women’s power and potential to fight for their own beliefs, their freedom, and their personalities. As a body they are a condemnation of 20th-century patriotic and patriarchal war and a challenge to construct feminist alternatives and ascertain female power and legal status, if necessary by female means of war. As Elizabeth Robins puts it: … intelligent women know that the sum of feminine achievement is for the first time a factor in that Welt politik which is the shaping of public opinion. We see clearly that, working shoulder to shoulder as we have never worked before, women are laying the foundation of a power which is to change the course of history. (73–74)

Writing serves as a key component to exert this new Female World Politics and shapes this new or alternative notion of a Feminist Pax Discursiva that replaces the prior, essentialist Pax Materna.

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Endnotes 1.

2. 3.

4.

5.

6.

Cf. Be
y Reardon, Women and Peace (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993); Jean Bethke Elshtain, Women and War (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1995 1987); Susan R. Grayzel, Women’s Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood, and Politics in Britain and France During the First World War (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Jennifer Turpin, “Many Faces: Women Confronting War” in The Women and War Reader, ed. Lois Ann Lorentzen et al. (New York: New York UP, 1998), 3–18; April Carter, “Should Women Be Soldiers or Pacifists?” in Lorentzen 1998, 33–37; Jodi York, “The Truth about Women and Peace” in Lorentzen 1998, 19–25; see also Elise Boulding, “Feminist Inventions in the Art of Peacemaking: A Century Overview” in Peace and Change (1995), 20.4: 408–439 and Sybil Oldfield, Women Against the Iron Fist: Alternatives to Militarism, 1900–1989 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989). In New Zealand women had been granted suffrage in 1893 and in Australia in 1902. For a closer analysis of this aspect cf among others P. Quinn et al. (eds.), The Literature of the Great War Reconsidered: Beyond Modern Memory (New York: Palgrave, 2001); B. Korte et al. (eds.), War and the Cultural Construction of Identities in Britain (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002); D. Novak Dubious Glory: The Two World Wars and the Canadian Novel (New York and Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2000); and L.T. Hergenhan, Australian Literature and War—Special Issue of Australian Literary Studies, vol. 12, no. 2 (October 1985). Consult in particular Jean Bethke Elshtain, Women and War (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1995 11987) and Susan R. Grayzel, Women’s Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood, and Politics in Britain and France during the First World War (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1999). See also Endnote 1 for further references. Cf Gail Braybon, “Women and the War” in Stephen Constantine et al. (eds.), The First World War in British History (London: 1995), 145. See also Denise Riley, Am I that Name? Feminism and the Category of ‘Women’ in History (London, 1988), 96–97, and Helen M. Cooper et al. (ed.), Arms and the Woman: War, Gender and Literary Representation (Chapel Hill, NC, 1989) For an insightful critical study on the Canadian war novel and the impact of female authors cf in particular D. Novak, Dubious Glory. The Two World Wars and the Canadian Novel (New York and Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2000). See also Donna Coates, “The Best Soldiers of All. Unsung Heroines in Canadian Women’s Great War Fictions.” In Canadian Literature, 151 (Winter 1996): 66–99.

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7.

For further information on the life and works of Nellie McClung, see among others Randi R. Warne, Literature as Pulpit: The Christian Social Activism of Nellie L. McClung (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 1992). Also Mary Hallet and Marilyn Davis, Firing the Heather: The Life and Times of Nellie McClung (Saskatoon: Fih House Publishers, 1993).

References Aldington, Richard. A Dream in the Luxembourg. London: Cha
o and Windus 1930. Alfonso, Harriet Hyman. Peace as a Women’s Issue. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 1993. Bethke-Elshtain, Jean. Women and War. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987, 1995. Boehmer, Elleke. Colonial & Postcolonial Literature. Oxford, New York: Oxford UP, 1995. Boulding, Elise. “Feminist Inventions in the Art of Peacemaking: A Century Overview.” Peace and Change 20.4 (1995): 408–439. Braybon, Gail. “Women and the War.” The First World War in British History. Eds. Stephen Constantine, Maurice W. Kirby, and Mary B. Rose. London: Edward Arnold, 1995. Brisbane Courier. Brisbane 1 Oct. 1918. Carter, April. “Should Women Be Soldiers or Pacifists?” The Women and War Reader. Eds. Lois Ann Lorentzen and Jennifer Turpin. New York: New York UP, 1998. 33–37. Coates, Donna. “The Best Soldiers of All. Unsung Heroines in Canadian Women’s Great War Fictions.” Canadian Literature 151 (Winter 1996): 66–99. _____. “War”. Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada. Ed. W.H. New. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. 1186–1196. Cooper, Helen, Adrienne A. Munich, and Susan M. Squier, eds. Arms and the Woman: War, Gender and Literary Representation. Chapel Hill: N.C., 1989. Damousi, Joy. “Socialist Women and Gendered Space: Anti-conscription and Anti-war Campaigns 1914–18.” Labour History 60 (May 1991). Davis, Marilyn L. Stories Subversive. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1996. Dennison, Flora MacDonald. War and Women. Toronto: SI, 1918. Fountain, Nigel. Women at War. London: Michael O’Mara Books, 2002. Gilbert, Sandra. “Soldier’s Heart: Literary Men, Literary Women, and the Great War.” Signs 8.3 (1983): 422–450.

