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.
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