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There have been a few key public moments during the research and writing of this book which serve as good illustrations of what it is all about. On a daytime chat show about teenage rebellion, a woman seeking desperately to explain the behaviour of her adoptive daughter apologized over and over again: ‘I know I’m not her real mother, but…¹ During the O. J. Simpson trial in 1995, prosecutor Marcia Clark fought simultaneous battles to win a conviction in the trial of the decade and to keep her children. Her ex-husband was trying to win custody on the grounds that she was working too hard to be a good mother. When the toddler Jamie Bulger was murdered, I recall reading that his mother had received hate-mail blaming her for looking away for an instant! After the second royal divorce, on what did the press blame the British royal family’s misfortunes? Not their own constant intrusion but on the notion that the Queen was a cold and distant mother. Then there was the firestorm of criticism that greeted the announcement of Madonna’s pregnancy. Comment on her unsuitability as a mother led to the dismissal of the child’s father as a ‘sperm donor’, followed, naturally, by speculation after the birth that the state of motherhood would change the singer, a woman who is herself the mistress of image manipulation.

The most public humiliation any mother has ever been forced to undergo was reserved for Deborah Eappen. She was the mother of Matthew Eappen, the small child whose death was at the centre of the murder trial of British au-pair Louise Woodward. For many people, from the very beginning, she was the person who was on trial and not Woodward, because she chose to work three days a week as an ophthalmologist instead of being a full-time mother, because she was married to a doctor and did not ‘need’ to work, because she left her children to be cared for by someone else. A woman grieving the loss of her child was being torn apart instead of comforted, derided instead of consoled. In the fervour of the lynch-mob mentality, little Matthew was all but forgotten as people carried placards in front of the court bearing the words ‘Don’t Blame the Nanny. Blame the Mother!’ They called television and radio phone-ins to scream how she deserved to lose her baby, and vented their hatred of her in a specially-created Internet website. People ignored the fact that Deborah Eappen came home to breastfeed at lunchtime and that she had halved her workload. People ignored the fact that Matthew had another parent who was also a doctor. It was left to Sunil Eappen to defend his wife, because she could not defend herself and because he, merely the father, was not seen to be at fault. The baby died because she wasn’t there.

A great deal has been said and written about motherhood. The only purpose of the bulk of what has already been published is to tell women how to do the job better. You could fill the Augean stables with past volumes of advice to mothers. This book purports to do none of that. I hope it will be many things to many people, mothers and non-mothers, but it is absolutely not a childcare manual.

The rhetoric of motherhood has remained unchallenged for so long that it has become woven into the fabric of our consciousness. For once let’s turn the searchlight on those who presume to tell mothers what to do; to analyse their actions, unpick their motives and judge their handiwork, just as they have done not only to mothers but to all women because they have the potential to be mothers. Once held up to the light, the agendas behind many of our assumptions and beliefs about contemporary mothering are exposed, whether their roots are in popular culture, so-called scientific findings, historically accepted fact or the legacy of tradition. First you find the flaws in what are presented as crystal-clear truths and then you see how the flaws form patterns. Finally, you begin to realize that myths have been created about motherhood and see how those myths refract through the many prisms of our culture and through time itself.

The motherhood myth is the myth of the ‘Perfect Mother’. She must be completely devoted not just to her children, but to her role. She must be the mother who understands her children, who is all-loving and, even more importantly, all-giving. She must be capable of enormous sacrifice. She must be fertile and possess maternal drives, unless she is unmarried and/or poor, in which case she will be vilified for precisely the same things. We believe that she alone is the best caretaker for her children and they require her continual and exclusive presence. She must embody all the qualities traditionally associated with femininity such as nurturing, intimacy and softness. That’s how we want her to be. That’s how we intend to make her.

The ideology which accompanies the myth of the perfect mother can only conceive of one way to mother, one style of exclusive, bonded, full-time mothering. Despite the changes in the working and family lives of millions of women, despite the talk of an age of ‘post-feminism’, attitudes towards mothers are stuck in the dark ages. Thirty years on from the start of the second wave of the feminist movement, we are still debating the effects of daycare on the children of working mothers and blaming never-married or divorced mothers for their children’s problems. This vision of idealized motherhood still permeates every aspect of life from the division of labour at home, to our employment laws, policies and legal rulings, and it drips down continually through popular culture, books, television, films and newspapers.

The ideal mother is also the ‘natural’ mother, hence the stereotype of the wicked stepmother. The maternal ideal is based on a belief in what is natural, on notions of maternal instinct. Today there is a renewed reverence for ideas about maternal instinct, which has been prompted by the fear that motherhood, one of the two pillars upholding the institution of the family alongside marriage, is being threatened. It stands to reason, then, that if maternal qualities are natural, all women must have them. The growing number of women who choose to delay or avoid motherhood altogether fascinate and alarm the myth-makers because they defy the myth. For them, new mini-myths are invented to try to co-opt them into the maternal state.

