Joanna Pocock

The many contradictions of modern motherhood

Like a sensible friend with all the facts at her fingertips, Eliane Glaser addresses the conflicts of childbearing and provides reassurance

For most working mothers, childcare costs are simply unaffordable. Credit: Alamy 
issue 22 May 2021

There are few certainties in life. Death and taxes are the ones regularly trotted out. However, there is another that rarely gets mentioned: the fact that every single human who has ever existed has come out of a woman’s body. This act of creation, while being a marvel, has also become banal. In Motherhood, Eliane Glaser deftly juggles the wonder and boredom, the joy and pain and the many profound contradictions that attend modern motherhood.

Philosophers, child psychologists and anthropologists from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Donald Winnicott and Margaret Mead provide cultural and social contexts for how our attitudes towards motherhood have changed throughout history. ‘There is enormous diversity in the way birth is thought about, treated and understood,’ wrote Mead in 1967: ‘In some societies, births are considered physiologically normal and in others pathological.’

If I’d had this book in my childrearing days I might have managed a few more nights of sleep

At the heart of Glaser’s book is the idea that nature is often seen to exist in opposition to civilisation and scientific progress. ‘Natural childbirth and motherhood is presented as the counter-cultural “minority” fighting for recognition in the face of prevailing orthodoxy,’ Glaser writes.‘Yet the reality is the opposite.’ She believes our current embrace of natural birth movements means that women are prevented from engaging fully in life outside the domestic sphere:

The attention paid to breastfeeding seems almost totemic, whereas other, more clear-cut improvements to children’s lives — generous funding for state schools or reducing air pollution, for example — seem less of a priority.

This she puts down to our shift from a collective feminism to one whose focus is on personal choice and individualism suited to our consumerist era.

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