Irish feminism is finally starting to embrace motherhood, writes Victoria White on International Women's Day. But only radical voices will change views of women in the home.
Imagine having eight children under eight, feeling your stomach lurch as you wash out a bucket of nappies and think, God grant I'm not pregnant again.
I used to blame Irish feminists of the 1970s for ignoring motherhood in their passion to stop women having children. Now I understand them. Theirs was, as it has been described, policy constructed from trauma.
Betty Hilliard's essay on motherhood and the Catholic Church in a new anthology, Motherhood In Ireland, edited by Patricia Casey and launched for International Women's Day today, has unleashed these women's trauma in my imagination. Based on interviews with Irishwomen who became mothers in the 1950s and 1960s, it brings home what it must have been like to have a baby most years of your fertile life. How it made you fear sex. How if you told the priest you were avoiding it you were refused absolution.
The priests don't see many of these women these days. Scandals such as that which engulfed Bishop Casey have made them view the Catholic Church as hypocritical and inhuman, and many of them are never going back. In one of the most dramatic quotations in the volume, one woman describes how she felt when news of Bishop Casey's affair hit the news: "I can't describe to you what it did to me inside. It was like there was a hole there that could never be filled. The shock I got, personally, that day! The more I thought about it and the things that followed, I can say it damaged my whole life."
The Catholic Church may have lost its power to control, but Irish feminism is still in recovery from the struggle to avoid conception. So much so that as Casey - a lecturer in social policy and social work at University College Dublin - says in her previous book, Maternity In Ireland: A Woman-Centred Perspective, the "right to choose" relates only to abortion, never to the right to have a midwife- assisted active birth.
Born in the 1960s, I was brought up by these feminists, and I reckon I thought "mother" was a swear word until I was about 30 and a half. Then I had a short space of time in which to become one. And then I had to live with being, well, a swear word. The period of growth into motherhood finally began for me - and, thankfully, so has Irish feminism's. Casey, mother of four and feminist writer, is an important new voice, one of the few that make me feel I am not alone.
The fact that Motherhood In Ireland is such a broad title shows how rarely this defining part of the identity of 79 per cent of Irish women is treated. The book is best seen as a large journal, one in what will with luck be a series, an eclectic collection of essays on subjects as wide as medicalised childbirth in the "bottleneck of the labour ward", the collapse of breastfeeding, Irish mothers in fiction, motherhood and creativity, motherhood in Gaelic Ireland, infertility, adoption, infanticide and much, much more.
Influential books articulate your own half-articulated intuitions. It took me a long time to grope towards the understanding that motherhood as defined by the patriarchal State had nothing to do with my motherhood. For starters it had very little to do with children. This idea is fleshed out in Valerie Bresnihan's essay "Mind-Maps: Motherhood And Political Symbolism In The Pro-Life Movement", a feminist deconstruction of interviews with representatives from three groups in the anti-abortion movement. They argue not just that women should stay at home with their children but also that they should stay at home full stop. If the woman goes out to work even after her children are reared, she is a threat to the stability of society. "She has so much spare time because of all the technical junk like washing machines," laments one male speaker.
It is the patriarchal definition of motherhood that is enshrined in the Constitution - much quoted in the volume - and that is why its commitment to protecting women's life in the home has been uncontested while today's mothers charge desperately from office to crèche to home. It was never intended to protect them, but have they escaped its clutches or are they living out another version of patriarchy? I think they are. I think feminism itself has taken on the values of patriarchy and that the market economy is exploiting this by selling slavery as freedom.
I don't believe that freedom for mothers is freedom from their children. When one of the anti-abortion women comes out with the line, "Mothers need their children and children need their mothers, something which is politically incorrect to say in today's society," I don't titter, I agree with her.
Sadly enough, this is political dynamite. Why? Because feminism is a philosophy based on western individualism and had great difficulty dealing with the issue of children's dependence. Even in Maternity In Ireland, Casey's powerful analysis of the patriarchal world of the medicalised Irish maternity industry, we read this limp statement: "While this book is concerned with the mother, it acknowledges that attachment is a relationship of which the mother is a part."
