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Paradox Of Natural Mothering
Single or married, working mothers are, if not the norm, no longer exceptional. These days, women who stay at home to raise their children seem to be making a radical lifestyle choice. The women in this work have renounced consumerism and careerism in order to reclaim home and family. These natural mothers favour parenting practices that set them apart from the mainstream: home birth, extended breast feeding, home schooling, and natural health care. Regarding themselves as part of a movement, natural mothers believe they are changing society one child, one family at a time. This work profiles 30 natural mothers, probing into their choices and asking whether they are reforming or conforming to women's traditional role. It illuminates the paradoxes of natural mothering, the ways in which these women resist the trappings of upward mobility but acquiesce to a kind of biological determinism and conventional gender scripts.
240 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 2001
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
May 7, 2009
I'm really enjoying this very academic/scholarly analysis of the "natural mothering" movement (which the author characterizes at the intersection of voluntary simplicity, attachment parenting, and cultural feminism (which is weirdly named because it actually seems to be biological essentialist feminism)). A lot of the how-to parenting guides/groups that we participate in are here put in their historical/social/economic contexts, which I find helpful in that it makes me feel less like a failure if I don't conform to some "ideal" notion of how I should parent (a problem for me whenever I read any how-to book). She does seem a bit hostile to the moms, and anyway I'm really not like the women she interviews in that I'm definitely not a cultural feminist -- I do think there are some biological parts of motherhood (duh!) but I don't think being a woman makes me inherently any more nurturing than Eric or any more fit to be the person who's most at home, as many of these women seem to do.
In the end the book was a disappointment. I found Bobel's tone rather hostile/condescending to the mothers. She addresses this in the end, saying that she came to this research study by at first participating in the group, and that her first draft was criticized as not scholarly enough, but that people thought later drafts were too critical of the moms. I agree. I also thought that her critique of the moms' cultural feminism made sense to me, but the feminist lens she did use was too hostile to motherhood to be useful. The best example was in a footnote about the "bartering" some of the mothers alluded to engaging in with the fathers to have more babies: "If the main source of power for natural mothers resides in completely dependent babies, it may be necessary to replace older children with younger ones. Without babies who need her (and only her) they risk losing power." An alternative reading that doesn't seem to fit with her kind of feminism is: or maybe they just like babies. Some people do -- and a good thing, too, from an evolutionary perspective. I kept thinking of Anne Roiphe's book about motherhood where she talks about how US feminism has failed women by focusing on the politics of abortion and equal rights in the workplace rather than the (for US feminists uncomfortable) fact that 80% of women will have children, and need a world designed to accommodate that.
I did appreciate her brief-but-thoughtful critique/situation of attachment parenting in context of the socioeconomic/racial structures that make it possible, as well as some of the questions she raised about AP. "Although AP's commonsense approach to childrearing seems humane, the link between such practices and the outcomes predicted by AP advocates are unproven. Moreover, questions about its feasibility remain . . . What happens when the mother must go to work outside the home? What does it cost to enact a lifestyle in which the child is 'at the center of the universe?' What kind of child does this lifestyle produce? At this point, no studies have tested AP's effect on child development and mother-child bonding, but anecdotal evidence abounds." (62) Those questions makes sense, but she follows it with a story about a mom who got sick of "subordinating her own needs to those of her children," which strikes me as bringing a very simplistic mainstream lens to evaluating AP.
She had one really interesting quote in the context of asking whether AP is always appropriate, in which she compared it to critiques of the holistic health movement: "Too much emphasis has been placed in the movement on what individuals can and should do for themselves and too littel on what they can expect from professional care providers. There is also little recognition of the limits of personal endeavor and will power. Expectations have been created that cannot be met, and when they are not, much unhappiness results" (Kristin Alster 1989, p. 134, quoted on p. 63).
She talks about the mom's "shock-shift" stories, in which they came to their lives because they were surprised by the intensity of their feelings as mothers. But when she talks about them, it's as though this idea that moms could be so overwhelmed by the intensity of their love is completely strange to her, something she heard on another planet. I'm not sure whether that wasn't her experience, or what. I appreciated her situating the mothers' "choice" to stay home in that circumstance in the socio-economic context that most of them were married, educated, middle class. However, what she downplays is that these moms _did_ make choices within that context that many, many other parents don't make, even though they have similar resources and therefore that choice.
I did appreciate her critique of the mothers' view of motherhood as "natural," as something that "just is" this monolithic thing that's always been that way. She references _The Continuum Concept_, which I've always found slightly annoying as well. I have too much academic and professional background in thinking about the cultural construction of nature to refer to it as some pure thing outside us that is constant over time that we can refer to. So I did appreciate that. These moms also seem to differ from me in their reference to emotion as the seat of their decisions. But I did feel she was too harsh with them for not being able to better articulate the "why's" of their decisions. How many of us _can_ say more about our decisions than "It just felt like the right thing to do?"
