Abstract
Motherhood has long been a site of idealisation, romanticisation and contestation. The Western, middle-class model of mothering, propagated by mainstream psychology discourses, aspires neo-liberal ideals of individual responsibility and intensive child-rearing. Hegemonic accounts of motherhood from the Global North generally fail to address the lived experiences of underprivileged mothers in the Global South. Yet, over decades, cross-cultural research has demonstrated the tremendous variability in child-rearing practices based on culture and class (LeVine & LeVine, 2017; LeVine & New, 2008). The two books reviewed here attest to the value of taking a contextualised approach to motherhood, one that acknowledges disturbing narratives that are often silenced in normative discourses.
Such counter-narratives often emerge from research with low-income mothers living under conditions of constraint. Motherhood and Melancholia: Notebook of a Psycho-Ethnographer by Lou-Marie Kruger elucidates the intricate realities and lived experiences of low-income mothers in the Dwarsriver valley of post-apartheid South Africa. Drawing on years of ethnographic observations, interviews and innumerable clinical encounters between Kruger and her students, the book portrays how various aspects of life, such as home, labour, love, work, food, pleasure and illness, can become brutal and unbearable for indigent women. One key contribution of this book is the analysis of poverty as a form of slow violence, exacerbated by the structural forces associated with globalisation and the unevenness of development. The Dwarsriver valley can be considered a prototype of the economic crisis of broader South Africa. Redistribution of wealth privileges certain individuals or groups at the cost of others. In academic writing, the slow violence of poverty is frequently overlooked, and there is a general perception that violence is instantaneous and ferocious.
What is also refreshing is Kruger’s self-reflexivity and ambivalence about being a white academic writing about marginality. She lays bare her moments of severe self-doubt, saying,
“My problem with writing is not simply a problem of a wandering mind and too many free associations. It is the rather uninteresting paralysis of a white academic and writer involved in the paradoxical task of writing about the crumbling of structures “that keep our kind in place”. It is the problem of white writing. Locked into the hierarchical position I occupy, writing seems to be an impossibility.”
There are a total of nine chapters in the book, along with a prologue and an epilogue. Chapters are arranged around the themes of home, birth, love, labour, hunger, distress and death, respectively. In Home, Kruger unpacks the multiple meanings of “home”. Instead of being a space that provides comfort and warmth, the home often emerges as a space of trauma, competition, exploitation, betrayal and abandonment for many. Rose, a 26-year-old woman, responded that her house is “noisy”, and it drives her crazy. In other contexts, scholars have called into question normative assumptions about family as an unproblematically supportive space, instead emphasising its inherent ambivalences and conflicts (e.g., Pinto, 2014).
Importantly, Kruger pays attention to the issue of physical homelessness, often ignored by psychologists and psychotherapists who tend to focus on psychological homelessness. In the valley, a lack of physical space meant that boundaries between households and people were porous. Inhabitants were all too familiar with each other. Gossip worked as a mode of social control. Physical and sexual abuse abounded, even though there was usually collective silence about sex and violence. The disempowered women of the valley negotiated their survival through self-silencing, repressing, shutting off or splitting off parts of themselves that did not fit the norms of society.
The third chapter, Birth, deals with women’s experiences surrounding pregnancy and childbirth. A majority of women in the valley had their first child during their teenage years before getting married or settling with a permanent partner, and motherhood is often actively desired and looked forward to by adolescent women. Such accounts are reminiscent of Scheper-Hughes’ (1993) Classic Death Without Weeping, a brilliant and layered ethnography of motherhood in Brazil. Many women in Kruger’s study commented that motherhood brought them hope and described their conscious decision to become pregnant. We hear of stories of 15-year-old Anthea, who spoke about her deliberate decision to have a child at 14, refusing to take contraceptive pills. The astonishing aspect of Anthea’s story was that her father agreed with her decision to have a baby. Narratives, such as Anthea’s contest the popular notion that teenage pregnancies are undesirable and that teenage mothers are naive victims without agency who fall prey to exploitative predators (see also Lesko, 2012 here).
The next chapter, Love, portrays how love and violence are often intertwined in the valley. Several women held on to violent relationships with great submission, despite repeated experiences of betrayal and abuse at the hands of their partners, hoping for a better future. While they often endured violent relationships out of conditioning as well as empathy, they also expressed sentiments of moral outrage, anger and insistence on justice, thereby illustrating that they are not powerless victims.
An important contribution of the book is the study of motherhood from the vantage point of economic disadvantage. In Hunger, Kruger elaborates on the conflict that low-income mothers experienced in not being able to subscribe to the ideal of all-providing motherhood given their resource constraints and poverty-related limitations. Some mothers talked about feeling as if they were vying with their children for food, quite like the women in Scheper-Hughes’ (1993) research, who were afflicted by circumstances of persistent scarcity and political apathy in rural Brazil.
Importantly, Kruger does not to resort to deterministic judgements about impoverished mothers, but pays attention to the context of women’s distress and rage. Ultimately, Kruger’s book calls for a different sort of psychotherapy, one that is deeply invested in the social, cultural and contextual factors underlying distress.
Another recent work that strongly highlights counter-hegemonic voices about maternal experiences is Orna Donath’s ground-breaking book Regretting Motherhood: A Study. The book portrays the lived experiences of 23 Israeli women from various social locations who speak about their ambivalence and regret in relation to motherhood. To her credit, Donath has delved into a topic that is still uncommon, whether in public debates or within sociological or feminist discourses. As someone who has chosen to be childfree, Donath is both an insider and an outsider, demonstrating the radical empathy required for a project of this sort.