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Grayzel, Susan R. Women’s Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood, and Politics in Britain and France During the First World War. Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1999. Grayzel, Susan R. Women and the First World War. London: Longman, 2002. Hallet, Mary, and Marilyn Davis. Firing the Heather: The Life and Times of Nellie McClung. Saskatoon: Fih House Publishers, 1993. Hergenhan, L.T., ed. Australian Literature and War—Special Issue of Australian Literary Studies 12.2 (October 1985). Hunter, Anne E., Catherine M. Flauenbaum, and Suzanne R. Sunday, eds. On Peace, War, and Gender: A Challenge to Genetic Explanations. New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 1991. Korte, Barbara, and Ralf Schneider, eds. War and the Cultural Construction of Identities in Britain. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002. Macpherson, Margaret. Nellie McClung: Voice for the Voiceless. Montreal: XYZ Publishing, 2003. McClung, Nellie. In Times Like These. New York and Toronto: D. Appleton / McLeod & Allen, 1915. _____. “Men and Money.” Maclean’s (September 1919): 15–17, 99–100. _____.The Next of Kin: Those Who Wait and Wonder. Toronto: Thomas Allen, 1917. Nead, Lynda. Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain. Oxford and New York: B. Blackwell, 1988. Novak, D. Dubious Glory. The Two World Wars and the Canadian Novel. New York and Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2000. Oldfield, Sybil. Women Against the Iron Fist: Alternatives to Militarism, 1900–1989. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989. Quinn, Patrick, and Steven Trout, eds. The Literature of the Great War Reconsidered: Beyond Modern Memory. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Reardon, Be
y. Women and Peace. Albany: SUNY Press, 1993. Reeves, N. Womankind Beyond the Stereotypes. Chicago: Aldine, 1971. Riley, Denise. Am I That Name? Feminism and the Category of “Women” in History. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, 1988. Robins, Elizabeth. Way Stations. New York: Dodd and Mead, 1913. Ruddick, Sara. Maternal Thinking: Towards a Politics of Peace. London: Women’s Press, 1990. Sassoon, Siegfried. “Glory of Women.” The War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon. Ed. Rupert Hart-Davis. London: Faber and Faber, reprint, 1983. Shute, Carmel. “Heroines and Heroes: Sexual Mythology in Australia 1914– 18.” Gender and War. Eds. Joy Damousi and Marilyn Lake. Melbourne: Cambridge UP, 1995. 23–42.

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_____. “Sexual Mythology in Australia 1914–18.” Hecate 1.1 (1975). Strong-Boag, Veronica. “Introduction.” The Next of Kin: Those Who Wait and Wonder. By Nellie McClung. Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1972. vii-xxii. Tate, Trudi. “Introduction.” Women’s Fiction and the Great War. Eds. Trudi Tate, and Suzanne Rai
. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. 5. Turpin, Jennifer. “Many Faces: Women Confronting War.” The Women and War Reader. Eds. Lois Ann Lorentzen and Jennifer Turpin. New York: New York UP, 1998. 3–18. Warne, Randi R. Literature as Pulpit: The Christian Social Activism of Nellie L. McClung. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 1992. York, Jodi. “The Truth about Women and Peace” The Women and War Reader. Eds. Lois Ann Lorentzen and Jennifer Turpin. New York: New York UP, 1998. 19–25.

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CHAPTER SIX

MOTHERING AND STRESS DISCOURSES A DECONSTRUCTION OF THE INTERRELATIONSHIP OF DISCOURSES ON MOTHERING AND STRESS Erika Horwitz and Bonita C. Long

D

iscourses manifest themselves as beliefs and values that people hold as truths and influence individuals’ subjective experiences and behaviours (Weingarten). The poststructuralist concept of discourse is defined as a “historically, socially, and institutionally specific structure of statements, terms, categories, and beliefs that are embedded in institutions, social relationships, and texts” (Sco
135–136). Thus, discourses are reflected in the established and accepted stories of society, they determine how one’s experiences are conceptualized, and they are associated with profound consequences, constraints, sanctions, or possibilities (Sho
er). Some discourses hold a dominant place in our society, whereas others are less salient or marginalized. Importantly, discourses do not occur in isolation from one another. Therefore, our goal was to examine the interrelationship of two dominant discourses that profoundly affect women and their parenting experiences—mothering and stress discourses (Bernard; Coontz 1992; Hays). Although the discourse of mothering is inextricably linked to other discourses, such as gender, women, workers, wives, children, marriage, and relationships (Rice), we refer briefly to these discourses only when they are relevant to the present discussion.

Discourse on Mothering In recent years, a number of authors have identified the dominant sociocultural beliefs and values, and their consequences that are inherent in the discourse on mothering (Badinter; Contra
o; Coontz 1992, 1997; Gordon; Hays; Thurer; Weingarten). For example, Coontz (1992, 1997)

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has wri
en about the North American family, the myths that are held about families, and how these myths function. In addition, Hays has explored the cultural definitions and contradictions of motherhood, and several other authors have dealt with the topic of motherhood from historical, social, or feminist perspectives (Baber and Allen; Bernard; Thurer). The results of this work have revealed that within the dominant discourse, mothers are held responsible for the physical, spiritual, and psychological well being of their children; that is, mothers are responsible for how their children turn out (Weingarten). The myth that mother is “all powerful” can even be seen in the 1897 National Congress on Mothers’ Program, which organizers metaphorically adorned with phrases such as “Mother is the name of God in the hearts and lips of li
le children” (Contra
o 230). This legacy continues today, as mothers are viewed as the primary agents in their children’s development, as well as the primary obstacles (Thurer). Thus, mothers are under considerable pressure to be “good” mothers (Contra
o; Croghan and Miell) and those who believe they are not living up to these expectations may experience feelings of inadequacy and guilt (Bernard; Thurer). The dominant discourse also portrays mothers as sacrificial and all loving, a portrayal that carries with it the expectation that mothers will be giving, selfless beings. Moreover, Thurer suggests that ever since the idealization of the Virgin Mary, mothers have been expected to be saintly and sacrifice their needs for their children. By implication, this message suggests that if mothers forgo their personal needs, they will be able to raise healthy, well-adjusted children. There are also contradictory messages implied in the “mother as powerful agent” discourse. Because mothers are viewed as responsible for their children’s fate, they need to learn how to parent competently (Hays). In order to satisfy this “need,” mothers turn to an endless list of available experts. Although expert information is oen conflicting and overwhelming, it has one overall message—it is up to mothers to nurture, love, care, and stimulate their children or the children will be greatly damaged (Contra
o; Thurer). Because of the vast amount of expert yet conflicting information about parenting (Brazelton; Leach; Spock and Rothanberg), mothers do not trust their instincts, because if they do, they may harm their children. An example of expert parenting advice is reflected in the tenets of a
achment theory, which posits that mothers must bond with their children (Bowlby 1991). Bowlby posited that mothers should spend copious amounts of time developing this

