By: Danielle Binks, Bernadette Green & Helen Lobato (excerpt from 'Bad mothers, baby bumps and more' blog)
Mothering, mind your step it’s a narrow path. Well, if you’re hoping for approval anyway. If you have kids, at some point you’ll be damned, but of course we all know if you don’t have them you’ll be doubly-damned. Being damned is a woman’s lot, you’re public property. In almost any country in the world, day or night, young or old, you can buy yourself a woman. We’re targeted as the ultimate consumer and consumable. So if you’re having kids being damned is just part of it.
You’ll be damned if you have them too early and damned if you have them too late.
Damned if you worry about what you eat when pregnant and damned if you don’t.
Damned if once you’ve popped them out you let them wander or damned if you keep them in the backyard.
You get my drift; there’s an awful lot of damning that comes with mothering. The media loves mothers:
got nothing to say today? Let’s rehash that old story about mother’s breastfeeding kids into primary school, oh so perverted the readers will love it! Or what about mother’s electing to have caesareans, what was that heading, I remember, oh yes, ‘
Too Posh to Push’, good one.
A recent example of mother damned is celebrity Chrissie Swan, who confessed to smoking while pregnant with her third child. As a TV personality and a woman with a weekly column in The Sunday Age, Swan had little choice but admit her ‘folly’ - after she’d being caught smoking in her car by the paparazzi. She was labelled a ‘bad mother’ – she apologized (to us, the general public, her children, her family, the media, to St. Gerard Majella…) as though she was the only woman who ever dared smoke while pregnant (never mind that 15 per cent of women smoked during pregnancy in 2009, according to a QUIT survey). Chrissie Swan admitted her regret, so the media and public gleefully climbed atop their high horses and got on with the bad mother bashing.
Lasy week, two-time Booker prize-winner, Hilary Mantel, wrote a stunning piece for the London Review of Books titled ‘
Royal Bodies.’ She was taking a close look at the reigning sexism of the Monarchy, and using the Duchess of Cambridge as an example.
When she was Kate Middleton, Mantel says, she was nothing more than “a jointed doll on which certain rags are hung.” Now that she has married the prince, Mantel laments that; “these days she is a mother-to-be, and draped in another set of threadbare attributions. Once she gets over being sick, the press will find that she is radiant. They will find that this young woman’s life until now was nothing, her only point and purpose being to give birth.”
Mantel is entirely correct (though she is being shouted-down as a Royal-hating harpie.) Just this month, the editor of Woman’s Day defended paying up to $150,000 for a photograph of the pregnant Duchess of Cambridge splashing about in a bikini on a public beach and showing off her expanding belly. Why is this? Maybe she’s the first woman to bear a child? Why else would anyone care whether she is pregnant or ponder the state of her ‘baby bump’!
In Our Baby Bump Obsession, Lenore Skenazy asks who’d ever heard of the “baby bump” until about 10 years ago? Right now babies are ‘hot’, she says. Just as most of society is obsessed with celebrities, their offspring have become its obsession too.
And women cannot win in this ‘is-she-or-isn’t-she?’ society. The media are either obsessed with how stars such as Angelina Jolie cope with being ‘fat’ and how quickly they return to their svelte selves. Or they turn to her counterpart, childless 44-year-old Jennifer Aniston, and constantly hound her with questions of “when?” and treating the sight of loose-fit clothing as an omen of impregnation.
A chapter of Radically Speaking titled ‘Radical Feminism: History, Politics, Action’ by Robyn Rowland and Renate Klein, observes that ‘Women who choose not to mother are outside the “caring and rearing” bond and attract strong social disapproval. Women who are infertile, on the other hand, are subjects of pity and even derision. The institutionalisation of motherhood by patriarchy has ensured that women are divided into breeders and non-breeders. So motherhood is used to define woman and her usefulness.’
So what do we take away from the bad mother bashing, the pitchfork-campaign against Chrissie Swan and Kate’s baby-bump watch? Rowland and Klein hit on it again; ‘Although motherhood is supposedly revered, its daily reality in patriarchy is tantamount to a degraded position.’
Apparently, pregnancy is public property and increasingly society buys into the patriarchal view that women only have worth if they’re mothers (but only of the ‘hot’, frolicking bikini-wearing kind) and mothers who adhere to the stringent rules of perfect parenting.
Don’t buy into it. Don’t use Kate as a role model or Chrissie Swan as a what-not-to-do. Don’t think that mothering is easy or inherent. Adrienne Rich in Of Woman Born argues that women learn to mother; ‘Motherhood is earned, first through an intense physical and psychic rite of passage—pregnancy and childbirth—then through learning to nurture, which does not come by instinct’ (1976, p. 12). Part of that learning should be recognising when motherhood is being manipulated and warped by the media for their own gains.
