What is the secret of motherhood? How 20th Century Scientists Got It Wrong

In “The Myth of the Good Mother: Unlearning Our Bad Ideas About Being a Good Mom,” Nancy Reddy juxtaposes her own raw story of early motherhood with a survey of the greatest successes of 20th-century parenting science (or the worst failures, depending on how you look at it). he.

“Before I had a baby, I was good at some things,” Reddy writes in her introduction, tantalizingly titled “Love is a Wonderful State,” a phrase she gets from psychologist Harry Harlow. Harlow was one of the first academics to study the “science” of motherhood in the laboratory. That Reddy finds holes in Harlow's legacy while pursuing a doctorate at the University of Wisconsin, where Harlow conducted his research, is one of the book's appealing ironies.

Harlow's most famous experiment placed baby rhesus monkeys next to wire cylinders wrapped alternately in hot toweling cloth or barbed wire. The babies clung without fail to the “cloth mother,” “proving” to Harlow that the ideal mother was “soft, warm, and tender… with infinite patience.” Reddy had imagined herself as a cloth mother, like “All the good mothers who surrounded me in Madison,” but her new son “howled,” “roared,” “kicked,” and thrashed,” his cries “a emergency within my entire body.” body.” Sleepless and gripped by an identity crisis, Reddy spends her days reading Harlow's articles: “If Harlow had discovered what made a good mother… on the same campus where I studied, I wanted to learn it too Instead, what he learns is the power of culture to bend science to its will.

Harlow pushed what was at the time a radical position: that breastfeeding was not necessary for bonding. This led one contemporary journalist to comment that “anyone can be a mother,” presumably even a father.

Unsurprisingly, this message never reached the postwar American public, even when Harlow (and John Bowlby, his sometime collaborator and the creator of “attachment theory”) had their findings covered by widely read magazines. The media heavily emphasized the conclusion that mothers needed to be kind and constantly available.

The scientists also appeared to distort the social implications of their work. In a report commissioned by the World Health Organization on the status of mothers and children in the postwar era, after state-sponsored daycares allowed women to enter the workforce en masse, Bowlby included to the “working mother” in a list of the main dangers for children. Sandwiched between “famine” and “bombs.”.”

As Harlow's findings were reconsidered in the 1950s, the campaign to keep mothers out of the labor market redesigned the laboratory. Reddy compares the experimental setup of psychologists who “filled cages with mother rats…each isolated mother with her offspring” – an attempt to “study motherhood in its essence” – with the world of “the ideal housewife of the suburbs, alone at home with her young children.” Bowlby and Harlow “looked at animals that suited them and saw what they expected to find”: that the unattainable ideal of motherhood meant that women did everything alone, all the time.

Reddy aims to shed light on how social science fed mothers the “false choice” between being everything to our babies or having other ambitions: work, friends, anything outside of domestic life. And she wants to change that mentality to a vision of “work-sharing,” a version of what cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead called “alloparenting.”

This is what biologist Jeanne Altmann discovered studying baboons in the wild. Baboon mothers, through social hierarchy and grooming, formed networks of female friendships to “protect their young from danger and identify food sources to share.” Reflecting on an idyllic time in her childhood, Reddy describes how her recently divorced mother and recently divorced aunt shared domestic spaces and child care, how her four daughters thrived in their rickety old houses, watched “The Cosby Show” and did their homework. together. Until both women remarried and moved their daughters with their new husbands. “We were baboons,” Reddy writes with sad tenderness. “Then we went back to being rats.”

“The Myth of the Good Mother” is full of memorable lines like this (“Some men will actually invent a whole academic discipline instead of going to therapy,” Reddy jokingly writes about Bowlby). But what saves the author from being too clever or simplistic is her rigor in examining how often academic studies of motherhood were based on predictable, socially motivated conclusions, driven by men who often neglected their own families.

Reddy's journey is also personal: her advocacy for collaborative motherhood is informed by her terrible loneliness, so common in the United States, in her first year as a mother. It captures how the occasional visits she receives from friends and family accentuate her general isolation, and how a woman in a postpartum exercise class sees her when she feels like an invisible, stifled failure.

Like the mythical good mothers she seeks to deconstruct, Reddy is white, heterosexual and wealthy, and raises her children in a two-parent home. Conspicuously absent from the book are the difficulties of mothers who do not occupy the same social position and the roles played by race and class.

But focusing on well-off whites helps make Reddy's point clear. Everything Reddy experiences, from the moment she unclasps her nursing bra to expose her “raw and cracked” nipples to her baby's body contorted by inexplicable screams, is an ordinary part of what America sees. considers a desirable parenting situation. When Reddy tells us that she “was a bleeding and dripping and crying mammal in the produce section” and that she barely survived, she is articulating the experience of countless women across the spectrum of American motherhood. She attributes her survival to her ability to ask for and receive help from the community of women she had gathered around her, with a history of always meeting her basic needs (decent healthcare, food, and housing). If they hadn't been… well, what would have happened then?

That question resonates when, one summer day, Reddy's sister calls her to tell her that a woman they knew as children took her own life in a state of postpartum psychosis. “I know you've been going through tough times,” Reddy's sister says, crying. Reddy assures her that while it is difficult, it is not “like that”: she is “fine” or well enough. The other woman, who is not well, becomes Reddy's shadow as the book propels us through her son's first year of learning to roll over, stand up, walk and talk. Reddy's feeling of invisibility is made even more real by the definitive absence of his double.

I sometimes wished “The Myth of the Good Mother” was a traditional memoir, because the personal sections are so compelling. But the narrative juxtaposition with intensive research serves a purpose. By rooting the unattainable standards that mocked her in the absurd science of the last century, Reddy takes aim at underlying power structures, including higher education and white supremacy. “The myth of the good mother” ends with the pandemic; As the walls close in on Reddy, she writes, “I finally broke.” Many of us did. She resolves this by insisting that her husband share the burden, a transition that she says occurs… after years.

I believe Reddy and admire his warning that “a man who really can't, or won't, learn to prepare lunch… is not a man you should stay married to.” Her book makes clear how much work we still have to do to untangle motherhood's notions of goodness and prescribed work.

Emily Van Duyne is an associate professor of writing at Stockton University and author of “Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation.”