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bond through “constant a
ention day and night, seven days a week and 365 in the year” (Bowlby 1996 67) because when the bond fails to form children are at risk of developing serious psychological problems. Moreover, Bowlby (1991) implied that full-time employment of a mother outside the home results in maternal deprivation for the child. Thus, mothers are pressured to dedicate time and energy to the formation of this bond (Contra
o). Although Bowlby’s theory places the onus on mothers to be the main source of attachment in their children’s lives (Karen), Coontz (1992) suggests that an a
achment to a series of adults may be healthy for children and may ease some of the social responsibility on mothers. According to Ratner, a consequence of expecting mothers to be the sole source of a
achment for children may be the easing of social responsibility and the promotion of an individualistic society. Another example of expert advice given to mothers stems from the work of the cognitive developmentalist Jean Piaget (cited in Thurer). Based on Piaget’s theory, mothers have been advised that stimulating their infants is essential to development. Many experts promote this belief and suggest ways for a mother to talk or play with their baby in order to encourage the baby’s intellectual growth (Thurer). However, many mothers may be le wondering whether they have provided enough stimulation for their children. Related to the mother discourse are dominant beliefs and values that cherish children for their innocence and purity (Contra
o; Coontz 1992; Hays). According to this discourse, children are always good and if they misbehave it is because they are either lacking something or because the mother is failing somehow. The myth of the vulnerable child exaggerates both “the power of the parent and the passivity of the child” (Coontz 1992 225). One could speculate that, as a consequence of the mother discourse (that is, mothers are responsible for child care), social institutions are freed from playing a larger part in the care of children. Also related to the mother discourse is the working/professional woman discourse. Some of the messages in this discourse are contradictory to the dominant discourse on mothering (Baber and Allen; Hays). Generally, employers expect women to be dedicated and commi
ed to their work regardless of their family obligations, a perspective that is consistent with the dominant philosophy of the workplace (for example, self-interest, profit-maximizing motive). As Hays suggests, working mothers believe that they must perform

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to their maximum potential in the workplace. Furthermore, they must act quite differently when fulfilling their work and mothering roles—competitive and tough-minded at work, and warm and loving at home (Hochschild). Women who try to integrate both the mother and work roles are told that their children should come first. However, the “ideas of appropriate childrearing all contradict the ideology of the workplace and the dominant ethos of society” (Hays 8), which promotes competition, individualism, equal opportunity, self-fulfillment, and advancement (Ratner). For mothers who work outside the home, leaving their children in the care of others is oen associated with feelings of guilt (Bernard; Coontz 1992) because the myths associated with the mothering discourse suggest that these children run the risk of “insecure a
achment” and low self-esteem (Karen). This double bind may create distress for women who have either chosen to or need to work. Although the mother discourse reflects a society that values children, our social structures and political policies do not adequately support children’s development (Berry). As a consequence, mothers may experience increased pressure, guilt, and self-doubt about the choices they make regarding their parenting and work roles. To summarize, maternal care-giving is viewed as essential to the “healthy” development of a child. Paradoxically, mothers are offered few clear guidelines and given li
le support to carry out this endeavour (Baber and Allen) even though they live by the ideology of intensive mothering. This ideology suggests that mothers should be the central caregivers of children. According to Hays, mothering is child centred, expert guided, emotionally absorbing, labour intensive, and financially expensive. One can conclude that for many mothers, a consequence of this discourse may be feelings of guilt, inadequacy, and low self-esteem. Given the emphasis put on a mother’s relationship with her child in a society that is individualistic and lacks community support, some have argued (Contra
o) that the exclusivity and isolation of the mother-child relationship is problematic for both the mother and the child. Moreover, our review revealed that the mothering discourse excludes the “voices” of low-income mothers, gay mothers, single mothers, and mothers in general. The voices in the mother discourse are those of experts—politicians, academics, physicians, media personalities, and those in positions of power. The mother discourse implies that mothers have the power to profoundly affect the social and intellectual development of their children. This belief reflects the assumption that mothers are all-

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powerful when it comes to their children and that they have primary control over how children develop. However, missing from this discourse are many other factors and social forces that affect children (for example, poverty, media, traumatic events, peers, discrimination, teachers, and schools) but that are too complex for mothers to control or modify (Coontz 1992). Temperamental differences among children also play an important role in their development (Karen). For example, mothering is not one-sided; interactions with the child are systemic in that the child affects the mother, her experience, and her responses, which in turn affects the child in an ongoing exchange. A consequence of the mother discourse, which empowers mothers relative to their children’s lives, is that it also frees society of greater responsibility for child care.

