THE IDEALISED MOTHER
Who fed me from her gentle breast
And hush'd me in her arms to rest
And on my cheek sweet kisses prest?
My Mother.
When sleep forsook my open eye,
Who was it sung sweet hushaby
And rock'd me that I should not cry?
My Mother.8
Ann Taylor Gilbert's paean to her mother in 1802 exemplified the new romantic attitude towards motherhood which Jean-Jacques Rousseau had promoted just a few decades earlier.
In his 1762 novel Emile, Rousseau extolled ‘natural' motherhood. Attacking the tradition that assigned childrearing to fathers, he instructed his readers to trust the mother's natural instincts to lavish her child with affection:But when mothers deign to nurse their own children, then will be a reform in morals... Fix your eyes on nature, follow the path traced by her... When the child draws its first breath do not confine it in tight wrappings.9
Rousseau anticipated a massive shift in the way that motherhood was to be perceived. Within every mother lay a ‘natural' instinct to care for her child though she might require some guidance in order to properly fulfil her duty. Rousseau's injunction to mothers to breast feed their children — on the grounds that wet-nursing went against the laws of nature — is credited with influencing a generation of literate women. Rousseau also insisted that the place of the mother was with her children, nurturing and educating them to become good citizens. It was a time-consuming regime, a system which could only be practised by women of the upper and middling classes who had the time and the wealth to pursue such a child-centred lifestyle. Emily Fitzgerald nee Lennox, a member of the English aristocracy, was influenced by her reading of Rousseau. Although she continued to employ a wet nurse for all of her 22 children, she did endeavour to keep some of her younger children with her by establishing her own school on the coast south of Dublin where children could pursue a programme of exercise, games and learning in a free and natural environment along the lines advocated by Rousseau.10 Middleclass women now succeeded in achieving true womanhood if they responded emotionally to their infants and bonded with them through breast-feeding and constant attendance.
Yet, the ideal of true motherhood demanded that women be constantly there for their children; it implied a commitment to domesticity and was therefore incompatible with the demands of the labour market. The new motherhood was a full-time job.By 1900, however, the ‘natural' mother could no longer be trusted to care for her child without intervention. Her ‘natural' maternal instinct was to be supplemented by education and instruction so that she might become the responsible mother. Maternity and motherhood — formerly two distinct concepts encompassing the act of giving birth and the nurturing role, respectively — had converged. ‘There have always been mothers but motherhood was invented.'11 This reconfiguration of the mothering role, from the biological to a public or social role, was formulated by pedagogues such as Pestalozzi and Froebel around 1800. For the Zurich-born Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746—1827), the bond between mother and child was the basis of social morality. In his popular novel Leonard and Gertrude published in 1781, Pestalozzi portrayed the heroine as an active mother who bore moral responsibility in the family, primarily through her religious and educative role towards her children.12 Unlike Rousseau’s depiction of the rather passive Sophie, partner to Emile, Getrude personified a maternal revolution which provided women writers with a model legitimising public participation. In 1810, the German schoolteacher and advocate of women’s education, Betty Gleim, wrote: ‘Truly, the saying that “Your child will become whatever you are” is of such immeasurable importance, that, if she really feels it and lives by it, every mother ought to tremble before the responsibility that she takes on as teacher and educator of the coming generation.’13
Rousseau had conceptualised a mother’s role as duty determined by nature; the new pedagogues and their adherents went one step further. By conceptualising motherhood as a social and moral contribution to the state they allowed for the recognition of women’s individual rights, an argument most forcefully articulated by Mary Wollstonecraft.