There’s a moment in the popular film When Harry Met Sally in which the main character, played by Meg Ryan, is discussing man problems with her best friend. ‘You’re thirty-one. The clock is ticking!’ warns her chum. ‘No it isn’t,’ she replies. ‘I read it doesn’t start until you’re thirty-six.’ The notion of the so-called ‘biological clock’ is a great example of contemporary mythmaking. The clock has two hands. On the one hand there’s the fact that a woman’s fertility declines over time, which is true and which is being shamelessly exploited to make women anxious about the decision when to have a child. On the other hand, there’s the notion, as expressed by the character Sally in the film, that the urge to have a child strikes all women at a particular time, without warning and independent of all intellectual thought processes, which is palpable rubbish and has no scientific basis whatsoever. Those women who say they have experienced a natural urge or need to have a child do so at different times of their lives and in different ways; plenty of women never do. Nevertheless, these two ideas are rolled into one and delivered as gospel in such a way as effectively to browbeat women (including those who may feel ambivalent about having children) into the institution of motherhood. Listen to your heart not your head, is the message.

Women’s magazines and the women’s pages of newspapers are full of it. ‘The price of delaying pregnancy is high,’² warns a writer. ‘The brood instinct is a biological time-bomb with a dicky fuse,’³ postulates another. ‘What time is it by your biological clock?’⁴ asks a third. The logic goes like this: if you are over thirty you are running out of time to have a family; you may think you don’t want one, but you are wrong; the feeling will strike but by then it may be too late! This unpleasant and exploitative mind-game is played out over and over. Meanwhile no one never hears the flip side of the coin, from the women who have children mainly because they don’t quite dare not to, because they are afraid of losing out, and of ‘missing the boat’. Or from the woman in her mid-forties who preferred to tell people she was infertile rather than explain her decision not to become a mother. Nor do you hear from women, like the television director I spoke to, who cherished her children but regretted her decision to become a mother. There’s silence on that. In the language of the myth it is important to believe that all women come from one mould, with the same biologically programmed responses.

Beliefs about motherhood are passed off as ‘traditional’ and ‘natural’, as though the two words had the same meaning; and, as both traditional and natural, these beliefs have become unassailable. Yet, as any historian will tell you, the most enduring of these ideas is not more than a few hundred years old. There have been periods in history when women appeared not to care much for their children at all, routinely sending newborns away to wet-nurses and using infanticide as a means of family planning. There have been times, specifically the early years of colonial America, when fathers and not mothers were thought to be the best people to raise children. The current maternal ideal is simply the product of a particular time and place, and at its height lasted no more than a few years from the end of the Second World War until the early 1970s. It just happens to be the version that was in place when most of the people who are now running the country were born, and comes to us washed with the sentiment of nostalgia.

Today, caring for children is still virtually an exclusively female task. It is also harder than ever before. As the quantity of available information about childcare and child development has ballooned, so motherhood has become increasingly proactive and interventionist. The job now starts at conception. The mother-to-be is expected to give up tea and coffee, alcohol, cigarettes, including passive smoking, soft cheeses and other unpasteurized foods; she must avoid stress and too much aerobic exercise and take folic acid and multivitamins – and that is the very minimum. If she consults any of the several dozen contemporary advice manuals available she will find an unending list of do’s and don’ts, some doubtless valid but many irrelevant, perhaps even the product of the ‘expert’s’ own imagination. Throughout her pregnancy the growth of her child and every aspect of her own behaviour will be closely monitored by her doctor and hospital.

Once a mother fed, clothed and comforted her offspring, and there, for better or for worse, lay the limits of her obligations. Today her responsibilities have doubled. She is also in charge of her children’s emotional stability and psychological development. In the mid-twentieth century, Freud and the psychoanalysts who followed and developed his theories – John Bowlby and D. W. Winnicott in particular, who wrote in the 1940s and 1950s – emphasized the mother’s role and her competence in a way that had never been considered before. They issued dire warnings about children who would turn into retards or psychopaths if women failed in their duties as mothers. Since those days, added to her responsibility for her child’s mental well-being, mothers have also been given the third task of driving their offspring towards intellectual and academic achievement. Successful motherhood now means producing a high achiever as well as a well-balanced adult. Bookshops today sell volumes entitled Discovering Your Child’s True Genius and toys come from the Early Learning Centre.

