Mothers Read online

  The play dramatises their history, but it is the mothers’ own words that are spoken. These mothers lament the loss of their children: one son dead, one missing and one daughter who chose to remain in Syria after the husband she married in Brussels was killed in combat a matter of weeks after they arrived. They may, as two of them insist, feel they have failed as mothers. But they are also in search of knowledge – it is above all for their failure to know and pre-empt what their children were planning that they castigate themselves. In a world that had become callously indifferent, hostile or meaningless for their children, the mothers are trying to comprehend the choices they made. Two of the mothers, Samira and Geraldine, travel to Syria. Samira goes in search of her daughter Nora – to ‘the end of the earth’, as Samira puts it: ‘wherever you are, I will abandon everything. I will come and get you.’ Geraldine, after the death of her son Anis, travels to the Syrian–Turkish border, where she gives money and clothes that belonged to her son to a pregnant woman, one of the refugees huddled on the border. The pregnant woman says she will call her son Anis. The play ends on this. It therefore seizes the familiar tropes – to the ends of the earth, a mother’s grief – and gives them a new twist, simply by allowing these women to speak: ‘There. That’s the mum’s story,’ is the last line of the play.10 As if to say, motherhood is part of the polity of nations. Given voice, space and time, motherhood can, and should, be one of the central means through which a historical moment reckons with itself.

  Why in modern times is the participation of mothers in political and public life seen as the exception – with the UK appearing to lag behind the rest of Europe, the US and other countries of the world in this regard? Why are mothers not seen as having everything to contribute, by dint of being mothers, to our understanding and ordering of public, political space? Instead, mothers are either being exhorted to return to their instincts and stay at home (on which more later) or to make their stand in the boardroom – to ‘lean in’, to use the ghastly imperative in the title of Sheryl Sandberg’s bestseller – as if being the props of neo-liberalism were the most that mothers can aspire to, the highest form of social belonging and agency they can expect. We are now witnessing what feminist sociologist Angela McRobbie has described as a ‘neo-liberal intensification of mothering’ – perfectly turned-out, middle-class, mainly white mothers, with their perfect jobs, perfect husbands and marriages, whose permanent glow of self-satisfaction is intended to make all women who do not conform to that image (because they are poorer or black or their lives are just more humanly complicated) feel like total failures; one of McRobbie’s articles on the topic has the title ‘Notes on the Perfect’.11 This has the added advantage of letting governments, whose austerity policies always disproportionately target the most vulnerable women and mothers with no chance of ever achieving such an ideal, completely off the hook.

  The only good news is that the sheer amount of effort that goes into the stereotype – perhaps into all stereotypes – also bears witness to its vacuity, to the fact that it is hanging by a thread. Mothers, we might say, are the original subversives, never – as feminism has long insisted – what they seem, or are meant to be. The evidence is there, in the many brilliant chronicles I will be discussing later in this book. And yet, despite these testimonies – steadily increasing in voice and volume – the acuity and rage of mothers somehow continue to be one of the best-kept secrets of our times. I have never met a single mother (myself included) who is not far more complex, critical, at odds with the set of clichés she is meant effortlessly to embody, than she is being encouraged – or rather instructed – to think.

  A very peculiar form of socially licensed aggression is at play, one that never misses its opportunity. In December 2016, calls went out in the UK to stop mothers involved in separation and child-contact cases – 70 per cent of which involve domestic violence – being routinely interrogated by abusive ex-partners in secret hearings in the civil family courts, a practice outlawed in criminal cases. One woman was forced to watch a video of her disclosing sexual abuse while sitting next to the man in question (how this had been allowed to happen was never made clear).12 More subtly but no less insidiously, when Theresa May was elected prime minister in July 2016 after the Brexit referendum, one minister she retained – in the midst of a reshuffle generally acknowledged as intended to kill off David Cameron’s legacy for ever – was the hugely unpopular Jeremy Hunt at the Department of Health, so he could complete the process of imposing his new contract on junior doctors, after massive protests and strikes. According to his department’s own assessment, the contract is likely to ‘impact disproportionately on women’, notably mothers, due to its unsocial hours. As the Medical Women’s Federation has pointed out, the most affected will be those engaged in part-time training, as well as carers and lone parents (the DH helpfully suggests that those affected should make ‘informal childcare arrangements’). Lawyers have advised that the new contract might be in breach of junior doctors’ right to a family life under the Human Rights Act. ‘Any indirect adverse effect on women,’ the DH report concluded, ‘is a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim.’13

