Maiden, Mother, Crone redux
We, as a species that hopes to continue to exist, require women to become mothers. But it seems we have always made that difficult.
Rebecca Mead, in ‘How Should a Mother Be?’ (New Yorker, Jan 26/26) reviews a history of the ‘external factors in the culture [that] make being a good mother a timeless imperative – one that’s endlessly demanded yet impossible to achieve’. The factors change – from the probability of death in childbirth until not so long ago, to the impossibility of excelling in the ‘intensive, intentional parenting’ currently required while building and sustaining a stellar career, all in the absence of adequate public childcare.
No wonder young women who have a choice (which in theory but not in reality they all do) are opting out of motherhood.
In fact, every stage of being a woman is made impossibly difficult by societal expectations. It’s almost as if keeping women down is necessary for lifting men up. (And I understand, as much as I can as a woman, the genesis of that feeling, because in most persevering species, the role of the male is unapologetically minute and momentary. Still, one hopes for a more evolved perspective.)
Let us briefly review how the bar for females doing life right at every stage is structurally challenging.
Maiden: One must be attractive but not a temptress. One must be intelligent and competent but not supplant males. One must be emotionally supportive but not create dependency.
Mother: One must be ‘good enough’ but the expectation is endlessly mutable and malleable, defined by race and ethnicity, differentially accessible by class.
Choosing not to be, or being unable to be, a mother is potentially a crime on its own merit. I recall a client, in tears, saying her culture called her a ‘mule’ because she was barren. We recall the wives of Henry VIII being dispatched because they did not produce a male heir, whereas it was the quality of Henry’s sperm that explained the problem.
Pregnancy can render a woman a fragile porcelain creature who must be protected from living her life, a depersonalized baby-making machine, and everything in between.
(For example, my doctoral research respondents, kids who became legally ‘independent’ when they aged out of the child welfare system at 18, talked a lot about parenting. The girls reported that pregnancy gave them otherwise unavailable status and resources -- and intensified surveillance, proof that they were being cared for so that their baby, which was likely to be apprehended at birth, could get ‘a good start in life’. The boys were chastised for not ‘keeping their pecker in their pants’ and threatened with having to reimburse the state for supporting the mother of their child.)
Mead, in her article, references Pliny of ancient Rome, where the (male-authored) literature describes the expertise of midwifery as unlimited power, which was meant as a warning, not a complement. I see scary parallels with the modern medicalization of childbirth, where it seemed a good idea for women wracked by contractions to lie prone with her feet in stirrups, vagina at easy eye-height for the attending physician, scalpel in hand to perform a preventive episiotomy so that the stitching up of vaginal tears could be neat ‘embroidery’ (an ob-gyn actually said that to me!).
Okay, so procreation is inevitably gendered, and as such, a hotbed for politics. Surely menopause offers relief from the wars?
Crone: I accomplished (ha!) menopause fairly early and easily and thereafter took evil pleasure in horrifying women friends by quantifying the amount of time that returned to a woman’s life when she no longer had to worry about menstruation: the several days per month of actually bleeding, the days leading up to and out of that time, the hours worrying about having or not having a period, the cost of the paraphernalia. (I didn’t even know about the pink tax then.)
Just recently I learned that many young women are choosing birth control that eliminates menstruation, and part of me says, good for them, beating crone-dom to the punch. But another part of me grieves this distancing from the body, this addition of yet another decision over-riding nature. When should one want menopause to take place? What if the answer is never? HRT to the grave? No wonder there’s such a whoopla about menopause at the moment – it just became another stage of life for women to do ‘it’ right!
What I wanted to say about crone-dom is that I think it has become, potentially, a reiteration of motherhood. The expectation that, if you’re still relatively hale and hearty, you subsidize the un-achievable expectations of modern parenting by active grand-parenting, and/or in your spare time, subsidize the inadequacies of the health system to manage elders whose care needs are sadly neglected. Next column, readers.