She reconfigured the maternal role as a responsibility which first of all demanded that women be educated and thereafter conferred rights. Wollstonecraft envisaged the ‘indispensable duty of a mother’ as the route to citizenship. If it was a woman’s task to raise and educate new citizens then she should be rewarded with the recognition of that most important responsibility: ‘Make women rational creatures and free citizens, and they will quickly become good wives and mothers.’14 For Wollstonecraft, then, motherhood was both individual fulfilment and social duty. It was a model which was appealing primarily to middle-class women from the beginning of the nineteenth century. Those women who practised the new maternalism were able to use their experience to transform both their own self-understanding and their world view.15 Both the joys and the sorrows of motherhood in the lives of upper and middle class women ‘could provide the basis for personal growth and social commitment’.16 These women extended their role into charitable work, social reform and ultimately political discourse relating to women’s education, employment and political rights. The power of this new maternal ethic was based in the fact that social motherhood was now separated from biological motherhood. All women could share in this new elevated maternal culture which was a source of strength in the public sphere.Who was the responsible mother pictured in nineteenth-century discourse? She was the mother who breast-fed her children, who listened to and acted upon the advice provided by health professionals, who abandoned traditional practices and who no longer listened to the words of old wives. Across Europe, women were bombarded by doctors, health workers and philanthropists with advice and information. These professionals presumed that women wanted to do the best for their children but were hindered by their own ignorance. Nowhere was there more of a gap between the professionals and mothers than in rural Russia where infant mortality rates were higher than anywhere else in Europe, where children were dying ‘like flies' from smallpox, malaria, diptheria, scarlatina and diarrhoea, and being crippled and blinded for life on account of ignorance and a reluctance to accept medical intervention.
Physicians believed peasant women were the key to reform. If these women could be weaned away from their dependence on witch doctors, untrained midwives and village and religious elders, and if they could be educated to discard traditional beliefs and practices such as fear of the evil eye, the practice of swaddling and resort to dummies or rags dipped in milk or pre-chewed bread, then, it was argued, the battle against needless infant death would be won. To cause the death of a child by ignorance was regarded as ‘the greatest sin a woman can commit against the law of God' according to one child care manual.17Thus, the route to the child was through the mother. In the words of one contributor to a British National Conference on Infantile Mortality in 1908: ‘it [is] assumed that the mother, as a mother, knows what is best for her child. But experience shows that the human mother, just because she is human, intelligent, and not instinctive, does not know.'18 Infant welfare activists questioned the long-standing assumption that women possessed innate maternal expertise. Motherhood ‘was proved to be a skilled job requiring a technique, which, like any other kind of technique, has to be acquired'.19 Medical professionals did dispense a lot of valuable advice. They taught women the value of breast over cow's milk, how to sterilise feeding equipment, the danger of bacterial infection from dummies, and means of preventing the spread of tuberculosis. But of course most poor women simply did not have the time or the money to carry out all of these obligations in respect of hygiene and nutrition. Working-class mothers had limited control over their environments and yet the health visitors, sanitary inspectors and (mostly) female members of sundry philanthropic organisations ‘had poor mothers coming and going, suggesting that they had powers that they actually lacked and holding them morally and sometimes legally responsible for deeds they could not do'.20 Moreover, few suggested that working-class mothers would gain any concrete public recognition for compliance.
Indeed, attempts to teach mothers to ignore neighbourly advice and superstition in favour of medical or scientific diagnosis and treatment of infant illnesses inevitably resulted in a downgrading of women's own understanding of their children as well as the damage to women's confidence in their ability to care for their babies. For the working-class woman, motherhood would always be just one part of a complicated life during which she combined domestic and household management, paid work and child care.The maternal revolution was an unequal process. Middle-class women embraced their new responsible maternal role in the private sphere of the family and, at the same time, negotiated for themselves a public voice and identity. But, a key element of this entailed advising working-class mothers of their duty to take on board the new mother-child intimacy and nurturing and hygiene standards. ‘Social mothers overrode deficient biological mothers.'21 In this way, the concept of responsible motherhood provided middle-class women with a power base. But as infant mortality rates rose across Europe during urban and industrial growth, the responsibility for infant survival was placed more heavily on working-class mothers who were treated, in the words of feminist social worker Anna Martin, as ‘the unpaid nursemaid(s) of the state'.22