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.
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.
The only difference is that natural mothering advocates on the Right believe that moral authority is vested in God, whereas natural mothering advocates on the Left believe they moral authority is vested in “Nature”.
Is natural mothering a religion that merely replaces God with Nature?
Do 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.”
I’m not the first person to notice the remarkable similarities, both superficial and deep.
Chris Bobel, in The Paradox of Natural Mothering, notes:
… [W]omen 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.
Furthermore:
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.
They’ve surrendered their agency to a “higher power.” Whether the women are controlled by men or religion or some conception of nature, they are still controlled.
They live their lives according to a script:
…[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.
That’s not reasoning or choice; it’s religion.
