Lessons Learnt

This chapter looks back on the process of becoming a mother, as women come to understand the visions they had — of motherhood as a bed of roses, of birth as agony or ecstasy, of pregnancy as a flowering or a burden. After the event these images are brought sharply into focus by the contrast medium of reality, which exposes the outline of what was, too often, a romantic dream. More than a third of the women interviewed for this study said they found becoming a mother a difficult experience. Eight out of ten said it had been different from what they had expected. The same proportion thought the pictures of pregnancy, birth, and motherhood conveyed in antenatal literature, women's magazines, and the media in general were too romantic, painting an over-optimistic portrait of happy mothers and fathers, quiet contented babies, and neat and shining homes that bore little resemblance to the chaos, disruption, and confusion of first-time motherhood.

Remember Pregnancy is a State of Health

This chapter argues that pregnancy is a medical condition — a condition to be monitored by doctors. Between seven and eighteen visits to the general practitioner (GP), local authority, or hospital clinic were made during pregnancy by the sample women for antenatal care: the average was thirteen. Going to the doctor suggests illness, and two other features of illness are associated with pregnancy in modern industrialised society: a pregnant woman, like other ‘patients’, is allowed to give up her normal work, and is encouraged to hand over responsibility for the management of her condition to others (the medical profession). Moreover, pregnancy produces unpleasant symptoms, each of which, in other circumstances, can be a sign of illness. Even in pregnancy some of these require medication, a habit not normally associated with health.

Mothers and Medical People

This chapter discusses the mothers' encounters with health professionals, which have become a central theme in the transition to motherhood. How mothers feel about their health care has become an inseparable part of having and rearing a baby. Everybody knows that reproduction is a medical business, but not everybody feels the same way about it. The satisfactions and dissatisfactions mothers exhibit towards hospital doctors, GPs, midwives, and health visitors depend on the attitudes they have towards them. While some are happy to place themselves and their babies in medical hands, others suspect that useful advice can be given without medical training; some may argue that medical experts are only experts by virtue of their own belief in a false image.

Into a Routine

This chapter explores the process of getting used to motherhood after the first five months. Here, the achievement of producing the baby is in the past, and the present must be devoted to growing and guiding the baby towards childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. Accounts of daily routines given in this chapter reflect the different dispositions and social circumstances of mothers, but all record a sense of life being focused on the baby. Either activities are organised around the baby's needs or the baby's needs are stage-managed to make other activities possible, but in both cases the baby is dictator. In every family it is the mother who is seen and who sees herself as responsible for satisfying the baby's needs. For most women, then, the meaning of early motherhood lies in constant contact with the child.

Domestic Politics

This chapter examines fatherhood. It shows that, while biology makes fathers dispensable, society carves out particular roles for them. These roles are shaped by history and circumstance, yet in a sense the problem for every society is the same. If men are to feel involved with (or at least responsible for) their children, they must be impressed by a sense of indispensability: they must feel necessary. Our industrialised culture achieves this end via a logic of economic dependence: women and children must be supported by men. The logic is reinforced by an appeal to a set of ideas about the nature of both men and family life. A proper man fathers children, who are then visible confirmation of his sexual and social normality. A proper family is made up of a male and female parent and their children. Looked at another way, the problem for men is how to share the experience.

Learning the Language of the Child

This chapter explores the process of a new mother coming to terms with her newborn. It shows how, within the hospital, biological motherhood is achieved, but the social role of mother is only rehearsed. The chapter considers the breadth of emotions that the mother goes through as she endures the crippling sense of isolation, the challenges of being a new mother, and even the joys of motherhood. Looking after a baby twenty-four hours a day is an experience that cannot be imagined in advance, after all. Ninety-one per cent of the sample mothers in this volume said it differed from their expectations — motherhood is more exhausting, even if it is also more rewarding, than the rosy pictures in the books. Images of how people thought it would be come more sharply into focus when viewed through the lens of reality: motherhood a full-time job, a responsibility for life.

Childbirth and the ‘Position’ of Women

This chapter considers how the meaning of childbirth is interlocked with a society's attitudes towards women, arguing that it is important to appreciate the history of motherhood as it appears to us in industrialised society today, because our sort of motherhood is unique in history. What happens to women when they become mothers reflects what has already happened to them as they became women. Like childbirth, femininity and masculinity follow different cultural patterns. The industrialised world today insists on certain sex differences while having moved towards an idea of sex equality. This chapter shows how equality and difference are compatible, since equality in this ideology does not mean ‘sameness’.

The Agony and the Ecstasy

This chapter considers the experience of childbirth. It reveals that certain themes run through the accounts of birth gathered in the course of research: the problem of recognition, the clash of expectations and reality, and the question of control. But the issue of who controls birth is part of childbirth today in a more general sense. In entering hospital to give birth a woman becomes part of that great and growing debate about who is having the baby: the mother, the medical profession, the hospital, the family, and the state. In the role of patient a mother is vulnerable, but she is vulnerable twice over, for she has not only her own interests to defend but her baby's. Moreover, hospitals are made up of rules and set procedures; certain things must be done in certain ways at certain times and in certain places. Defeating the depersonalisation that results — the feeling of being a cipher, of being one amongst many machines mechanically programmed to produce a baby — becomes a massive, and often unreachable goal.

Menus

This chapter examines a major theme in the early weeks of motherhood — feeding. Indeed, for months the mother's concern for the baby tends to be focused on what, how much, and how often it eats. A baby that is feeding and growing ‘well’ is a prize for the mother's efforts — a tangible token of her love and work. Conversely, a baby who gains weight more slowly than it ‘should’, and who perhaps cries a lot and seems unsatisfied, is a sign of maternal failure. Of course such an attitude is fanned by the professional advisers of baby who take it as axiomatic that the baby's growth and happiness must depend on a mother's care. A new mother listens to these advisers, but she also listens to those who have reared babies without the benefits of professional training: mothers, mothers-in-law, sisters, and friends. And she listens to her baby, who may have ideas of its own. The chapter shows that what goes into the mouths of babies is a mix of all these ingredients, a compromise between the different messages.

Mother and Baby

This chapter considers that, in sense, a woman's relationship with her baby begins not only before birth but before conception; it has roots in her own babyhood, in the way she herself was ‘mothered’. Also important are the messages sent and received throughout childhood and adolescence that, decoded, read: women need babies, and babies need mothers. The chapter shows how myth, fantasy, and the economics of reproduction under capitalism are all jumbled up in this relationship, and which impacts it greatly. Most women by the time they achieve motherhood have, from these various sources, some idea about how mothers do (or should) feel about their babies.