Stress and Coping Discourse The stress and coping discourse is also pervasive in our society (Lewig and Dollard; Newton; Pollock) and we wondered what myths and messages were a result of its interrelationship with the mothering discourse. Thus, in this section we first describe the general stress and coping discourse and then specifically examine the stress discourse directed at mothers. Given the limited literature in this area, we identified this discourse by reviewing two sources of material—Internet sites that focus on mothers or parenting, and popular women’s magazines. This was an initial a
empt to identify the ideology and practices that result from the stress and coping discourse and its interrelationship with the mothering discourse. Stress is generally understood to be harmful and especially detrimental to our health. For example, Parker et al. provide evidence that the lay public believes that stress can lead to heart a
acks, nervous breakdowns, the wearing down of the body’s defences, high blood pressure, ulcers, stroke, intestinal disorders, and skin disorders. One of the most powerful aspects of the stress discourse relates to this belief that stress causes illness. However, aer reviewing the literature on stress and health, Pollock (390) concluded that research focused on the role of stress in health is “inconsistent, contradictory, or inconclusive.” Although it is not unusual to find a relationship between stress and some illnesses, according to Pollock the strongly held belief that stress causes illness is not yet warranted. Pollock also suggests that there is

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the implicit message in the stress discourse that one should be able to handle or cope with stress, and if one cannot, one is therefore “weak.” Thus, responsibility for stress-related illness is placed on the individual because he or she should be able to modify problematic behaviours. If unable to do this, an individual may be regarded as possessing certain personality characteristics or behaviour pa
erns that lead to stressrelated illness. Furthermore, individuals are expected to engage in self-care and should be able to access resources to deal with their stress. Not being able to do this is a sign of weakness and a deficient nature (Newton). Another prevalent belief inherent in the stress discourse is that certain stressful events can cause great stress to everyone who experiences them, and this belief reflects the universalization of stress (Aldwin; Pearlin). For example, researchers and the lay public alike generally believe that experiencing the death of a loved one is a traumatic event. However, Wortman and Silver found that nearly one-third of bereaved spouses did not appear distressed at any point during the first year aer their spouse died. Therefore, those who do not experience stressful events consistent with the dominant stress discourse may feel guilty and different. The stress discourse also implies that employment is stressful but that workers should be able to cope—that is, to manage or control their stress (Furnham). Furnham found that employees explained their inability to cope in terms of psychological phenomena—in other words, the deficit was perceived to be intrinsic to the individual. Although employees in Furnham’s study suggested that stress was related to the structural organization of their companies, they also believed that stressed workers were less effective and more prone to self-destructive behaviours. These same employees suggested that the best way to deal with stress was to seek professional help and to use the advice of the self-help industry. The belief that work is stressful and that it is the individual’s responsibility to deal with it is prevalent (Lewig and Dollard; Newton). Generally, stress in the workplace has been a
ributed to psychological factors, which have been emphasized over the functions and structures of organizations and society and which is consistent with the western ideology of individualism. Handy suggests that an understanding of organizational culture, power, and conflict in institutional life is necessary in order to construct a more complex conceptualization of workplace stress.

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The stress discourse portrays stress as an individualistic and natural phenomenon (Newton; Pearlin), yet stress is affected by various social factors that are not intrinsic to the individual. Economic class, race, ethnicity, gender, and age are examples of social forces that affect people’s exposure to stressful events and their ability to cope. Coping is also related to historical factors that reflect constraints that limit or govern individual choices (Lennon). Moreover, other societal practices such as competition, individualism, and materialism interact with the experience of stress (Ratner). The stress discourse suggests simplistic solutions, such as, individuals should be able to ease the stress they experience if only they engaged in self-care practices (Pollock), particularly if they exercise, eat well, meditate, and organize their time. Thus, the stress discourse does not take into account that women are subject to other discourses that pressure them to succeed in multiple valued roles—to be good mothers, to develop careers, and to be good partners (Gilbert; Polaski and Holahan; Pollock). We now highlight aspects of the stress discourse directed at mothers and women in general. In order to deconstruct this discourse, in late 1999 and early 2000, we carried out an analysis of 13 articles that were found in current issues of three popular women’s magazines (Canadian Living, March, 2000; Good Housekeeping, March, 2000; and Woman’s World, March, 7, 2000) and on three Internet sites (parentsplace.com; allhealth.com; and womenfirst.com). To select articles from the Internet, 30 of the most recent articles from each Internet site were printed and numbered. A random selection of the Internet articles from each site was undertaken, by pulling corresponding article numbers from a hat. Because we were most interested in the discourse associated with mothering, we selected six articles from parentsplace.com and two each from the other two sites (allhealth.com and womenfirst.com). In addition, we selected three articles from current issues of popular Canadian women’s magazines that were prominently displayed on magazine racks. They were chosen because articles on stress were highlighted on their covers. The method we used to analyze these articles was based on a qualitative methodology developed by Horwitz, which was an extension of Mishler and Van Manen. In order to conduct the discourse analysis, the first author read and reread the articles and asked, “What is this article trying to convey?” and “What is the main message embedded in it?” The messages were cross-checked by finding support

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for interpretations through the language and statements contained in each of the articles identified under each main message. They were then grouped into themes by matching the messages they contained to defined categories. Finally, each article was re-examined for evidence found in the language and meaning to verify the theme to which each of the articles belonged. The 13 articles were distributed to seven counselling psychology doctoral students and the second author to determine whether they agreed or disagreed with the analysis. Their examination of the articles supported initial classifications. The results of the analysis yielded four main themes. The first theme was: A mother’s stress can harm her child’s health. Four of the articles explicitly made this claim. These articles claimed that a mother’s stress can aggravate her child’s asthma or allergies (Wheeler), and even play a role in the occurrence of her daughter’s anorexia (“Anxious Mothers Can Play a Role in Anorexia” 1999). One article claimed that stress during pregnancy can affect the unborn infant’s health and well being (Plumbo). Finally, a fourth article claimed that marital stress is harmful to children (Huggins). Consistent with the mother discourse, this theme placed a strong emphasis on mothers’ stress as being potentially harmful to their children. The second theme identified was: Stress is damaging to mothers’ health and well being. In addition to harming children, stress is also damaging to mothers. One article claimed that stress can be positive if it is kept under control, but if it becomes unmanageable it can “wreak havoc” upon a woman’s mind, body, and productivity (“The Positive Side of Stress”). In another article, the author suggested that stress can damage a woman’s psychological well being (“Stress and Your Emotions”). The message implicit in these examples is that stress is bad and can create problems in various areas of a mother’s life. If stress can affect a person’s productivity, mind, and body, a stressed mother may fear the loss of her job and with it the loss of her self-esteem, as well as financial security. The third theme we identified was: Stress can affect mothers’ interpersonal relationships. In one article, it was suggested that a woman’s stress can overload other individuals. Another article claimed that marital stress can interfere with the communication between parent and child (Huggins), and another suggested that stress can damage interpersonal relationships with a woman’s family, friends, and co-workers (“Stress and Your Emotions”). A mother’s concerns may become magnified if she believes that her stress can affect her