Where feminist theory has a problem, the true voice of an artist speaking for herself has none. The visual artists Róisín de Buitléir and Maree Hensey write honestly of the fear they had before the birth of their first children that their art would not survive. "How could one separate this feeling of being no longer one to finding that self again?" Then they speak of the liberation from frantic individualism that having children has brought, most of all the liberation from "trying to remain the same". The sheer joy of having children shines out in the creative writing and memoir. "This is the best I can be," writes Eavan Boland, feeding her child at dawn in her famous poem "Night Feed".
Mary Moynihan's chapter on her mother is simply the story of a woman who loved children. The picture included shows her holding the infant Mary close enough to feel the soft cheek and inhale the baby smell, close enough for the baby to feel her warmth, mutual pleasure brought to them by nature for their own good. Moynihan's mother had another child the next year and then nothing. A botched adoption meant she had to give up a daughter to her birth mother; when the agency offered her another child she cried: "I want my child!" Then, after 15 years of infertility, came the gift of a healthy son, in whom she rejoiced for one week before collapsing and dying from a brain haemorrhage.
Is love disallowed in academic discourse? Is that why it often falls short - in this volume too - when discussing motherhood? You cannot explain without love the choice that any woman would make to opt out of the workforce, even part time, to rear her children. And so it is never presented as choice in feminist discourse, while not having a child is almost always presented as choice.
"Because women conceive, become pregnant, give birth and nurse babies, they tend to find themselves in the role of carer for their infants," writes Casey in Maternity In Ireland. "This caring role is prescribed for women in Irish society." So most Irish mothers who are at home are there because they can't help it? The British magazine Top Santé found in 2001 that only 4 per cent of mothers of preschoolers wanted to work full time.
Is rearing children, even with its domestic drudge, really "shit work", as David McWilliams wrote in the Sunday Business Post recently, or is it perceived as "shit" because it's mostly done by women? Would it be all right if it were done by men? Even in Sweden, where there is a high degree of social equality, the 18 months' paid leave given to either parent on the birth of a child is taken up by women 70 per cent of the time.
Frankly speaking, given that women give birth and nurse and have done for thousands of years, it would have been evolutionary madness for nature not to have customised us further for the care of young infants, and it is likely that we are often better at it. It is pointless to wait until men make up 50 per cent of the carers of young children. What is important is valuing parenting - and valuing children.
Several times in the volume the effect of the patriarchal concept of dualism, dating at least from the Greeks, is mentioned - the "body is bad, mind is good, woman is bad, man is good" malarkey. It is important to remember that the fear is not just of woman's body but also of mother's love. In Plato's republic mothers had to breastfeed, but never their own children. There is a ghastly echo of this in Pauline Dillon Hurney's chapter on infant feeding, when a midwife called June Goulding remembers girls sitting on milking stools in a Co Cork mother-and-baby home the 1950s, forced to feed babies other than their own.
In Máire Mac an tSaoi's chapter on motherhood in Gaelic Ireland, she remembers that she heard seriously advanced in the 1920s and 1930s the idea that children should be farmed out to Irish-speaking kibbutzim because of the dangers of parents' "natural partiality". She contrasts this with the "immediacy and tenderness" of the lullabies and dandling songs in the oral tradition, which tell, she thinks, the true story of mother love.
Motherhood In Ireland vividly shows how the attack on motherhood is nothing new, but I don't hear in it a feminism radical enough to change that. This feminism would insist not just on childcare places but also on the right of mothers to choose to rear their children themselves. This would mean recognising the economic value of child-rearing, the first primary education. It would mean, really, fighting for the welfare of children - and understanding that the welfare of mothers is the same thing.
Motherhood In Ireland, edited by Patricia Casey, is published by Mercier Press, €20