Mothers are besieged with information, more than they can possibly absorb. The advice is always presented as ‘best for baby’ but masks any number of other agendas – professional, political and social. Careers are not made by agreeing with the findings of the last researcher; newspapers need stories to sell; and authors must have something new to say. So modern mothers find themselves faced with a plethora of often conflicting advice. One doctor might warn her not to gain weight; another might tell her to eat for two. Childbirth choices go in and out of fashion, mirroring power struggles in the hierarchy of hospitals: natural versus interventionist; home versus hospital; midwife versus consultant. One month a mother may hear that she should bring her new baby into her bed; the next she will be chided and told she risks smothering her baby, either literally or emotionally. In an era when delinquency and the breakdown of discipline are at the forefront of social and political debate, the mother who strikes her child is condemned.

Nothing exemplifies the paradox of motherhood as a state which is both revered and reviled, natural and yet policed, more clearly than the issue of breastfeeding. Bottle-feeding is frowned upon and the pressure on mothers to breastfeed is immense, yet there are still very many people in the UK who regard the sight of a breastfeeding woman as obscene. In August 1997 a woman breastfeeding her child in a courtyard had water thrown over her by a disgusted shopkeeper. She turned out to be an Express newspaper journalist and the story, which was carried on the front page of the next day’s newspaper, prompted a national discussion. Many people, including Anne Winterton MP, supported the shopkeeper’s view that women should breastfeed out of sight, but in Britain there are extremely few public breastfeeding facilities and the combined effect of public disapproval and lack of facilities keeps breastfeeding mothers virtually homebound. In Britain the Campaign for Rights in Breastfeeding lobbies MPs to prevent women being thrown out of restaurants, shops and public places for breastfeeding their babies. In the USA harassment of women feeding their babies in public has required twelve states to pass laws clarifying a mother’s right to do so.

This contradictory response to motherhood is evidenced in other ways, too. A woman announcing her pregnancy will be offered congratulations, will find herself treated as though she has done something very special, but the display of a pregnant body inspires a degree of repulsion which is not properly explained by the suggestion that such images are merely indecorous or inappropriate. When Demi Moore appeared on the front cover of Vanity Fair and exposed the curves of her pregnant body, some newsagents insisted the magazine be sold in an opaque wrapper. In 1997, when the new women’s magazine Frank ran a fashion layout using pregnant models, the magazines’s offices were deluged with complaints. Mothers should not be seen. Neither should they be heard.

One rarely hears mothers complain, and then never in public. Their compliance is bought or ensured in three ways: by glorifying aspects of motherhood; by making women who don’t feel or do what is required feel guilty; and finally, and as a last resort, by punishing mothers considered actually deviant (for example, women who leave their children inspire a moral wrath not visited on the thousands of fathers who do the same; legal sanctions are being levied on pregnant women who refuse medical treatment or abuse their own bodies).

The best-known image of the ideal mother has been with us for centuries in the form of the Madonna and Child, the most compelling depiction of pale, calm, benevolent motherhood. Whether sculpted by Pisano in 1300 or painted by Dali in the mid-twentieth century, she is always portrayed cradling her child in her arms and gazing at him in a moment of private pleasure, or looking outwards contemplating the viewer with a smile of peace and fulfilment playing upon her lips. Although Christianity did not, on its own, invent the motherhood myth, the Church has been highly efficient at marketing the maternal ideal. Mary is held up to Catholic women everywhere as an inspirational figure. In parts of Catholic Central and South America there exists even today a kind of cult of motherhood named after her: Marianisma. Poor women sacrifice and deny themselves everything for the sake of their children, especially their sons, in the hope that they will one day repay their mother’s love and loyalty when she is old. Motherhood in this instance is capable of delivering earthly salvation.

Baby Jesus is never painted with his head thrown back and bawling. His mother never looks testy or tired. No one paints her trying to prepare Baby Jesus’s food with one hand while jiggling him on her hip with the other. Or ignoring him while he screams his lungs out in the next room. No one has ever painted Mary going about the mundane tasks of motherhood: giving Jesus a bath, feeding him or dressing him. The Madonna and Child are frozen in eternity in a moment many mothers experience with their babies relatively infrequently.

The image of the maternal idyll is presumably so appealing because it reminds both those who paint such images and those who look at them of a time when they were children and found comfort in a mother’s embrace. It isn’t really a comment on women’s experience of motherhood, although it is often read as one. The power of the image is derived from what society wants from women.

