Yesterday I wrote about the tendency of anti-vax mothers to view themselves as heroes. Though they view themselves as rebelling against “the system,” the truth is that they are merely submitting to a different system, characterized by deeply valued fantasies including the illusion of control of the health of their children and the radical uniqueness of their children, almost always in conjunction with ignorance of science, medicine and statistics.
While researching for that post I came across a fascinating book, The Paradox of Natural Mothering By Chris Bobel, an associate professor of Women’s Studies. In Bobel’s view, natural mothering isn’t just a paradox, it is a plethora of paradoxes:
[pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Though natural mothers imagine themselves as transgressive advocates for social change, in reality they are both privileged and self-absorbed.[/pullquote]
It is a movement of radical simplicity that promotes rabid consumerism … albeit for non-traditional products.
It venerates a highly romanticized “natural” form of parenting that not only was never practiced by our foremothers, but is thoroughly modern.
It stresses feminist empowerment through total submission to a traditionally gendered division of labor.
It isn’t so much a paradox as it is an oxymoron.
Natural mothering may resist certain capitalist and technological prescriptions for family life, but it does not resist essentialized, even romanticized, conceptions of women that manifest themselves in a rigid sexual division of labor.
In truth, natural mothering reflects the three P’s: purchasing, patriarchy and privilege.
Purchasing
Bobel notes:
For many of the natural mothers, consumerism is a key feature of what they regard as mainstream culture. Typically, natural mothers perceive themselves as fervent critics of American consumption practices. They assert that every individual must make a pledge to live simply if the planet and its inhabitants are to survive. Moreover, consumerism sustains the capitalist system, which is increasingly dependent on mothers who work outside the home. When a mother refuses to “buy into” the notion that her worth is established by a paycheck or a job title, she performs an act of resistance. Furthermore, when she is home, she is “freed up” to construct a lifestyle less dependent on the goods and services designed to assist overly busy people who do not have time to cook, sew, garden, and build.
The irony is that there is virtually no aspect of natural mothering that does not require the purchase of expensive products and services. As sociologist Norah MacKendrick explains in her paper More Work for Mother; Chemical Body Burdens as a Maternal Responsibility:
The ideology of intensive mothering infuses spaces of consumption by urging mothers to buy with the best interests of the child in mind. Consumption is therefore entangled with other routine activities that parents — and mothers in particular — view as integral to securing a child’s future outcomes. Indeed, women’s transition to motherhood is marked by the consumption of specific material goods…
Eggs must be cage-free, clothes must be unbleached cotton and homeopathic treatments must be devoid of GMO’s. And all of it must be organic and therefore quite expensive. Natural childbirth requires a midwife, doula and rented inflatable tub, not to mention books and courses. Breastfeeding requires a lactation consultant, lactation cookies, herbal supplements and specialized clothing designed for ease in breastfeeding. The list of products that are required for radical simplicity is quite long and constantly growing.
It’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that natural mothering, touted as a rejection of contemporary consumer culture, is merely a niche form of the very same consumer culture that is purportedly being rejected. In other words, just as the women who feed their children McDonald’s take out, let them play with plastic toys, and allow them to watch TV are obviously responding to rampant consumerism, natural mothering advocates who hire doulas, treat everything with homeopathic remedies, and wear their babies in slings are unwittingly responding to the exact same consumerism they claim to deplore, carefully curated to appeal specifically to them.
Patriarchy
As Bobel explains in the section Putting Family First and Mom Last: Natural Mothering and Accommodating Patriarchy, natural mothering requires an almost complete capitulation to the misogyny of the patriarchy:
…[N]atural mothers do not resist patriarchal constructions of motherhood. While they make the fairly radical claim that female productivity must be ascribed social value, they do not resist the most fundamental assumptions about what it means to he a woman in the contemporary age. Natural mothering, rooted in biologically determinist understandings of gender, reifies a male-centered view of role-bound women. The “natural” in natural mothering may liberate mothers from a mechanized and commodified experience of their maternity, but it reproduces a gendered experience that subordinates their needs to those of child and husband and models that experience for their children…
Natural mothering, then, adapts to patriarchal notions about women and men, including … the preeminence of biology as shaper of human destiny. It accepts a standard that rationalizes women’s inferior social position…
Women are taught to seek “feminist” empowerment through submission to traditional gender norms.
Privilege
Privilege is a sine qua non of natural mothering and not merely the economic privilege that allows natural mothers to purchase expensive specialty products. One must have access to a highly technological lifestyle in order to give meaning to rejecting it. That’s why unmedicated vaginal birth is an “achievement” for a suburban white women, but not for a woman of color living in an African village without access to epidurals.
Moreover:
Natural mothers … enjoy a privileged position in which their alternative lifestyle is possible. That is, it is because they enjoy a secure economic status, solidified by their racial, educational, and class status, that they can afford to take the social risks involved in nonmainstream practices. In this sense, their privilege serves as a sort of safety net, protecting them from a nasty fall should they, for instance, he challenged for nursing their toddler in a public place or refusing conventional medical treatment for an illness. Being white and middle-class, they are less likely to come under attack. A poor woman of color spotted breastfeeding an older child could risk censure and certainly judgment. A mother receiving state benefits is required to vaccinate her children; waiving vaccinations is not an option. An immigrant woman known to use herbal remedies to treat illness risks a scolding by her family physician.
Though natural mothers imagine themselves as transgressive advocates for social change, in reality they are both privileged and self-absorbed.
The most striking thing about the paradigm of natural mothering as a politicized lifestyle is the specific way in which it is realized. Rather than taking to the streets, running for local office, or dedicating their lives to grassroots community organizing, these women strive to effect social change through the day-to-day practice of mothering outside the mainstream.
But they are not effecting social change, they are reifying their own privilege and passing it on to their children to the exclusion of other children.
Natural mothering — promoted as radical simplicity, parenting just like our foremothers and offering feminist empowerment — is in fact the complete opposite. It is a form of consumerism, confirms traditional misogynistic gender roles, and reflects and reinforces privilege.