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relationship with her children, because the modern discourse tells mothers that they must maintain safe and close attachments with their children, and that the mother-child bond is essential to the child’s healthy development. The experts warn that stress is dangerous to the mother-child relationship, which complicates a mother’s experience, particularly given that women are expected to be the keepers of family relationships (Coontz 1997). The final theme we identified was: Mothers should be able to cope with their stress because there are many options available. Seven articles contained a variety of solutions to cope with stress. Some of these suggestions included a
ention to diet (Somer), writing journals, exercising, listening to music, laughing, meditation (Donovan), prioritizing, visualizing, and identifying stressors (Donovan). Other suggestions were to nurture emotional connections, plan (Peterson), worry constructively, never fret alone, confine your worry time, distract yourself (Umansky), wake up earlier, eat breakfast, drink decaffeinated coffee, have a snack, and hug your kids (Smalley). Finally, women were cajoled to take a mini break, deal with their time problems, and socialize (Langlois). In sum, women are told they should be able to cope because there are many options available to them. This claim places the responsibility of a mother’s stress solely on her and ignores social factors that aggravate her experience or limit her resources. For example, access to reliable universal daycare may reduce a mother’s sense of responsibility and the experience of stress (Gordon). In addition, the dual role of mother and worker leaves many women struggling for time and juggling responsibilities (Hays; Reifman et al.). Lack of time and resources can make it difficult for these women to dedicate any part of their day to activities such as organizing, meditation, exercise, cooking nutritious meals, and ge
ing adequate sleep. Mothers who are unable to engage in the coping strategies suggested by experts may experience guilt and anxiety over the possible negative consequences of their inadequate coping. The themes we identified are only a preliminary analysis of the dominant stress and coping discourse present in popular women’s magazines and parenting Internet sites. For example, a search of the allhealth.com site yielded 3,621 documents relating to stress, a search of parentsplace.com yielded 1,074 documents, and a search of womenfirst.com yielded 200 documents. These themes are representative of the general dominant discourse on stress and coping identified above: (1) stress is

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harmful, (2) stress can cause illness, (3) individuals should be able to cope, (4) individuals cannot avoid stress—it is universal, natural, and (5) individuals are responsible for managing their own stress. When these messages are directed at mothers and women, they interact with the mothering discourse and help to reinforce the myths and messages ingrained in it.

Interrelationship of Discourses on Mothering and Stress Discourses on mothering and stress have become legitimized by their claims to truths. In this sense, discourses are assigned the status of objective knowledge and therefore defy, dispute, and legitimate knowledge (Foucault; Sco
). The manner in which these discourses become so ingrained in the consciousness of mothers is through expert advice that claims to be based on scientific, objective knowledge. It may be that discourses are culturally entrenched and therefore invisible, so that members of society are not even aware that most of what they assume is real is a culturally created myth. Discourses can interrelate with one another in a manner that affects the experience of those to whom they are directed. The discourse on stress in western society posits that individuals are supposed to manage their own stress (Pollock); in addition, the mothering discourse stresses that mothers are responsible for their children’s well being (Thurer). Thus, as a consequence of the belief that stress can affect health and is harmful, mothers not only struggle to manage their own stress but also to seek ways to minimize their children’s stress. This series of expectations aggravates the burden on mothers and may lead them to feel deficient and guilty for not being able to control their environment enough to safeguard their children from the devastating effects of stress. An exploration of both discourses reveals that the stress and coping discourse bears a strong similarity to the mothering discourse and serves as a reinforcement of the embedded myths and messages.

Conclusions Modern constructions of motherhood, and also childhood, are filled with contradictions that are tied to the patriarchal, individualistic nature of western society (Baber and Allen). Some of these contradictions

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are the result of the multiple discourses by which mothers live (for example, career versus motherhood). However, the stress and coping discourse is remarkably similar to the intensive mothering discourse and serves to reinforce its myths and messages. Despite this, not all women assimilate these dominant discourses to the same extent. A mother may resist certain aspects of a discourse in order to maintain the integrity of her identity by creating opposing views (Croghan and Miell). To explore the effects mothering and stress discourses have on individual subjectivities, future research would benefit from examining the strategies women use to negotiate and resist the messages and myths embedded in these dominant discourses. Furthermore, the socio-political context of women’s lives is ignored in both the stress discourse and the mothering discourse because, for the most part, it has been reduced to women’s biological and the psychological experiences. Thus, future studies of mothers’ health and well being need to include consideration of social factors such as income, class, sexuality, and ethnicity.