The ideal mother is everywhere in art, poetry, fiction, film. She is the dream for whom Peter Pan searches, a beautiful memory to Cinderella and Snow White whose stepmothers are cruel to them. She is there on the cover of Good Housekeeping and Family Circle, in television programmes such as Happy Days and Little House on the Prairie. In more contemporary depictions like the Cosby Show, a nod to modernity has allowed her a job. She is such an archetype you sometimes don’t even notice her, but there she is in Hollywood action movies standing behind Mel Gibson or Harrison Ford, vulnerable, warm yet wistful, part of the hero’s home and family life that he must protect. And be sure she exists by design and not by accident. In 1997, when Disney again adapted Dodie Smith’s The Hundred and One Dalmatians for the screen, writer-producer John Hughes changed Smith’s original version in which Cruella DeVil is an old school chum of the dalmatians’ owner Anita. Instead, he made her Anita’s former boss and owner of a fashion design company, unmarried and childless, whose motive for wanting to kill the puppies is her fury at being deserted by Anita, who gives up her job when she becomes a mother. In the first version of the tale it was Snow White’s natural mother who was her adversary.

Mothers are stereotyped and so are women who choose not to become mothers. In 1995, researchers ascertained the attitudes of a group of college students towards motherhood.⁵ They showed that married mothers who stayed at home were seen in a positive even sentimental light, but stepmothers were held in poor regard, divorced mothers were viewed as failures, and single mothers as deviants and losers. Traditional mothers were even thought to be nicer people. Our beliefs about motherhood are pervasive and powerful. Whether Snow White and Cinderella helped to create the myth or simply perpetuated it, they illustrate its appeal. Marketing men use it to sell feel-good movies, baked goods and cold remedies. Today the same idealized image is even being used to sell motherhood itself, as a multi-million-pound market in reproductive technology flourishes using glossy brochures containing colour pictures of mothers and their babies to sell infertility treatment to childless couples.

In the 1960s feminists rejected an overly romantic vision of motherhood and identified its silken cords of oppression. Before the changes wrought in the 1960s only one line of promotion was available in the lives of most women: from perfect bride to perfect wife to perfect mother. An oversight on the part of the feminist movement as a whole has been to ignore motherhood from that point on, believing that if all the available political energy was devoted to increasing women’s career choices and achieving economic independence, motherhood would somehow take care of itself. At the same time, another school of popular feminism actually bolstered myths about motherhood by arguing women’s moral and social superiority in relation to men and laying claim on behalf of womanhood to qualities such as creativity and emotional sensitivity.

Even the so-called ‘power feminists’, such as Naomi Wolf, author of Fire with Fire, argue that there is nothing stopping women today except their own victim mentality. In her analysis Wolf overlooked motherhood, the one area of women’s lives feminism has barely acknowledged. The dated, unchanged, narrow institution of motherhood which obliges women to mother in a certain way is the Achilles’ heel of modern feminism. Despite Wolf’s exhortations to think positively, no woman manager can compete with her male colleagues on fair terms if she is also a mother. Yet the word ‘motherhood’ does not even appear in the index to Wolf’s book, and in the page and a half of text given to the subject the author merely repeats the old feminist adage that biology is not destiny. End of story. In fact, the story of how feminism must tackle the issues surrounding motherhood is only just beginning.

It is unrealistic to suppose that the majority of women will stop having children. Many women talk, in convincing terms, of a strong, biological impulse which produces the desire to have children; others simply love children and wish to raise them; others still value family and the links created through the generations by blood ties. This vital and valuable commitment to children nevertheless means that today, while the perfect bride is no more than a one-day fantasy and the perfect wife has been consigned to the waste disposal, the perfect mother as an instrument through which women’s actions and choices can be controlled and manipulated has survived, because while men can be left to look after themselves, children cannot. And while a woman might rightly walk out on an aggressive, incompetent or uncaring man, few women would wish to forsake their children.

Working alongside the idealized depiction of motherhood is the second tool of enforcement: guilt. Guilt has become so strongly associated with motherhood that it is often considered to be a natural emotion. It is not. Guilt is not a biological, hormonally-driven response. Women feel guilty because they are made to. Mothers are told that every failure, every neglected task, every dereliction of their growing duties, every refusal to sacrifice will be seared upon their child’s psyche, will mar his or her future, and damage not only the mother-child relationship but every subsequent relationship in the child’s life. That is, if the mother who is found to be wanting doesn’t create a juvenile delinquent or a fully-fledged criminal.