Critiquing her own research, she says, "I developed a critique that at times indicted women for their choices instead of taking to task a social system that sets women up to make choices that serve the interests of men. Shouldn't I criticize the system that teaches and rewards biological determinism and gender-role-bound behaviors? Where is the critique of men who enable women's subordination? And where is the discussion of social institutions (such as public education and health care) whose inadequacy forces people to search for alternatives? Throughout this work, I often fail to address these questions and instead criticize natural mothers for the contradictory rationales they advance to explain their lifestyle. This is a classic instance of woman blaming." (172)
In the end, I thought her research had potential, and some of her insights were interesting, but it was too ivory-tower. It just didn't seem to me to engage with the realities of womens' lives in a way that was nuanced and made sense to me. Anne Roiphe's less scholarly but equally thoughtful work that acknowledges the deep love parents have for their children, the inconvenient truth that kids _do_ do best with consistent caregivers, etc. was ultimately more helpful.
In the end the book was a disappointment. I found Bobel's tone rather hostile/condescending to the mothers. She addresses this in the end, saying that she came to this research study by at first participating in the group, and that her first draft was criticized as not scholarly enough, but that people thought later drafts were too critical of the moms. I agree. I also thought that her critique of the moms' cultural feminism made sense to me, but the feminist lens she did use was too hostile to motherhood to be useful. The best example was in a footnote about the "bartering" some of the mothers alluded to engaging in with the fathers to have more babies: "If the main source of power for natural mothers resides in completely dependent babies, it may be necessary to replace older children with younger ones. Without babies who need her (and only her) they risk losing power." An alternative reading that doesn't seem to fit with her kind of feminism is: or maybe they just like babies. Some people do -- and a good thing, too, from an evolutionary perspective. I kept thinking of Anne Roiphe's book about motherhood where she talks about how US feminism has failed women by focusing on the politics of abortion and equal rights in the workplace rather than the (for US feminists uncomfortable) fact that 80% of women will have children, and need a world designed to accommodate that.
I did appreciate her brief-but-thoughtful critique/situation of attachment parenting in context of the socioeconomic/racial structures that make it possible, as well as some of the questions she raised about AP. "Although AP's commonsense approach to childrearing seems humane, the link between such practices and the outcomes predicted by AP advocates are unproven. Moreover, questions about its feasibility remain . . . What happens when the mother must go to work outside the home? What does it cost to enact a lifestyle in which the child is 'at the center of the universe?' What kind of child does this lifestyle produce? At this point, no studies have tested AP's effect on child development and mother-child bonding, but anecdotal evidence abounds." (62) Those questions makes sense, but she follows it with a story about a mom who got sick of "subordinating her own needs to those of her children," which strikes me as bringing a very simplistic mainstream lens to evaluating AP.
She had one really interesting quote in the context of asking whether AP is always appropriate, in which she compared it to critiques of the holistic health movement: "Too much emphasis has been placed in the movement on what individuals can and should do for themselves and too littel on what they can expect from professional care providers. There is also little recognition of the limits of personal endeavor and will power. Expectations have been created that cannot be met, and when they are not, much unhappiness results" (Kristin Alster 1989, p. 134, quoted on p. 63).
She talks about the mom's "shock-shift" stories, in which they came to their lives because they were surprised by the intensity of their feelings as mothers. But when she talks about them, it's as though this idea that moms could be so overwhelmed by the intensity of their love is completely strange to her, something she heard on another planet. I'm not sure whether that wasn't her experience, or what. I appreciated her situating the mothers' "choice" to stay home in that circumstance in the socio-economic context that most of them were married, educated, middle class. However, what she downplays is that these moms _did_ make choices within that context that many, many other parents don't make, even though they have similar resources and therefore that choice.
I did appreciate her critique of the mothers' view of motherhood as "natural," as something that "just is" this monolithic thing that's always been that way. She references _The Continuum Concept_, which I've always found slightly annoying as well. I have too much academic and professional background in thinking about the cultural construction of nature to refer to it as some pure thing outside us that is constant over time that we can refer to. So I did appreciate that. These moms also seem to differ from me in their reference to emotion as the seat of their decisions. But I did feel she was too harsh with them for not being able to better articulate the "why's" of their decisions. How many of us _can_ say more about our decisions than "It just felt like the right thing to do?"
Critiquing her own research, she says, "I developed a critique that at times indicted women for their choices instead of taking to task a social system that sets women up to make choices that serve the interests of men. Shouldn't I criticize the system that teaches and rewards biological determinism and gender-role-bound behaviors? Where is the critique of men who enable women's subordination? And where is the discussion of social institutions (such as public education and health care) whose inadequacy forces people to search for alternatives? Throughout this work, I often fail to address these questions and instead criticize natural mothers for the contradictory rationales they advance to explain their lifestyle. This is a classic instance of woman blaming." (172)
In the end, I thought her research had potential, and some of her insights were interesting, but it was too ivory-tower. It just didn't seem to me to engage with the realities of womens' lives in a way that was nuanced and made sense to me. Anne Roiphe's less scholarly but equally thoughtful work that acknowledges the deep love parents have for their children, the inconvenient truth that kids _do_ do best with consistent caregivers, etc. was ultimately more helpful.
January 19, 2011
Interesting topic but I found the analysis rather uninspiring.
June 13, 2012
I read a couple chapters. Couldn't get into it. Gave up.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews