Mothering mythology in the late twentieth century: Science, gender lore and celebratory narrative

At its core, the myth of the natural mother involves the belief that women are naturally mothers -- they are born with a built-in set of capacities, dispositions, and desires to nurture children; hence, mothering comes naturally to women. Accordingly, mothering is assumed to have the following characteristics: First, mothering is believed to be instinctive, not learned. The most important dimensions of mothering thus require attunedness to instinct rather than education. Mothering is also considered to be primarily an engagement of love, not work. More precisely, it is presumed that the work of mothering primarily involves love (thought of as an unsocialized emotion), dedication and intuitive understanding more than it involves labour, skill, and knowledge in the economically and scientifically significant sense of these things. Another key assumption about the work of mothering is that it primarily involves instrumental activity rather than interpretive activity. In other words, children's emotional and physiological needs are a pre-given objective reality to which the mother can respond well or badly in ways readily assessable by outside observers.(f.2) (This feature of the myth can come into tension with the idea that mothering is instinctive, if instinctiveness is taken to entail that mothers know their children's needs better than others can know them. But the range of this idea of maternal epistemic authority is often limited to knowing when the baby is hungry and predicting diaper changes.) I considered using the term "ideology" in place of "myth" to refer to the complex of beliefs, stories, and images that revolve around mothering as natural. But I think that "myth" is a more adequate and accurate term. It is a richer concept, and I think it accomplishes something that "ideology" doesn't readily seem to. "Myth" suggests that natural mothering operates most deeply at the level of celebratory narrative -- of stories passed on in celebration of traditions whose meaning and significance may be larger than life, but remain nevertheless inchoate, not understood, not spoken. The term "ideology" also suggests such subliminal or subterranean levels of influence and communication, but it does so without the full-bodied storiedness of "myth," and without the strong suggestion that what is passed on is culturally invested with the spirit of celebration (however ambiguous attitudes to mothering may be; however materially unsupported women's efforts at mothering may be). This doesn't mean that we have to burn every thread of the myth of the natural mother as an utterly worthless and pernicious legacy. Because on a suitably complex understanding of love, of individual, of bonding and of instinct, mothering as widely cross-culturally and historically experienced is about love and bonding between individual mothers and children in ways that are not simply learned, and in ways that run deeper for being lifelong, for being intimate in number, and for being outside the reign of institutional structures. Plato's vision in The Republic of state-run, anonymous parenting is a vision that should be resisted. Nevertheless, we do need to get beyond the myth of the natural mother fat enough that our hidden cultural messages about mothering neither communicate the idea that mothering is essential for women nor obscure the fact that mothering is very much about work, very much in need of social support, and centrally about contributing to there being children and young adults in the world, now and in the future -- a staggeringly important thing once you stop to imagine a society without young people.