Every human alive knows something about mothers. Everyone’s had one. Mothering is at the root of all our biology, male and female; it’s tangled deep in our psychic development, and all human cultures have been bound to negotiate – with different degrees of awe, anxiety, sentimentality, hostility – forms and languages around its centrality. Jacqueline Rose thinks that contemporary culture in the west has its relationship with motherhood all wrong, with disastrous consequences for mothers and for all of us.
When she quotes from a 2016 campaign in the British rightwing press against non-EU mothers giving birth in NHS hospitals, and describes the NHS demanding money from pregnant asylum seekers, she’s certainly on to something that shames our country, as did the apparent indifference of our government to the plight of unaccompanied minors held in the Calais camps. “Where are the mothers of these children?” Rose asks. A mother’s loss “is so often the hidden face … of these children’s fates” – that’s true and terrible. It shames us too when she gives figures for how many women in the UK lose their jobs every year because of pregnancy, how many pregnant women face unlawful discrimination or adverse experiences, health and safety risks at work. And of course there’s so much more to enumerate, so much stupidity and cruelty and indifference – and mothers are usually mixed up in it because they are mixed up everywhere, in everything. And because, in the west as elsewhere, society tends to be skewed against the needs and rights of women.
Is Rose convincing, though, when she argues that our problem with mothers specifically is a key to all these different wrongs, connecting and even causing them? We punish mothers, she thinks, because the figure of the mother is “held accountable for the ills of the world, the breakdown in the social fabric, the threat to welfare”. And she believes there are reasons for that – psychic reasons, if you like. We are afraid of our own weakness, in our early relation to our mothers: when “rightwing politicians” promote “iron-clad self-sufficiency”, they may actually be repressing “the echo of the baby in the nursery”, and “their own vaguely remembered years of utter dependency”. Also, don’t we all demand the impossible of our mothers, doesn’t our contemporary culture in particular insist on their perfection? We expect them to “repair the world and make it safe”; because the world is incorrigible and our mothers are bound to fail, we are always punishing them for our disappointment.
These suggestions may have some powerful explanatory value, both in personal relationships and in the dynamics of a wider culture. They are familiar enough: ambivalence over motherhood is hugely important and interesting, and it’s been a staple of 20th- and 21st-century narratives from psychoanalysis through literary fiction to soap opera. But does anyone outside the advertising industry still dwell “solely on the virtue of mothers and motherhood”, really? Mothers struggle when they don’t feel “maternal goodness welling up” inside them, not necessarily because they have been conned by false expectations of perfection, but because it really is important to try to be “good” – patient, judicious, affectionate, tolerant – when you’re responsible for a child (fathers too), and because often, being human and flawed and a needy child yourself, you will fail. This inevitability of failure seems to me not so much a crisis in contemporary motherhood as one of those psychic knots at the heart of life. You can’t cut through it, with whatever reforming zeal – though just naming the problem, and imagining it sympathetically, helps us live with it.
In terms of the understanding and support available for struggling mothers in the UK at present, there is surely progress to celebrate alongside the wrongs to deplore. Maternal and infant mortality are low compared with the rest of human history. Women used to worry that pregnancy made them too ugly for their husbands; now they wear stretchy dresses flaunting bumps. Less than 50 years ago there was no maternity leave; until the 1940s women in the civil service had to retire when they married. There’s a pervasive suggestion in this book that our contemporary culture in the west might actually be the most anti-mother yet. Yet how could one begin to quantify this, weigh one culture’s forms of motherhood against another’s?
Rose is no doubt right to take issue with something saccharine and sanitised in many contemporary representations of motherhood, and she wants us to listen more to the dark side, to what mothers “have to say – from deep within their bodies and minds”. But although there’s plenty in this book from the dark side, she doesn’t sample enough of the other stuff. Who exactly is demanding that mothers be “love and goodness incarnate”, “appease the wrongs of human history and the heart”? All of us? The west? Men? Or only “rightwing politicians”? It isn’t clear. How do these demands get expressed? The evidence needs teasing out, deep down inside the detail of our language.
The net of this argument is cast so wide and so loosely, invoking so much: single mothers and slavery and Victorian divorce law, Rachel Cusk and the Mothers of the Disappeared, Medea and Sylvia Plath and matriarchy in pre-colonial Uganda, Klein and Winnicott and Rose’s own story of adopting a baby from China. Sometimes within one paragraph the focus slides from the UK to the US, and then to contemporary western culture in general – when she says “the law needs to be changed” it’s not always clear which law, where. Her story is too totalising, its passion can feel like a free-floating indignation, drawing anything and everything up into its complaint. The sections on Simone de Beauvoir and Elena Ferrante are better because they are more focused – although I began to feel that you could have too much of Ferrante’s feminist-gothic fatalism, with its anguished attachment to the irrational.
There’s a logical difficulty with treating mothers as an oppressed minority: mothers are also punishers. They too may be neoliberals, anti-immigration, hostile to asylum seekers using maternity services in the NHS; Mrs Thatcher was a mother and so for that matter was Frau Goebbels. Mothers are participants in their culture, all mixed up with men, woven with them inextricably into the flawed fabric of our societies, as different from one another and as multifarious as fathers are. Of course it would be unequivocally an excellent thing if here in the UK we became a less patriarchal society, more oriented to the needs of mothers, listening more respectfully to their stories – though Rose doesn’t have much to say about how we might achieve that. But it wouldn’t be an end to all our problems.
• Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty, published by Faber, is the Guardian Bookshop’s book of the month. To order a copy for £8.99, saving 30% (RRP £12.99), go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