Apart from the introduction and an epilogue, the book consists of six chapters. The first chapter deals with the conflict between societal expectations about motherhood and women’s experiences. Here, Donath’s contribution lies in locating regret within feminist critiques about the politics of pro-natalist policies that tend to naturalise motherhood, on one hand, while also simultaneously placing it within discourses of choice. The naturalisation of motherhood results in a tendency to individualise regret as related to the inadequacy of certain mothers who are seen as incapable of coping with the demands of care. In turn, this individualisation of regret ignores the very gendered nature of care work, which feminist scholars have long called attention to (e.g., Hochschild & Machung, 1990). Biological determinism assumes motherhood as a natural path for all women with reproductive capacity. On the other hand, the discourse of “choice” propagated by neoliberal politics and capitalism presumes that women choose motherhood to celebrate their bodies and experience life in a novel way. By drawing on insights from feminist scholars like Angela McRobbie, Rosalind Gill and Rickie Solinger, Donath challenges the idea of “free choice”. She argues that the idea of motherhood as a choice ignores the harsh realities of inequality, patriarchy, social control and power relations, all of which are implicated in motherhood, care work and women’s choices. Women from oppressed communities and classes might have limited agency in their reproductive choices, while disabled women might be dissuaded from motherhood (Ghosh, 2016; Vaidya, 2016). Poor women and women of colour are often condemned for creating “large” families. All these examples reveal the intersectionality of motherhood and the limitations of the notion of “choice”.
Donath’s encounters with mothers revealed that several women entered into motherhood as a result of passive decision-making or conforming to societal norms without even thinking about it. Nina, one of her respondents, said, “Things happened, transpired without a deliberate hand”. Another woman, Sophia, considered motherhood an escape from the trauma and pain she had experienced in her natal family. Donath proposed a term “institutionalized will” which refers to women’s internalised belief that motherhood is central to gaining acceptance, dignity and wholeness from society.
In the second chapter, the author discusses how the status quo regulates maternal behaviour by creating a dichotomy of “good mothers” and “bad mothers.” One of the key contributions of the author is the distinction drawn in the book between regret and ambivalence. While maternal ambivalence has started to receive more attention and legitimacy in academic and popular discourses as an inevitable aspect of motherhood, there is still a reluctance to acknowledge the presence of regret. In the literature on maternal ambivalence, women are often depicted as eventually resolving their conflicted feelings over time (Lowy, 2021). The respondents in Donath’s study defy the linear-progressive story of a mother who gradually comes to terms with the maternal experience. Class and social privilege play a vital role here. The freedom to express one’s own reluctance towards mothering and to live according to it might be affordable for a woman with greater social privileges. However, a woman from an underprivileged background might find it difficult to live by her conviction and may feel forced to change her position.
In the third chapter, Donath delves deeper into the nature of mothers’ regret. For the women portrayed in this book, the reasons behind regret are diverse. Many women demonstrated considerable self-awareness, speaking about the experience of losing life by giving life. They experienced a sense of loss of certain peculiarities of their intimate relationships, a loss of sense of their previous existence in the world, a loss of creativity and even a loss of words. While society considers non-mothers as deficient and empty, these mothers opine that motherhood turned them into deficient people with persistent feelings of emptiness.
The most striking chapter is the sixth chapter, which highlights the inevitability of exploring and accepting the diversity of maternal subjectivities instead of reinforcing the notion of an essentialist “mother”. Donath also emphasises the fact that favourable living conditions and a strong support system do not guarantee maternal satisfaction, whereas the subjective world of the mother is the prime determinant. Some women may regret motherhood because of constraining circumstances and structural violence, while some women may regret motherhood solely for psychological or intrinsic reasons.
Several women in Donath’s study emphasised the inevitability of framing an alternative social and cultural interpretation of post-pregnancy experiences. At the same time, the mothers were able to distinguish their feelings about motherhood from their feelings towards children. Even though they regretted mothering, they loved their children.
Regretting motherhood helps to challenge the widely accepted notion that mothers are selfless beings whose ultimate purpose is to ensure the well-being of their children. As one mother of four children expressed, “There is no reason in the world to have children. Generally speaking, the suffering is too deep, the difficulty is too great and the pain is too profound to justify the possibility that I will be able to enjoy motherhood when I’m old”. Donath’s book is a bold attempt to highlight the diversity of maternal experiences and give voice to the unspeakable aspects of motherhood that often get repressed in an effort to maintain a hegemonic status quo.
Both books successfully unearth repressed or buried aspects of maternal experiences. What is also powerful is the radical empathy and self-reflexivity of authors. Kruger wonderfully portrays how mothering experiences in the valley were entangled with psychological experiences and responses to poverty. While the women in Kruger’s book deviate from ideals of motherhood due to constraining circumstances or lack of resources, those in Donath’s study deviate from such ideals for psychological reasons. While looking at non-normative maternal experiences, it becomes important to adopt an intersectional perspective. These are not just books about the gendered nature of caregiving or the burden of child-rearing on women. Significantly, these books gesture to the importance of paying attention to outlier experiences of mothering and thereby resisting the oppression of compulsory motherhood.