Natural mothering is a cultural pre-occupation of both the Right and the Left.
Consider the lifestyle of fundamentalist mothers: every moment of the day consumed with child and family care. From homebirth to homeschooling, from growing her own food to baking her own bread, from extended breastfeeding to rejection of conventional medical care, women are trapped in their own homes by a never ending series of labor intensive tasks. Above all, they are indoctrinated to ignore their own needs in favor of other family members.
Both feature conversion experiences, trust in and submission to a higher power, a fervor for proselytizing and condemnation of those who make different choices.
Consider the lifestyle of a radical natural mothering advocate: every moment of the day consumed with child and family care. From homebirth to homeschooling, from growing her own food to baking her own bread, from extended breastfeeding to rejection of conventional medical care, women are trapped in their own homes by a never ending series of labor intensive tasks. Above all, they are indoctrinated to ignore their own needs in favor of other family members.
But it’s more than just the superficial similarities. Natural mothering seems to share major philosophical features including conversion experiences, trust in and submission to a higher power, a fervor for proselytizing and condemnation of those who make different choices.
The only difference is that natural mothering advocates on the Right believe they are mandated by God to adopt the lifestyle, whereas natural mothering advocates on the Left believe they are mandated by “Nature” to do so.
Is natural mothering a religion?
I’m not the first person to notice the remarkable similarities, both superficial and deep.
Chris Bobel, in The Paradox of Natural Mothering, describes the centrality of conversion experiences, which she calls shock-shift stories:
These stories unfolded predictably. Soon after the birth of her first child, the new mother was shocked by her overwhelming feelings of love for her baby and her companion feelings of being unable to leave him or her. Next, she shifted her perspective from that of a pregnant woman with careerist aspirations to that of a new mother who simply had to be with her baby around the clock. For her, there was no alternative, no choice.
Women surrender personal agency in the same way they do in religious fundamentalism. Rather than “Let go. Let God.”, natural mothering advocates encourage each other to “Let go. Let Nature.”
Describing the views of one mother, Bobel notes:
[Her] conceptualization assumes that women must willingly submit to biology’s shaping of their lives… [I]ts centrality in natural mothering undermines the mother’s claim of personal agency and free will as the impetus for her lifestyle. Natural mothering, it appears, is less a lifestyle fashioned by individual women making hard choices about the best way to parent than a chosen lifestyle represented in essentialist terms.
Bobel explains how natural mothering advocates like to think about themselves:
If we listen to their narratives of self-motivated decisions to quit jobs and careers and stay at home full-time with babies, we see strong, self-determined women who actively choose a particular lifestyle, even if that lifestyle denies the individual mother’s self-actualization.
But, in truth:
Natural mothers … may actively choose to embrace the “nature is best” ideology, but once they become attached to this ideology – buying into it completely and without regret – they surrender their capacity to make choices and in some ways become passive objects. Put differently, the ideology begins to take on hegemonic proportions and transforms women into individuals who surrender their own agency in the interest of family.
What they initially describe to themselves and others as a “choice,” comes to seem like no choice:
…[N]atural mothers claim that they could certainly choose to parent like “everyone else” (i.e., like the majority of conventional, mainstream mothers), but at the same time they speak of choice, they speak of being guided by an intuitive, body-derived source of knowledge, one that is undeniable, one that they can never dispute or reject… Natural mothering is the only real choice. The natural mothers in this study were adamant that they cannot turn their backs on the natural ideology so central to their way of living, sleeping, eating, schooling, and consuming.
They’ve surrendered their agency to a “higher power.”
It might be an overstatement to claim that the natural mothers have replaced God or Man as the authority that dictates a life course with nature as represented by the body, but perhaps not. Whether the mothers are controlled by men or religion or some conception of nature, they are still controlled.
They live their lives according to a script, whether that script is religious or based on the worship of nature.
…[C]onstructing a lifestyle on the basis of a body-derived feeling that can neither be explained nor denied is the action not of an agent, but of an individual who is dutifully following a script. In this case the script was written by biologically determinist and historically gendered ideas about women, mothers, and families.
Because — and this is the critical point — our ideas about “Nature” are cultural constructs.
When the mothers spoke of nature, they spoke of a monolithic and static concept, the one true thing that predates dates humankind and remains pure and unadulterated. To them, nature is the perfect model for human behavior because it is separate from and unpolluted by human manipulation. This view, of course, is problematic; it denies the many ways in which nature is indeed culturally constructed …
The way that ancient peoples viewed nature is very different from the way that scientists view nature, for example. The views of ancient peoples are every bit as cultural determined (it was their religion!) as the views of scientists and neither is a completely accurate assessment of nature itself. Natural mothering advocates have simply traded the religion of the present for the biologically determined, gendered and often misogynist religion of the past.
Natural mothering advocates believe, like many ancient peoples believed, that Nature is an irresistible higher power that should be worshipped: venerated, trusted and to which we must submit.
That’s not reasoning or choice; it’s religious fundamentalism.
