MMO: Your
previous book was on the nature of privacy. A Potent Spell:
Mother Love and the Power of Fear centers on a different
kind of personal experience— the intensive “emotional
and cognitive” work that mothers invest in protecting
their children. What inspired you to write about this topic?
JMS: There
was no one experience that made me focus on the relationship between
mother love, fear, and decreased mobility in mother’s lives,
but the general experience of raising my kids led me to discover
what I felt was a disconnect between my experience and popular
cultural assumptions about motherhood. Also, I work as a psychotherapist,
and while raising my children, I felt a large disparity between
how my profession had traditionally viewed mothers — as so
harmful, and my own observations and feelings. I wanted to examine
this disconnect in a larger context, and I also wanted to address
what was wrong — how our culture has historically undermined
women’s power by exploiting the sense of vulnerability mothers
feel in attachment to their children.
MMO: The
subtext of so much “expert” child-rearing advice
is that mothers will damage their children— both
physically and psychologically— if they deviate from
the prescribed parenting methods of their time. One of the
elements you address in the book is that mothers have the power
to destroy their children as well as protect them, and how
this may have influenced attempts to exert authority over mothers’ behavior
by manipulating their fear of child loss.
JMS: It’s
absolutely true. The “omnipotence” of motherhood has
a dark side. Mothers can harm or kill infants and children. They
rarely do it; yet it’s frightening to contemplate and may
be one of the reasons cultures so consistently attempt to control
mothers, and to threaten them. One of the experiences that sparked
my interest in exploring the complexities of mother love and fear
was seeing a performance of Bacchae [a classic Greek drama
by Euripides that culminates in a mother unwittingly killing her
son during an ecstatic ceremony]. I was deeply moved
by the story, and I wanted to understand why. There seemed to be
many threads in the drama that connected to motherhood and power,
and how mothers’ power is expressed or usurped and obscured.
Untangling the meaning of the play was central to writing the book,
even though only a short section of the text is actually devoted
to an analysis of Bacchae.
MMO: Our
culture generally lacks an established context and common language
to articulate the true psychological, emotional and social complexities
of motherhood. How did you approach this in writing A Potent
Spell?
JMS: It’s
important to understand that this language is missing for a politically
important reason. One way to undercut the power of any group is
to obscure the truth of their experience. We typically think about
that as a silencing of voices. You might say it’s against
the interests of the dominant culture to let groups who are marginalized
or oppressed own a vibrant language to describe their reality.
Instead, we construct descriptions and expectations of motherhood
based on ideologies and stereotypes that preserve the status quo.
Our society doesn’t
take notice of mothers’ experience because we don’t
want to. Here’s an example: in the growing literature on
maternal attachment, there are yards and yards of references that
relate to the experience and development of the child. But I’ve
yet to find any resources on the meaning of maternal attachment
to mothers. Something critical is missing, not just in our language
but also from our cultural, scientific and political consciousness.
MMO: You
note that new mothers are often overwhelmed by a sense of vulnerability
when they realize what it means to be responsible for an utterly
dependent infant. You also suggest that developing an awareness
of the emotional weight of the mother-child bond may be core
to the transformative quality of motherhood. Given that this
experience is so common— and
may even be universal— why don’t we as women,
and society as a whole, have a greater shared understanding
of its nature and effect?
JMS: Our
interest in the experience of motherhood and its relative personal
and cultural importance to women is new. Until very recently, it
just hadn’t crossed our minds that motherhood should be given
serious consideration as a distinct aspect of womanhood – For
the greater part of history, there was no concept that a woman
should be anything other than a mother, and motherhood has been
considered intrinsic to femaleness.
The capacity to give meaning
to motherhood as a discrete experience in women’s lives depends
on a larger cultural understanding that a separation exists between
who women are as women, and who women are as mothers. The effort
to build this understanding is just beginning. In contemporary
society, we are sometimes unwilling to notice how new and fragile
our efforts to gain broad acceptance of women outside the context
of motherhood actually are.
MMO: You
write about the concept of the “free mother”— a
mother who has the freedom to make active choices about how
she leads her life as a woman. Can you explain how this concept
differs from more radical feminist formulations that suggest
women can only achieve equality if they are completely liberated
from the biological and cultural constraints of child-bearing
and child-rearing?
JMS: I
personally know a number of women who felt the only road to freedom
was not to have kids. And it’s sad, really, that women sensed
their opportunities for equality were so limited that some felt
there was no other choice but to forgo motherhood. These women
were attuned to the fact that cultural conditions surrounding motherhood
are deeply resistant to fairness and equality, and they rejected
the idea of making an asymmetrical sacrifice.
MMO: Our
culture takes a dim view of the idea of “free” motherhood— in
your book, you note that most popular representations of non-conforming
mothers are commonly associated with abandonment, neglect,
moral lassitude, premature death and the wholesale dissolution
of family life. A mother who places “her life” above “family
life” is rarely depicted as content, or as deserving
happiness, affection or a rich and rewarding life.
JMS: Shame
is a powerful mechanism in our society, and when we encounter negative
representations of mothers who have stepped outside the bounds
of cultural expectations we should be mindful of that power. We
use shame to keep people in line. Linking the desire for a more
expansive life to such shameful behavior is a very effective way
to coerce mothers into compliance with the status quo.
MMO: You
describe the “free mother” as “one who feels
she is in fact living her life, and has adequate food, sleep,
wages, education, safety, opportunity, institutional support,
health care, child care, and loving relationships”. Most
of these variables are in short supply for all but the most fortunate
mothers. What needs to change in our society to create an environment
that supports free motherhood?
JMS: You
can probably answer that question as well as I can! But I think
the most important thing to keep in perspective is that we are
at a starting place, and that while the current conditions are
not advantageous, there is some cause for optimism. When we talk
about motherhood and freedom, we need to begin by being aware of
how recent the changes are that allow women to possess any sense
of entitlement to equality and autonomy. Because this is so brand
new, we haven’t figured out how to reshape our social structure
to bear the newness of it.
Whenever a society experiences
this type of shift, there is a strong resistance to altering established
social and political patterns. Even though it may be obvious some
systems and institutions no longer serve a productive function
in the changing world, reinforcing the existing framework is often
seen as preferable to promoting changes that may challenge the
existing distribution of social and political influence, particularly
by the groups that hold the greatest power.
We can expect to hear
time and time again that what lies on the path ahead is far more
dangerous and destructive than the restrictive conditions we’ve
endured in the past, and these regressive messages can be very
effective in slowing progress. We have to hang on to the hope that
we can move ahead. We have to be brave enough to imagine that there
is always potential to improve the human condition, and not lose
sight of the conviction that we all have a legitimate claim to
justice and equality. If we look around the world today, an honest
assessment would confirm, as the World Health Organization and
United Nations have suggested, that most mothers labor more hours
than men, earn less, have fewer political rights, are more frequently
the victims of intimate physical violence… and so forth.
There’s much work to do. We mustn’t be distracted by
sentimental claims about the good old days, or mythologies that
claim that the good mother is submissive and disproportionately
self-sacrificing.
mmo : March
2003 |