  Singlehandedly and carelessly, this new contract will cut off many women’s, notably mothers’, access to the top ranks of the medical profession, making the job of nursing rather than consultancy or surgery their only available path – women as nurses conforming to another stereotype. One newspaper report on the dispute had the title ‘The new junior doctors’ contract is blatantly sexist – so why doesn’t Jeremy Hunt care?’14 Caring might be the problem – permitted on condition that it is hived off into a type of gender-specific, low-grade, women-only quarantine. As if a dedicated neo-liberal society can acknowledge the role of women as carers, but only so far, and certainly not if it disrupts any of the other arrangements by which it believes it can most efficiently perpetuate itself. All this takes place with blithe disregard for the indispensable role of mothers in securing any future whatsoever (motherhood as the downside of the modern world).

  * * *

  In July 2015, a report issued by the Equality and Human Rights Commission stated that every year in the UK a staggering 54,000 women lose their jobs as a result of their pregnancy.15 Seventy-seven per cent of women and new mothers in work experience some form of negative treatment (bullying, snide remarks, straight insults, the suggestion that they are a burden on their employers and the state). Overall, the vast majority of pregnant women face unlawful discrimination or adverse experiences each year (77 per cent of pregnant women and new mothers face discrimination in the workplace compared with 45 per cent a decade ago).16 Under present law, they have three months to file a case (an impossibility for most women reluctant to do so during their pregnancy).17 The problem seems to be getting considerably worse – those estimated 54,000 women fired are double the number reported in 2005. In 2016, Citizens Advice reported a 25 per cent increase over the previous year in people seeking advice on pregnancy and maternity issues.18 Maternity Action is demanding that the legal protection for pregnant women provided by the Maternity and Parental Leave Regulations (Regulation 10) be extended to include the period of notification of a pregnancy to six months after returning to work, the time when women are most vulnerable.

  ‘The government’s approach,’ commented Maria Miller, chair of the 2016 parliamentary report on workplace discrimination, ‘lacks urgency and bite’ (promising a review of the situation, the report rejected the demand for a German-style ban on employers making women redundant during and after pregnancy other than in exceptional circumstances).19 For women at the recruitment stage, there is no redress – if you are visibly pregnant at interview, you are very unlikely to get the job. Likewise, in the US, women are meant to be legally protected against discrimination, but they are not. Between 1935 and 1968, the principle was written into federal policy that women with children were unemployable.20 The situation has barely improved. One woman, working for Procter & Gamble’s Dolce & Gabbana
cosmetics shop at Saks Fifth Avenue in 2014, was told, when she mentioned that one day she would like to be a mother: ‘Pregnancy is not part of the uniform.’ In February 2015, at four months pregnant, after needing first to sit down at moments during her shift, and then short respite periods built into her day – agreed by the management – she was fired.21

  The law needs to be changed, but the problem goes deeper. A friend of mine with a baby under a year old was about to return to work, hoping to conceive her second child in the coming year. She fretted that this would be seen as abusing the system of legally stipulated maternity leave. The idea that everyone in her office, indeed everyone full stop, relies on women having babies – witness the instant social panic at any hint of a falling birth rate – or that she should feel free to plan her pregnancies in the way that felt right for her and her family, did not occur to her (personally, I was just impressed that she didn’t seem fazed by the prospect of two babies under the age of two). Nor was she aware that, were she not in a job with such legal guarantees written into her contract, she would most likely be sacked. She felt guilty. Struggling not to allow motherhood to take over her life completely, she had nonetheless bought into the belief that it was something everyone, apart from her and her baby, should be protected from, something that should not interfere with anything or anybody else.