References Aldwin, C.M. Stress, Coping, and Development. New York: Guilford, 1994. “Anxious Mothers Can Play a Role in Anorexia.” 1999. Retrieved February 22, 2000, from h
p://www.parentsplace.com. Baber, K.M., and K.R. Allen. Women and Families: Feminist Reconstructions, New York: Guilford, 1992. Badinter, E. Mother Love: Myth and Reality. New York: MacMillan, 1981. Bernard, J. The Future of Motherhood. New York: Dial Press, 1974. Berry, M.F. Politics of Parenthood: Childcare, Women’s Rights, and the Myth of the Good Mother. Toronto: Penguin Books, 1993. Bowlby, J. Maternal Care and Mental Health. New York: Shocken Books, 1966. Bowlby, J. A
achment. New York: Penguin Books, 1991. Brazelton, T.B. Touchpoints: Your Child’s Emotional and Behavioral Development. Don Mills, Ont.: Addison-Wesley, 1992. Contra
o, S. “Mother: Social Sculptor and Trustee of the Faith.” In the Shadow of the Past: Psychology Portrays the Sexes. Ed. M. Lewing. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. 226–55. Coontz, S. The Way We Never Were. New York: Basic Books, 1992. ____. The Way We Really Are: Coming to Terms with America’s Changing Families. New York: Basic Books, 1997.

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Croghan, R., and D. Miell. “Strategies of Resistance: Bad Mothers Dispute the Evidence.” Feminism and Psychology 8 (1998): 445–465. Donovan, D. Finding a Balance. 1999. Available online at Ivillage, h
p://www. parenting.ivillage.com/mom/time/0,,432,00.html. Foucault, M. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Writings. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980. Furnham, A. “Lay Theories of Work Stress.” Work and Stress 11.1 (1997): 68–78. Gilbert, L.A., C.K. Holahan, and L. Manning. “Coping with Conflict Between Professional and Maternal Roles.” Family Relations 30 (1981): 419–426. Gordon, T. Feminist Mothers. London: MacMillan Education, 1990. Handy, J.A. “Theoretical and Methodological Problems within Occupational Stress and Burnout Research.” Human Relations 41.5 (1988): 351–369. Hays, S. The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood. Yale University Press: New Haven, 1996. Hochschild, A. The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work. Metropolitan Books: New York, 1997. Horwitz, E. “The Experience of Mothers in Stepfather Families.” Unpublished master’s thesis. Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, B.C., Canada, 1998. Huggins, C. “Fathers’ Job Stress Can Affect Children.” 1999. [At the time of publication, this article is no longer available online. For copies of the article, please contact: Erika Horwitz, [email protected].] Karen, R. “Becoming A
ached.” The Atlantic Monthly Feb. (1990): 35–70. Langois, B. “Surefire tips for Mastering Stress.” Canadian Living Mar. (2000): 71–74. Leach, P. Your Baby and Child: From Birth to Age Five. New York: Random House, 1989. Lennon, M.C. “The Structural Contexts of Stress.” Journal of Social Behavior 30 (1989): 261–268. Lewig, K.A., and M.F. Dollard. “Social Construction of Work Stress: Australian Newsprint Media Portrayal of Stress at Work, 1997–1998.” Work and Stress 15.2 (2001): 179–190. Mishler, E.G. “The Analysis of Interview-Narratives.” Narrative Psychology: The Storied Nature of Human Conduct. Ed. T.R. Sarbin. New York: Praeger, 1986. 233–55. Newton, T. Managing Stress, Emotion, and Power at Work. London: Sage, 1995. Parker, J.D., M.D. Finkel, and L.C. Indice. “Stress and Illness: The Structure of a Belief System.” Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science 25.2 (1993): 193–204. Pearlin, L.I. “The Sociological Study of Stress.” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 30 (1989): 241–256.

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Peterson, G. “Back to School Anxiety: Strategies to Help You Cope.” 1999. Available online at Ask Dr. Gayle, h
p://www.askgayle.com/qa222.htm. Plumbo, P. “Can Work Stress Affect Baby?” 1999. Available online at Ivillage, h
p://www.ivillage/com/newborn/topics/0,,4rn6,00.html. Polasky, L.J., and C.K. Holahan. “Maternal Self-discrepancies, Inter-role Conflict, and Negative Affect Among Married Professional Women with Children.” Journal of Family Psychology 12.3 (1998): 388–401. Pollock, K. “On the Nature of Social Stress: Production of a Modern Mythology.” Social Science Medicine 26.3 (1988): 381–392. Ratner, C. “Concretizing the Concept of Social Distress.” Journal of Social Distress and the Homeless 1.1. (1991): 7–22. Reaney, P. “Anxious Mothers Can Play a Role in Anorexia.” 1999. Available online at CYCNET, h
p://www.cyc-net.org/newsdesk-006207-m.html. Reifman, A., M. Biernat, and E. Lang. “Stress, Social Support, and Health in Married Professional Women with Small Children.” Psychology of Women Quarterly 15 (1991): 431–445. Rice, J.K. “Reconsidering Research on Divorce, Family Cycle, and the Meaning of Family.” Psychology of Women Quarterly 18 (1994): 559–584. Scott, J.W. “Deconstructing Equality-versus-Difference: Or, the Uses of Poststructuralist Theory for Feminism.” Conflicts in Feminism. Eds. M. Hirsch and E.F. Keller. New York: Routledge, 1990. 134–148. Sho
er, J. Conversational Realities: Constructing Life Through Language. London: Sage, 1993. Smalley, B. “All-Day Stress Relief.” Woman’s World 7 March (2000): 22. Somer, E. How does my diet measure up stress-wise? 1999. Available online at Allhealth, h
p://www.allhealth.com/quizn.draw/o,4/28,6540_18041,00. html. Spock, B., and M.B. Rothanberg. Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care. New York: Penguin Books, 1992. Stress and Your Emotions.” 1999. [At the time of publication, this article is no longer available online. For copies of the article, please contact: Erika Horwitz, [email protected].] “The Positive Side of Stress.” 1999. Available online at Ivillage, h
p://www. ivillage.co.uk/workcareer/survive/stress/articles/0,,272_156491,00.html. Thurer, S. L. The Myths of Motherhood: How Culture Reinvents the Good Mother. New York: Penguin Books, 1994. Umansky, D. “Escape from the Worry Trap.” Good Housekeeping 230.3 (2000): 148–150. Van Manen, M. Researching Lived Experience: Human Science for an Action Sensitive Pedagogy. London, Ont.: Althouse Press, 1994.

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Weingarten, K. “Radical Listening: Challenging Cultural Beliefs for and about Mothers.” Cultural Resistance: Challenging Beliefs about Men, Women, and Therapy. Ed. K. Weingarten. New York: Haworth Press, 1995. 7–23. Wheeler, B.C. “Lower Your Stress, Relieve Your Kids Allergies.” 1999. [At the time of publication, this article is no longer available online. For copies of the article, please contact: Erika Horwitz, [email protected].] Wortman, C.B., and R.C. Silver. “The Myths of Coping with Loss.” Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 57 (1989): 349–357.

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CHAPTER SEVEN

A LESSER WOMAN? FICTIONAL REPRESENTATIONS

OF THE

CHILDLESS WOMAN

Enza Gandolfo

I

n 1999, aer reading Susan Johnson’s A Be
er Woman, a memoir of her experience of childbirth and motherhood—a poetic and brave book—I went to a talk Johnson gave in a local bookshop. As it turned out, the all-female audience was predominantly made up of women who were mothers. The women, admirers of Johnson’s book, shared their appreciation of her willingness to tell her story, one of the hidden, never-told stories of motherhood, in which, they said, they could find themselves. In the midst of this discussion a number of women vented their anger against a reviewer who had called A Be
er Woman “self indulgent.” “She wouldn’t understand, she’s childless,” one of the women called out. Oblivious, or indifferent, to the fact that childless women may be si
ing among them, the women joined in a tirade not only against the reviewer but also against all those “selfish and bi
er childless women,” who “can never understand what it’s like to be a mother.” Silenced by the fever of their antagonism, I did not declare myself. Though I longed to stand up and speak in defence of childless women, it seemed impossible to argue with their key premise that a woman without a child could never understand what it was like to be a mother. Discovering myself as the other among this group of women did not surprise me. Most of them were middle-class women of Englishspeaking background; as a woman of non-English-speaking and working-class background, I had oen felt the outsider. However, I found this division between them, as women with children, and myself, as a woman without children, disturbing. I spent several years in my thirties struggling with my inability to bear a child. When I finally

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decided to stop fertility treatments and to accept that I would never have children, I started to question what being childless meant for me. I read novels, autobiographies, and studies of childlessness, searching for the voices of other women without children. And I wrote to explore, examine, and imagine the lives of women who were not, and never would be, mothers. My approach in this chapter is what Rosa Braidotti calls “transdisciplinary” and “nomadic” (Braido
i 1997 76). The first stage begins as I set my own experience in the context of other childless women’s experiences. It winds through sociology, psychology, cultural studies, and feminist theory to explore what it means to be a childless woman in a society where, as Adrienne Rich argued in 1976 and as continues to be true today, “a woman’s status as childbearer [is] the test of her womanhood … motherhood [is] the enforced identity for woman” (Rich 26). Then, the second stage is across a footbridge into literary studies where the journey will venture into fictional territory to focus on the representation of the childless woman in three Australian novels— Eleanor Dark’s Prelude to Christopher, Patrick White’s The Aunt’s Story, and Elizabeth Jolley’s The Sugar Mother—and the relationship between these representations and the discourses surrounding childlessness. The third stage—I think of it as reaching base camp—focuses on my own writing. My novel, Swimming, is not the final expedition, even though this chapter closes with an extract from it. As a childless woman who is also a feminist and a writer, my intention is to make visible my experience of being childless so that the stereotypical perceptions of childlessness are exposed and disrupted. Maternal desire and longing is generally believed to be innate and natural, even though many feminists (and others) have argued that what we consider to be “naturally” female (or male) is in fact socially constructed. It is not surprising then that the involuntarily childless—the infertile women—incur pity, while the voluntarily childless—those women who have chosen not to become mothers—are oen viewed as selfish, and are faced with having to defend their “aberrant” choice (Letherby 719). What are the consequences for each woman of remaining childless? “Who are we as we reach middle age?” asks Laurie Lisle in her book Without Child. “No longer maidens, but not yet matrons or matriarchs either, we are something else yet to be named” (Lisle 223). And we remain unnamed, for there is no noun in the English language to

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describe the woman who never has children: “Within language, women [continue to] exist in the category ‘not men’ and then are produced as wives, mothers, lovers, daughters and sisters rather than subjects in their own right” (Schaffer 10). In this chapter, I have chosen to use the adjective childless rather than child-free or non-mother. But all three terms are problematic. Childfree implies a desire to be rid of children and non-mother perpetuates the articulation of womanhood with motherhood and implies a failure to become. I have chosen to use childless because of its common usage in the literature and among women without children, but it is a term weighed down by implications of lack, and it too illustrates the negative nature of the discourses surrounding childlessness. In this chapter I have italicized childless to highlight the constructed nature of that discourse, and to problematize its use to “define” women without children. Over the past 30 years, an increasing (though nowhere near comprehensive) feminist scholarship has developed on mothering, on the discourses of mothering, and involving critiques of the institution of motherhood. Yet feminists have only recently begun to examine the meaning of childlessness in women’s lives. As the feminist Ann Snitow observes: From the beginning, feminists set out to break two taboos: The taboo on describing the complex and mixed experiences of actual mothers and the taboo on the celebration of a childfree life … [but] feminists were be
er able in the long run to a
end to mothers’ voices than they were able to imagine a full and deeply meaningful life without motherhood, without children. (Snitow 145)

