I’ve been writing about this issue for more than a decade: the stress, shame and guilt of contemporary mothering ideology. Now it has hit the mainstream with the cover of TIME Magazine: The Goddess Myth, How a Vision of Perfect Motherhood Hurts Moms.
As Claire Howorth notes in the cover article, Motherhood Is Hard to Get Wrong. So Why Do So Many Moms Feel So Bad About Themselves?
[pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Maternal guilt, shame and suffering is not a bug in the philosophy, it’s the ultimate purpose.[/pullquote]
…Call it the Goddess Myth, spun with a little help from basically everyone–doctors, activists, other moms. It tells us that breast is best; that if there is a choice between a vaginal birth and major surgery, you should want to push; that your body is a temple and what you put in it should be holy; that sending your baby to the hospital nursery for a few hours after giving birth is a dereliction of duty. Oh, and that you will feel–and look–radiant.
The myth impacts all moms. Because they partly reflect our ideals, hospital and public-health policy are wrapped up with it. But even the best intentions can cause harm. The consequences vary in degree, from pervasive feelings of guilt to the rare and unbearable tragedy of a mother so intent on breastfeeding that she accidentally starves her infant to death.
I spoke to Howarth for her piece and she mentioned my book Push Back: Guilt in the Age of Natural Parenting:
Luckily, An anti-shame canon is growing. Political scientist Courtney Jung’s recent book Lactivism argues that breast milk has become an industry the way formula once was, compounding the incentives and pressures that potentially hurt moms. Amy Tuteur, a former OB, wrote Push Back, a polemic against natural parenting. In Blaming Mothers, legal scholar Linda Fentiman writes that “mothers–and pregnant women–are increasingly seen as exclusively responsible for all aspects of their children’s health and well-being.”
Howarth concludes:
Motherhood in the connected era doesn’t have to be dominated by any myth. Social media can just as easily help celebrate our individual experience and create community through contrast. Moms have to stick together even as we walk our separate paths. We have to spot the templates and realize there are no templates. We have to talk about our failures and realize there are no failures.
But it isn’t an accident that the goddess myth —— natural parenting —— is pitting women against each other and causing shame and guilt. That’s what it was designed to do. Natural parenting is not about raising children; it’s about controlling women.
Specifically, it’s about re-immuring them back into the home. If you were a misogynist who felt threatened by competition from women in business, science and politics, what better way is there to marginalize women once again than to divert them into competing over who has the better vagina and breasts?
That was the conscious plan of the founders of the natural childbirth, lactivism and attachment parenting movements. Grantly Dick-Read, fabricated the racist lie that “primitive” (read black) women had painless childbirth and that white women of the “better classes” who wanted to have painless childbirth, too, simply had to withdraw from competing with men to compete with other women over who had the more “authentic” birth.
That was the conscious plan of the founders of the La Leche League, 7 devout Catholic women, who saw the promotion of breastfeeding as a way to keep mothers of young children out of the workforce and send them back home where they belonged.
Dr. William Sears, the popularizer of attachment parenting, is a religious fundamentalist who promulgated a philosophy that fetishizes physical proximity of mother and child (“baby wearing”) effectively forcing women back into the home.
Natural parenting justifies its intrusiveness into maternal choice by promoting fear in regard to infant and child health. Natural parenting advocates inflate risks of rare events to monstrous proportions or invent theoretical risks that have never been seen in real life. Using and misusing the language of science, natural parenting advocates problematize infant and child safety.
For example:
Lactivists howl that low breastfeeding rates compromise infant health despite the fact that breastfeeding rates have no correlation at all with infant health. Infant mortality rates dropped precipitously through the 20th century despite the fact that for most of that time period breastfeeding rates dropped like a rock. Indeed, the countries with the highest infant mortality rates in the world have the highest breastfeeding rates.
By promoting fear about their children’s well-being, the philosophy of natural parenting causes women to tightly regulate their behavior so it conforms with the “rules” of natural parenting and to pathologize and blame themselves when they fail in conforming to those rules. Hence the outpouring of guilt and recrimination for epidurals, C-sections, formula feeding and other deviations from natural parenting diktat.
Why has natural parenting become popular despite the fact that it imagines threats to children that don’t exist? Because it fits neatly into our cultural myths about motherhood: the motherhood is a woman’s highest calling, that suffering is integral to motherhood and that women belong in the home not in politics, business or the academy.
Natural parenting harms mothers through guilt, shame and suffering; it is critical to understand that that’s not a bug in the philosophy, it’s both a defining feature and the ultimate purpose.