A culture of mother-blaming, by everyone including children, has become so deeply entrenched in our society that bad mothering is considered to be a contributory cause in an astonishing array of contemporary problems. In America, when the Unabomber was arrested, a leading news magazine hypothesized that the rage which had caused him to wage a twenty-year bombing campaign might have been provoked by an early episode when his mother left him. The desecration of inner-city communities is laid at the door of single mothers instead of economic policies or even absent fathers. A psychologist assessing a child’s bed-wetting, or a teenager’s use of recreational drugs, will often look first to the mother – does she work, how much time does she spend at home? Maternal guilt can be elicited directly in newspaper headlines (‘What kind of mother are you?’) or indirectly, as in the advert for a company selling home-office products: ‘When I finally got home, John was waiting.⁶ Half asleep he asked the question he’d been saving all day: Mom, can we play now?’ In 1997 the BBC programme Panorama produced new ‘evidence’ showing how children fared badly when their mothers worked.⁷ All this time, the responsibility of fathers has gone unquestioned.

In the 1990s the accumulated result of the hailstorm of advice and threats is a hyperconsciousness about mothering, particularly among middle-class women, many of whom work and have children in their thirties. The current pressures on mothers mean that such women embark on motherhood with guilt built in from the start, and they approach the role with an enormous degree of anxiety, determined to do it right, determined not to be criticized. A lack of support from the wider polity means they are like trapeze artists, flying without a safety net, unable to afford the luxury of a single mistake. They become control freaks. Everything is sublimated to the needs and wishes of the child. There is a rigidity about the running of the household, which has become totally child-centred: the telephone is switched off during afternoon naps; bedtimes, bathtimes and mealtimes take precedence even over the appearance of visitors, and certainly over entertainment and other social events; there’s a baby intercom in every room and a planner on the kitchen wall with every activity from ‘Water Babies’ to music play carefully timetabled. Because the buck stops with her, the mother sees herself as absolutely indispensable and no one else, except perhaps a carefully-vetted nanny, is entirely trusted to take care of her child. To non-mothers she appears ridiculous, but she is driven by guilt and fear, and cannot see how excessive her own actions are. In this lie the makings of a tragedy.

On the flip side of the coin are those mothers society views as so wicked and unnatural that they have to be forced into taking responsibility. The rhyme about the little girl who had a little curl could just as well have been written for mothers, certainly in terms of the way they are seen by society. ‘When she was good she was very, very good and when she was bad she was horrid.’ In America women are being prosecuted and imprisoned for taking illegal drugs while they are pregnant; forced into having caesarean sections against their wishes; or hospitalized by court order for failing to follow a doctor’s orders. The notion of ‘foetal rights’, which underlies many of these convictions, is burgeoning and is rapidly being exported to the UK. In contrast to the over-anxious mother who is generally white and middle-class, these ‘unnatural’ mothers are usually poor. In Britain women are being charged and imprisoned for leaving their children at home alone. For those women who deliberately harm their children, society reserves a strength of hatred unequalled for any male killer.

Women, because of their ability to bear children and also because society assigns them the task of raising children, have a set of uniquely different responsibilities and therefore liabilities. For some women, who might find themselves accidentally pregnant, these responsibilities are not even asked for. There is a complicated set of moral and legal issues to be answered over how far a woman can be held accountable for what she does to her own body which also affects an unborn child. These are questions which are presently being dealt with through the entirely inappropriate medium of the criminal courts.

Recent events amount to nothing less than a legally sanctioned witch-hunt against mothers, an extraordinary vilification of women as mothers unparalleled at any time in history. It is no coincidence that such events, representing the extreme tip of a general contemporary culture of victimizing mothers, are taking place at this time. Society has always turned its critical eye upon mothers at key moments: in the nineteenth century during the Industrial Revolution, when women’s role as home-maker was born, and after the Second World War when women had to be encouraged back into domesticity to give men their factory jobs back. And so it is now. The prosecutions mentioned above come in an era of perceived instability and uncertainty, during which the placebo of family values has been placed at the top of the political and social agenda by politicians and lawmakers under pressure to provide solutions. Mothers in general, and mothers who are actually or perceived to be deviant in particular, are taking the brunt of our fear and despair over a collective failure towards the next generation. All this mother-blaming is a displacement activity for all the problems we can do nothing about, from corporation downsizing, to urban decay, to the emergence of new world economic powers which disrupt domestic economies and employment patterns.

Women are criticized for abandoning their traditional duties, while the truth is that women today carry a greater part of the burden of caring for children than ever before, with no corresponding policy changes to support them. Our urban, post-industrial lifestyles have removed grandchildren from the proximity of their grandparents, nieces and nephews from their uncles and aunts and cousins from each other. Divorce – 40 per cent of marriages – has frighteningly eroded the role of fathers in the lives of their children. In England and Wales alone in 1994, 164,834 children saw their parents divorce.⁸ The mother-centric philosophy of the motherhood myth has contributed to the growth in numbers of single mothers. Many children start off in life without any kind of paternal commitment at all.

