Most advocates of natural mothering — natural childbirth, breastfeeding, attachment parenting — believe that they have the best interests of children at heart. They don’t understand that they have fallen prey to the Maternal Guilt Industry that seeks to control mothers by generating and manipulating the fear that they will inadvertently harm their children.
I’m not talking about the women who make choices based on what is best for their families and themselves; they do have the best interests of their children at heart. I’m talking about the advocates, professional and lay, who proselytize on how all women should raise all children.
[pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]The operating principle of the Maternal Guilt Industry is this: children’s wellbeing can only be ensured by mothers’ suffering.[/pullquote]
The attempt to control and manipulate women through love for their children is such a fixture of our culture that it is as invisible to us as the air we breathe.
As Jana Malamud Smith explains in A Potent Spell: Mother Love and the Power of Fear:
[S]tarting in Colonial America, a deep grammar of threat, stable beneath ever-changing “facts,” links and relinks child safety to maternal “acceptance” of constricted, submissive “feminine” behavior, deference to authority and her willingness to stay close to home.
It has ever been thus:
The mother’s fears of child loss and the derivative fears of harming children or caring for them inadequately have been continually manipulated, overtly and subtly, even aroused gratuitously, to pressure, control and subdue women for a very long time — possibly millennia.
What’s new is the latest iteration, the Maternal Guilt Industry, seeks not merely to control women but to make them pay for the privilege.
Malamud Smith’s starting point is what many mothers feel in their bones.
We know that most mothers … feel they will sacrifice even their lives on their children’s behalf. Part of the reason is love. Part is love’s corollary: each mother knows that it would be difficult, if not unbearable, to choose otherwise. How could we live with ourselves if we believed we had not given all to save a child?
When you are willing to give your life to protect your child, how much easier is it to give your aspirations, identity and freedom? The Maternal Guilt Industry seeks to deprive women of all three.
Understanding the depth of a mother’s feelings about child loss is central to comprehending how women who are mothers live in the world… [C]onsciously and, particularly, preconsciously, many women anticipate and fear, often with very good reason, that should they challenge their social role, should they defy the explicit or implicit rules of their environment, they might unwittingly damage their children.
The operating principle of the Maternal Guilt Industry is this: children’s wellbeing can only be ensured by mothers’ suffering.
- You must suffer the agonizing pain of labor, and must not dare to expunge it with pain relief, or your child will be harmed and it will be your fault.
- You must endure any discomforts of breastfeeding, any inconvenience and any disruption of your ability to work, or your child will be harmed and it will be your fault.
- You must carry your child constantly and sacrifice any private time, even when you are sleeping, or your child will be harmed and it will be your fault.
- You must spend endless hours shopping for and hand preparing food for your child, as well as presiding over complex food restriction diets, or your child will be harmed and it will be your fault.
- You must buy the books, services and accoutrements of natural parenting (natural childbirth classes, lactation consultant services, fancy child slings and wraps) or your child will be harmed and it will be your fault.
- You must never consider your own needs, desires and ambitions or your child will be harmed and it will be your fault.
The originators of natural mothering were quite explicit in invoking the trade off between mothers’ desires to escape from traditional gender roles and the harm that would supposedly come to their children as a result. Grantly Dick-Read created the philosophy of natural childbirth explicitly because he feared white women of the “better” classes would not have enough children to rule the world; the founders of La Leche League were explicit in proclaiming that by convincing women to breastfeed they could keep them from going to work; Dr. William Sears of attachment parenting is quite explicit in asserting that “God” wants women to stay in constant physical proximity to their children and maintain a state of subservience.
The saddest aspect of the Maternal Guilt Industry is not that it profits from women’s misery and seeks to maintain that misery in order to continue to profit. The saddest aspect is that women have been recruited as the primary enforcers of the mandatory misery of other women:
Sure midwives profit from convincing women to endure childbirth without pain relief, but they genuinely believe that pain makes women better mothers. They don’t seem to understand that they have been co-opted into enforcing gender stereotypes and oppressing other women.
Sure lactation consultants profit from convincing women to breastfeed, but they genuinely believe that breastfeeding makes women better mothers. They don’t seem to understand that they have been co-opted into enforcing gender stereotypes and oppressing other women.
Sure the purveyors of fancy slings and wraps and attachment parenting books profit from their philosophy, but they genuinely believe that continuous, close physical proximity to their babies makes women better mothers. They don’t seem to understand that they have been co-opted into enforcing gender stereotypes and oppressing other women.
As Malamud Smith notes in regard to parenting “experts”:
The authorities’ admonitions have often harshly and incorrectly punished mothers by suggesting that their children’s suffering or death is a consequence of their behavior — usually any behavior deemed to be ambitious, sexual or independent.
It’s easy for us to laugh at past efforts:
… Richard Kissam, MD [wrote] in The Nurse’s Manual and Young Mother’s Guide (1834), “If the mind of the mother be withdrawn from her child to other pleasures, her milk will be less nutritious and less in quantity.” Milk loses its basic life-sustaining characteristics if a mother lets herself think private, pleasurable thoughts? The notion was terrible science, but a powerful way to make mothers feel guilty and ashamed when their attention inevitably wandered …
It’s much harder to recognize that the present drive to force all women to breastfeed is no different. The claim that breast is best is terrible science, but a powerful way to make mothers feel guilty and ashamed if they use formula.
The ultimate irony is that the women of the Maternal Guilt Industry (and it is mostly women) imagine themselves as independent and transgressive, bucking the hegemony of patriarchal medicine. The reality is that they are oblivious in knuckling under to the traditional patriarchy of enforced gender norms. Maternal suffering is not a requirement for happy children; but it is a requirement for making women easy to control. And when it comes to controlling contemporary women, the Maternal Guilt Industry has no peer.