The documentation of the experience of childlessness is generally confined to psychology, sociology, oral history, and autobiography. These are personal reflections, case studies, or evidence of what has been and continues to be perceived as the problem of being “other” (Marshall; Sandelowski; Hampson; Peacock; Burke
). Current research on childlessness contends that the childless woman is seen and oen sees herself as “not a whole person” (Ireland 18). The woman who does not have children is believed to be abnormal; she is the damaged woman—infertile, barren, and childless. Even when a childless woman is envied her freedom, it is understood to be at the cost of the most intimate and crucial of human relationships. The childless woman is the other of the other, doubly lacking first as a woman (not

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man) and then as a non-mother (not fully woman). Carolyn Morell, a childless feminist social worker, provides a summary of the negative views towards the childless in what she has identified as the “three dubious discourses” about childless women: “Discourses of derogation: (these women are morally flawed) … discourses of regret (the only future for the childless) … discourses of compensation (not-mothers’ activities and a
achments are simply efforts to make up for the absence of children)” (Morell 76). Despite these negative discourses and the fact that the “motherhood mandate” remains firmly in place, an increasing number of women are remaining childless. In Australia, as in many other developed countries, the birth rate is at its lowest level ever (Gray). The mere existence of an increasing number of childless women offers an opportunity to challenge the discourses that perpetuate the essentialist notion that “woman = mother = womb” (Huffer 10), discourses that are oppressive for all women, whether they have children or not. With this in mind, I head across the footbridge into the territory of fiction, into the realm of the imaginative, in search of childless women whose lives are not the negative opposite of mothering—in search of narratives that challenge those “dubious discourses of childlessness” (Morell 76). There are very few Australian novels directly exploring childlessness. Of the three novels that I have chosen, childlessness is a central theme only in Elizabeth Jolley’s The Sugar Mother. However, all three novels are concerned to some degree with the consequences for women of not following what Judith Wilt, in Abortion, Choice and Contemporary Fiction: The Armageddon of the Maternal Instinct, calls the “sunny narratives”: courtship and marriage leading to motherhood. Eleanor Dark’s Prelude to Christopher is set in Australia in the 1930s, within a small rural community that views motherhood as a woman’s only role, and in some ways her only worth. Nigel, the main protagonist, is a doctor commi
ed to the principles of eugenics as a way of improving social conditions. He is married to Linda. Linda wants to have children but Nigel decides that they will not, because of a strain of madness he fears runs in Linda’s family. Although initially Linda agrees, she soon realizes how important having a child is to her and she appeals to Nigel: “You haven’t the right to deprive me of any hold I have on—on normality. If I were climbing a cliff, you wouldn’t knock away my footholds” (91). Linda’s maternity is the novel’s narrative crisis (Moore 349). For Linda, not having children makes her less of a woman:

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“To be born a woman with a woman’s urge for creation—and to have nothing to give to life but sterility and death! You saw yourself before some fantastic judgement-seat, following women who had lived long and fruitfully … you saw yourself a figure of fun with your angular barren body.” (Dark 181)

Our sympathies are with Linda—she takes over the story as soon as she enters it—but she cannot survive in the world she lives in, and when she commits suicide, we are not surprised. Nigel denies Linda maternity because he considers her a dangerous and difficult woman, but we know there is nothing abnormal about Linda. Even though in the end it seems it is the actual denial of maternity that leads Linda to end her life, that finally drives her “mad,” we suspect that having children would not have made Linda any less difficult or curbed her husband’s desire to control her life. Patrick White’s The Aunt’s Story is the story of Theodora Goodman’s life. She is born in the late 1800s on the family station, where she lives until aer her mother’s death. In her fiies, finally free, she sets off on a journey to Europe and America that is really a search for self. Like many of the childless women in novels of the time, Theodora is a spinster. Of course even then single women had children, but we realize early on that this is not going to be Theodora’s fate. While still a child at school one of her spinster teachers says, “Probably you will never marry. We are not that kind.… You will grow up probably ugly, and walk through life in sensible shoes. Because you are honest and because you are barren, you will be both honoured and despised” (63). Theodora has at least two opportunities to form relationships that might have resulted in marriage and children, but each time she destroys that possibility by her actions; marriage and maternity would only come to Theodora if she were able to transform herself into someone else. Theodora, like Eleanor Dark’s Linda, is a strong and intelligent woman. Theodora like Linda is more masculine than feminine; she does not know how to behave as a “normal” woman. Like Linda, she joins others in her disdain of herself: “this thing a spinster,” she says, “which at best, becomes that institution an aunt” (12). As an aunt she has some identity, as a spinster she has none. In the second section of the novel, set in Europe, Theodora meets an array of characters, most of them imaginary, with whom she can live a more exotic and erotic life. Through her relationship with these people, she is finally able to start accepting herself and her past. The

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third part of the novel, set in America, begins with this epigraph from Olive Schreiner: “When your life is most real, to me you are mad.” Is Theodora mad? In the closing chapter of the novel Theodora takes refuge in an empty house and the ghost Holstuis appears to her and says, “They will come for you soon.” He tells her, They will give you warm drinks, simple, nourishing food, and encourage you to relax in a white room and tell your life. Of course you will submit. It is part of the deference one pays to those who prescribe the reasonable life. (283)

Theodora is not able to prescribe to this “reasonable life” and so must accept their assessment that she is mad. There is no room in the world for Theodora, just as there was no room for Linda. In the end she is taken to the asylum; coming to accept herself means accepting she doesn’t fit in—accepting that she will never fit in: Theodora Goodman took her hat and put it on her head as it was suggested she should do. Her face was long and yellow under her great black hat. The hat sat straight, but the doubtful rose trembled and gli
ered, leading a life of its own. (287)

In these two novels the childless women are struggling with the limitations placed on them as women in a patriarchal society. Both are denied motherhood because they are unable to conform, to behave like “normal” women. And these writers, like early writers writing about motherhood—for example, Emily Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell— cannot see a way out for their women