What do women get instead of real solutions to coping with the dual role? Companies which market pagers so that children can reach their working mothers in an emergency, and surveillance specialists who offer to film the babysitter secretly to check whether she is abusing your child. ‘A woman’s place is in the house’, asserts an advertisement for Knorr stock cubes, which depicts a female MP rushing home to cook for her children. Women continue to be responsible for the domestic sphere. The child has merely substituted the husband as the person for whom she must continue to carry out those tasks. The work is the same, but now women do that work as mothers not as wives.

Nothing provokes the fear that motherhood, as we know it, is under threat more than the new reproductive technologies that have made mothers of older women, lesbians, even virgins. Such births, because they appear neither ‘natural’ nor ‘traditional’, are a blatant challenge to an accepted view of what motherhood should be. The policy-makers’ answer, which is to try to limit these women’s access to the science, says it all. Technology has dramatically challenged the most basic assumptions around mothering. Take the simple verbs ‘to mother’ and ‘to father’. How they are defined reveals an abundance of meaning. ‘To father’ just means to beget, an act of procreation; but ‘to mother’ means to nurture, to rear, to feed, to soothe and to protect. Today, techniques enabling human egg retrieval and donation mean that women, just like men, can be the biological parents of children they never see and to whom they do not give birth.

At the same time, growing numbers of women are rejecting motherhood altogether. Women individually now have fewer children and fertility levels are at an all-time low; women leave starting a family until as late as possible, often into their thirties; and many have opted not to have children at all. A 1993 survey published in the British Medical Journal stated that 12 per cent of a group of women now in their forties had remained childless.⁹ An OPCS survey put the figure of 20 per cent on women who are young now and will elect not to become mothers, compared to 1 per cent in 1976.¹⁰

Much has been read into such statistics by parties with a stake in the debate. Some feminists greet them with delight; other people are sceptical and smugly assert that young women who say they don’t want children will almost certainly change their minds; still others argue that these women are not childless out of choice but because they can’t find a suitable partner or have trouble conceiving. I say there’s a modicum of truth in all these points. After many conversations with mothers and non-mothers, I have found that most women are not rejecting babies as such (although some certainly are), they are repudiating motherhood as an institution and much of what goes with it. I have spoken to many women who, in conversation, will state that they don’t like children; but what they then go on to talk about in detail is in fact motherhood, the changes to their lives. the sacrifices, the compromises. They don’t talk about children. Essentially, some of these women may want children but not that much, and that in itself contradicts many popularly-held assumptions about women and biology. ‘In pain thou shalt bring forth children,’ says the Bible. Motherhood is supposed to be its own reward. Our society has always imagined that it could ask any sacrifice, be as exacting, as demanding and as controlling of mothers as it wished because women’s hormonal impetus would impel them towards motherhood despite themselves. Not so, it would seem.

Perhaps this very blatant threat to fundamental assumptions about women’s character is what has fuelled the growing interest in socio-biology, and the opportunity it offers to reassert what are considered traditional mores, as well as removing the obligation to reform something once it has been deemed ‘natural’ and inevitable. In the 1990s, ideas based on Social Darwinism have found a ready audience among intellectuals and the general public alike as an explanation of why, for example, poor people are poor. It is because, so the theory of ‘survival of the fittest’ goes, the cream of society rises to the top leaving the less able at the bottom. The poor are not adaptive, talented or motivated, that is why they are poor. It is nobody’s fault and no amount of welfare or educational programmes will help because this state of affairs is natural and unavoidable – quod erat demonstrandum the continued existence of the poor despite fifty years of welfare. The poor will be with us always.

Much the same ideas have frequently been applied to the debate around motherhood. Today, finally freed from the overpowering constraints of a decade or so of political correctness, or so advocates of the science would have us believe, notions that women’s role and behaviour are biologically derived are now being discussed as the obvious truths they are. Observations on motherhood based on the behaviour of goats or rats, plus a burgeoning fashion in the new science of genetics, are reaffirming old ideas about the naturalness of motherhood.

Ideas about ‘maternal instinct’ have resurfaced with a new vigour. While most scientists will give a cautious nod to the notion that some form of instinct is at work within all of us, few would venture to try to describe precisely how instincts manifest themselves in behaviour in any predictable way. The real question is, why is it so important to label these feelings instinctual? A clue to the agenda that lies behind the enthusiasm for notions of ‘instinct’ is evidenced by the delight and satisfaction which greet the news that a woman previously considered a ‘career woman’ (particularly a high-profile woman) has given up her job to have children. The departure of Penny Hughes from a high-profile job at Coca-Cola, and the stories it sparked, is one example I deal with in a later chapter. Such a woman is perceived as having bowed to the inevitable, given way to nature and fulfilled her true destiny. In short, women are made to be mothers not managers and here is the proof.