  No less shocking – in some ways more so – nearly half (41 per cent) of all pregnant women in the UK face risks to their health and safety at work. Four per cent of pregnant women and new mothers in the workplace – a figure Maternity Action calls ‘astounding’ – resign from their jobs because of health and safety concerns. The existing obligation on all employers to carry out a risk assessment that considers female employees is, they state, ‘woefully inadequate’.22 Legally, if an employer refuses, or is unable, to make the working environment safe for these women then they are entitled to be suspended on full pay. It doesn’t happen. Maternity Action is demanding that a ‘no safe work’ leave be legally formalised. Instead, women in such conditions are forced to take early maternity or sick leave, sign themselves off, as if, once again, it were their own bodies and health at fault.

  As feminism has long pointed out, most bodily experiences of women from menstruation to pregnancy to menopause without distinction tend to be regarded as a form of debilitation or illness: too much blood and guts, bodies either too wet or too dry, bodies that inconveniently blur the boundaries between inside and out. Punishing pregnant women and mothers is part of a pattern (British maternity pay is among the worst in Europe, behind, for example, Croatia, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Italy, Spain and France).23 Although we should never underestimate the effects of an increasingly ruthless, profit-driven global economy, it seems that in all these cases there is something far more than a cost–benefit analysis involved. The same employers who provide routine assessments for workers with a health condition, an injury or disability are still refusing individual risk assessments for pregnant women and new mothers. To add insult to injury, 10 per cent of pregnant women in the UK are discouraged by their employers from attending antenatal clinics, putting their health and that of the unborn baby at risk.

  So if I had been more honest with my friend, I would not just have pointed out that everyone needs mothers, or at least some women to be mothers, and that being a mother is hardly an antisocial activity. I would have added that, while this much is undoubtedly true, and a banal fact of life, we should never underestimate the sadism that mothers can provoke. I probably would have been somewhat apologetic (as if merely having such an ugly thought made me personally responsible for this sorry state of affairs). The reasons for this are many, as we will see, but one reason why motherhood is often so disconcerting seems to be its uneasy proximity to death. First, in the risks of childbearing, which vary so dramatically across race and class: in the US, non-Hispanic black, American Indian, Alaska Native and Puerto Rican women have the highest infant-mortality rates, the disparity between non-Hispanic blacks and whites having more than doubled over the past decade;24 in the UK, 66 per cent of the female prison population are mothers, and twice as many black women are incarcerated than white for the same offences, while asylum seekers and refugees account for 14 per cent of all maternal deaths (despite comprising only 0.5 per cent of the population).25 But also in the sense, less tangible but no less powerful, that the fact of being born can act as an uncanny reminder that once upon a time you were not here, and one day you will be no more. ‘We have a winding sheet in our Mother’s womb, which grows with us from our conception,’ John Donne wrote, ‘and we come into the world, wound up in that winding sheet, for we come to seek a grave.’26 More simply, being born – each time testimony to the monumental physical and mental strength of all mothers – also alerts us to the irreducible frailty of life. Mothers require protection, solace and support from the first moment they find themselves the bearers of new life. Instead, you would think that mothers were the danger against which the workplace needs to protect itself.

  The figures speak for themselves. Employers do not want pregnant women and new mothers on the premises, or if they do, they do not want them healthy and safe, nor for them to attend the clinics that will protect their well-being and the lives of their unborn babies. ‘If Americans Love Moms,’ the New York Times headlined a recent article by Nicholas Kristoff, ‘Why Do We Let Them Die?’27 He is reporting on the fact that the US mortality rate for mothers in pregnancy or childbirth is higher than in any other country in the industrialised world: ‘We love mothers or at least we say we do. We are lying.’28 The message, spoken and unspoken, is clear: we will not take care of you, or allow you to take care of yourself, because part of us wants you out of here, or dead. The visceral fact of motherhood, the fons et origo of our being in the world, is an affront to normal – meaning, free of mothers and babies – life. There is a crucial feminist point to be made here. The problem for everyone, but especially men, Adrienne Rich writes in her path-breaking Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976), is that ‘all human life on the planet is born of woman’ (the first line of her book). ‘There is much to suggest,’ she continues, ‘that the male mind has always been haunted by the force of the idea of dependence on a woman for life itself.’29

  * * *

  The subject of mothers is thick with idealisations, which have been among the foremost targets of feminist critique (ideals are one of the surest ways of punishing others as well as oneself). ‘Stop peddling the myth of the perfect mother’ has been the recent plaint of the founder of Netmums, one of the biggest UK parenting websites, set up in 2000.30 It is one of the most striking characteristics of discourse on mothering that the idealisation does not let up as the reality of the world makes the ideal harder for mothers to meet. If anything, it seems to intensify. This is not quite the same as saying that mothers are always to blame, although the two propositions are surely linked. As austerity and inequality increase across the globe, more and more children are falling into poverty, more and more families are fighting a rearguard action to protect their children from inexorable social decline. Social unrest is therefore likely to increase. In this context, as in so many moments of crisis, focus on mothers is a sure-fire diversionary tactic, not least because it so effectively deflects what might be far more disruptive forms of social critique. Mothers always fail. It will be central to my argument that such failure should not be viewed as catastrophic but as normal, that failure should be seen as part of the task. But because mothers are seen as our point of entry into the world, there is nothing easier than to make social deterioration look like something that it is the sacred duty of mothers to prevent – a type of socially upgraded version of the tendency in modern families to blame mothers for everything. This neatly makes mothers guilty, not just for the ills of the world, but also for the rage that the unavoidable disappointments of an individual life cannot help but provoke.

  Hunt’s new doctors’ contract is by no means
the first time lone mothers have been targeted for especially vindictive treatment. One of the earliest proposed measures of Tony Blair’s 1997 government was to cut benefits to single mothers. This so went against the supposed humanitarian ethos of New Labour that he immediately had to back down. But his move was symptomatic of the way single mothers have often borne the brunt of a particular form of punitive social attention. In troubled times, the most vulnerable always tend to be the easiest targets of hatred. But might there also be a connection between the demand for singular devotion so regularly directed at mothers and the hostility that single mothers – who, even if not by choice, could be said to be obeying this injunction to the letter – have historically provoked? As if the single mother brings too close to the surface the utter craziness, not to say the unmanageable nature, of the idea that a mother should exist for her child and nothing else.

  A single mother also stands as a glaring rebuke to the family ideal. In the US, the number of single mothers has nearly doubled over the past fifty years.31 Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the number of lone, including unmarried, mothers in the UK rose faster than at any other time in history, seemingly unaffected by an increasingly strident Conservative rhetoric of blame. The most pervasive image was of an unemployed teenager who had deliberately got herself pregnant to claim benefits, although as Pat Thane and Tanya Evans point out in their 2012 study of twentieth-century unmarried motherhood, she was ‘very rarely to be found’.32 Over the past century, single mothers have variously received the epithets of ‘sinners, scroungers, saints’ (the title of Thane and Evans’s book). The first and last string them between religious opprobrium and holiness (neither of this world), the second more prosaically casts them as objects of moral contempt. Although today the religious vocabulary is somewhat muted, by depicting Bimbo Ayelabola in the unmistakeable guise of a welfare ‘leech’, the Sun headline was therefore following a tradition (‘saint’ is hardly an epithet about to be applied to foreigners).