The facts are that a great many policy decisions rest on our accepted views of motherhood. The new determinism offers a neat solution to complicated policy issues relating to the family and women’s position within and outside of it and the flexibility of the workplace. If it is accepted that women are biologically programmed for motherhood, some would argue, many things follow. Social commentator and columnist Melanie Phillips, for example, has argued that the biological differences between men and women mean that men should have first call on jobs. In The End of Order, Professor Francis Fukuyama argues that women’s entry into the workplace (and dereliction of the duties of good motherhood) is responsible for the breakdown of the social fabric. For both Phillips and Fukuyama, motherhood means stay-at-home motherhood.

Where the fundamentalists’ view of maternal instinct as a single, compelling force really goes askew is in relation to mothering styles. What is ‘natural’ is almost always presumed to be a 1950s model of motherhood. To back up this scenario, which supporters trace back to a time when males went out to hunt while females nested, advocates turn to the natural world, picking and choosing from what nature has to offer in order to advance their arguments. They ignore lionesses, hunters for their entire pride, who skilfully combine work and motherhood while the lion babysits. They also ignore the matriarchal hyena who, as dominant female, banishes males from the pack and is succeeded by her daughter. Nor do they consider the many species of birds who parent together as male and female and whose mating and pairing rituals biologists often compare to those of humans. There is also an assumption that everything that comes from nature is necessarily good. Anyone who has ever witnessed the sight of a caged rabbit eating her newborn might beg to differ.

It can be argued much more convincingly that women, like the caged rabbit, are not supposed to rear their children alone in their homes; nothing could be more unnatural than the mother alone in the highrise block or the suburban home with her children. You could say that, like lions and cheetahs, it is a natural function of motherhood to go out into the world to provide for offspring. Or, if you take the view that in prehistoric times men were hunters and women were gatherers, you might think, in that respect, that women’s skills are better suited to the modern world of work, with its emphasis on communication, information, negotiation and research, than are men who excel at mammoth-hunting or tribal fights.

There is another school of scholarship quietly growing, away from the spotlight. Psychologists such as Susie Orbach, Ann Dally and Diane Eyer argue that ‘traditional’ ideas about motherhood are neither natural nor helpful to children or women. Indeed, the narrow, exclusive mothering style can even be harmful. Eyer and Dally argue that the relationship between mothers and their children has palpably failed to thrive in the artificially claustrophobic world of the private, nuclear family. Nor are children or women helped that such an immensely important task as childrearing (which today requires almost superhuman capabilities) is placed principally on the shoulders of just one person. No one person can do it all; no one person was ever meant to.

Think about how obsessed we are with our mothers. They have the capacity to disappoint us, anger us, frustrate us and burden us in a way no one else does. The entire discipline of psychoanalysis was built on the back of the mother-child relationship. Today, people enter analysis, seek therapy and attend re-parenting classes because of their relationship with their mothers. In sitcoms, relationships with mothers are a source of humour. In Mad About You Jamie develops a facial tic every time her mother visits; Roseanne cannot abide her mother; the humour in Absolutely Fabulous wittily confounds mother stereotypes. There are innumerable books, films and plays containing the same theme: Psycho, Postcards from the Edge, the Debbie Reynolds satire Mother (which, despite a sympathetic portrayal of the mother figure, nevertheless confirms its own thesis that she is to blame for her son’s problems). During the writing of this book I asked a group of friends gathered at my home one evening how many of them had problems with their mothers. Everyone raised a hand. Every single one! One claimed his mother was too domineering; another was angry at his mother spending so much time at work; a third felt her mother favoured her elder sister and the lack of encouragement she received was the reason why her career was stagnant; a fourth rejected the imposition of his mother’s values; and a fifth felt that now she was an adult, her mother had forgotten her. For a group of normal, intelligent, functioning people to have so many grievances towards their mothers is not at all natural, nor is it desirable, however common it may have become.

Motherhood is in crisis because it has been set into conflict with itself. The legacy of past modes of thinking has been to emphasize the primacy of mothers to the exclusion of everyone else. Women are primarily responsible for children in 96 per cent of families.¹¹ Most of them also work, yet after three decades of female emancipation, work and motherhood have still not been reconciled. Women make up half the workforce and therefore half the taxpaying citizens of the country, but to date there are absolutely no serious political proposals on the table to provide universal, affordable childcare. In a straightforward cost/benefit analysis it is no surprise that women, whether or not they decide to become mothers, feel a growing ambivalence about entering an institution so full of evident hazards and somewhat vague rewards.

Fifteen years ago we imagined that new family structures and an acceptance of women’s work meant that fathers would step into the light after years in the background. That has spectacularly failed to happen on any significant scale, though is it any surprise within a culture which mythologizes motherhood and condemns fathers to be eternally and irrevocably seen as second-best?

In every society there is a tendency to assume that there is only one way to look after children, and that is the way it is done in that culture. Anthropologists and sociologists, however, have demonstrated that motherhood is a social and cultural construct which decides how children are raised and who is responsible for raising them. There are places in this world where motherhood has been differently forged; where a mother is not alone in her responsibility to her child and no one would expect her to be so; where men are far more involved in the lives of their children; where there is no conflict for women between having children and going to work; and where mothers are not made to feel guilty for the personal choices they make.

So far, feminist attempts to deconstruct the myths around motherhood – from the historical perspective (Elizabeth Badinter, Shari Thurer); from the psychoanalytic perspective (Nancy Chodorow, Dorothy Dinnerstein); from the journalistic perspective (Jane Bartlett, Will You be Mother?, Melissa Benn, Madonna and Child) – have concentrated exclusively on Western women as mothers and the Western concept of motherhood. They have omitted, or chosen not to look at, the experience of women who are mothers in other cultures where a different ideology may be in place or where there is no constraining ideology at all. They have largely ignored women who belong to ‘minority’ cultures in the West for whom the dominant ideology has little relevance.

In the West we often dismiss the experience of other cultures, particularly those seen as ‘less developed’ than our own. Or we tend to the romantic, ascribing to other people a simple wisdom which is in its way greater than our own because it is free from modern technological clutter. When it comes to motherhood, there are lessons to be learned from looking at others and the first and most vital is that there are many different ways to mother. Motherhood is fashioned by culture, it can be adaptive and it can be flexible. Not until we understand and accept that will we be able to liberate ourselves from a collective tunnel vision which prevents us from looking beyond the boundaries of our mythologized version of motherhood to realities and new solutions.

In the 1970s as a child I was raised in two different cultures by two women. The first, my own mother’s culture, was British. My other home was in Sierra Leone in West Africa with my African father and his second wife, my other mother. I spent my childhood between two homes until I grew up, went to university in London and made that city my home.

In Sierra Leone as a child, growing up with my brother and sister, I was loved by many people, who also had the authority to guide me, discipline me or advise me. As children we had many ‘mothers’ and many ‘fathers’. We also had many ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’, as sharing the physical care of other people’s children is common. Before taking on my siblings and myself, my African mother had already raised her young half-sister and to this day continues to share her home with the children of friends and relations. She has been mother to many. There, it mattered less whom we ‘belonged to’ biologically, because children belong to everyone. In contrast, within my Western family, everything. whether practical or emotional, rested on my mother. As an adult visiting West Africa, one is barely aware of the idealized image of motherhood so prevalent in the West.

So this book is written both from the perspective of an inquiring journalist and as the fortunate beneficiary of two kinds of mothering. In both these capacities and as a non-mother, throughout the process mothers have used me as a confessional, an objective sounding-board for their fears and perceived inadequacies. Indeed, while some people (mostly men) imagined it must be hard to write a book without being a mother myself, it would be a very hard book to write as a mother. The fear of criticism silences many women, as Adrienne Rich acknowledged when she wrote Of Woman Born. Certainly, this was the dread of the many mothers to whom I spoke. Entire social occasions could be given over to talking to a woman who thought she didn’t feel enough for her baby; or someone struggling with the fact that she cared less for one child than another. Too numerous to count were the guilt-ridden women who left their children with hired help while they went out to work. They confessed to me details of their lives they did not even dare tell other mothers, for women can be among the harshest critics of their own sex. They were desperate to discuss their feelings with someone, but terrified of being judged to be falling short of the standards, of being a less than perfect mother.

The insistence that a certain style of motherhood is ‘natural’ leads women to question every aspect of what they do, think and feel and to measure their own experience against an impossible and rigid standard. Every one of us assesses our own mother’s record, picking over her failures and all too easily forgetting her accomplishments. Collectively we judge the mothers around us personally and through our institutions. The myths around motherhood are seductive traps which set up women in the cruellest way. This book traces the origins of those myths and examines how they continue to control and manipulate women.

Perhaps by revealing the traps, and tracing how we have arrived at current ways of thinking about motherhood, we can blow the most destructive of these myths away altogether and move on to a new approach to raising children. One which is flexible and giving instead of rigid; one which is inclusive of other people, especially fathers, instead of exclusive; and one in which the model of motherhood embraces woman in all her roles instead of placing her needs and other interests in conflict with the function of parenting. By exposing the hidden agendas around motherhood we may place children where they really should be, at the very top of the agenda.