Maternity: science, art and history

Prehistory

About prehistoric mothers, it can be said that the bipedal position to which humans adapted caused the size of the pelvic bone canal to decrease, shortening the gestational period, which is why women began to give birth to less developed offspring than animals. This is not a disadvantage, as acquiring this position allows mothers to have their hands free to care for their immature offspring. As a result, mothers have greater responsibility once the child is born.(5)

The Mother in Greek Mythology and Culture

Female deities appear to have been predominant in a very ancient period of our history, which, according to archaeological findings, has been characterised by organised, peaceful and prosperous societies with rising social, technological and cultural development. Some theorists have based their arguments on the existence of these deities and on the sedentary, peaceful, and earth-bound way of life as indicators of a matriarchal organisation.(5)

In this era, the father's participation in procreation was ignored, while that of the woman was evident, as she preserved and nurtured the seed in her womb and propagated the life of her clan in the visible world. From this perspective, the universe is seen as a benevolent Mother who gives everything, and the earth in its fertility represents women.(5)

This archaic culture is overtaken by the invasion of warrior peoples who impose a patriarchal model of domination. The goddess becomes a subordinate wife, dividing her qualities among multiple goddesses. The multiple goddesses represent complex and multifaceted feminine dimensions.(5)

The virgin goddesses (Artemis, Athena, and Hestia) represent the quality of independence and the ability to focus consciousness on what makes sense to them in Greek mythology. They expand the feminine attributes to include competence and self-sufficiency. In contrast, the vulnerable goddesses (Hera, Demeter, and Persephone) embody the traditional roles of wife, mother, and daughter, expressing the need for affiliation and bonding. These goddesses are raped, dominated, or humiliated by male gods.(6)

In Greek culture, the virtuous woman is the faithful wife, submissive to her husband, who loses her purity through sexual relations and must undergo ‘purification’ to regain her virgin purity temporarily.(6)

Demeter, goddess of the harvest, represents motherhood. Her quality is generosity, which finds satisfaction in caring for and nurturing others. Aphrodite, goddess of love, beauty, and sensuality, enters relationships of her own free will and is never victimised.(6)

The Mother in the Middle Ages

Taking first the interpretations of Genesis, as already noted, Eve is seen as extremely guilty, almost even of killing the Saviour. The most prominent feature is that she allowed herself to be seduced by the serpent and led man into disobedience. For this reason, she bears most of Yahweh's curses. I will multiply your pains in childbearing; in pain you will bring forth children, and you will be under the power of your husband, and he will rule over you (Genesis 3:16).(7)

This first biblical incident, which shows how this ‘sex’ with its persuasion abused the first man, Adam, is homologated to a second episode in the New Testament, that of the woman at the gate, who with her question induces the apostle Peter to deny Christ, excluding him from the life of Christ. These interpretations also show how women are associated with mysterious forces of life and death in many cultures. However, in the Middle Ages, the bridge between Eve and Mary was temporarily broken. An unnamed Eve was replaced by an inaccessible Mary, distancing her from women as a role model because of her virgin motherhood.(8)

The primary obligation of women towards their offspring is to bring them into the world: to bear children continuously until death.(9)

Sterility is experienced as a condemnation and a breaking point in the couple's union.(9)

A mother's love for her children is seen as self-evident, on the assumption that she feels greater pleasure in loving than in being loved. However, this is another aspect of her disadvantage and weakness, as it is a carnal, passionate love that privileges the body, i.e., the health and well-being of her children, at the risk of losing their souls. At the same time, the educational role assigned to the mother is insignificant.(9)

The Mother of the Modern Age

Child-rearing as a Scientific Enterprise and the Idealisation of Motherhood

Towards the end of the 19th century, the new sovereignty of reason and logic, scientific development, and its methods began to dominate medicine, public and domestic administration, child-rearing, and all areas of society. With this, women lost their role as health and care providers in the family, and maternal instincts, virtue, and affection seemed insufficient.(10)

Women, who were seen as incompetent in caring for children, indulgent, irrational, and emotional, had to be trained in child-rearing. Children, whose upbringing became increasingly important, were no longer seen as innocent but once again considered full of dangerous impulses. In low-income families, pressure increased for mothers to stay at home with their children during early childhood and go out to work later.(10)

In the second half of the 19th century, motherhood was identified with child-rearing. In the 20th century in the United States, women organised themselves around the need for a new vision of the romantic ideal, which ironically took the form of the housewife concept, where the home and motherhood were simultaneously valued.(10)

A cult of domesticity emerged, in which women appeared protected in this private context under beliefs about motherhood as a moral duty. From this perspective, motherhood was seen as a social position due to its contribution to social welfare.(11)

Child-rearing thus becomes a task for those who perform it best, namely individual mothers, which is assumed in the ideology of exclusive motherhood. The mother's constant presence is irreplaceable in providing a constructive early experience, with the father not being directly important. This leads to another belief, intensive motherhood.(11)

The task of mothers is now to understand each child as an individual, to be attentive to their stage of development, and to be objective and reflective in responding to their needs. These approaches contribute to giving relevance to the mother in the child's healthy development.(12)

From this perspective, healthy and positive relationships and emotional responses in adult life result from good-quality maternal care. On the other hand, negative personality traits and psychological disorders in mothers have negative repercussions on their children's development.(12,13)

In the culture of the idealised mother, beliefs implicitly identify women with motherhood. Motherhood is the central goal in women's lives, and femininity is a condition of motherhood. Women are considered to have a natural capacity for love, connection, and empathy with others, pointing to the female personality as a model for a more humane world. Motherhood also fulfils a function of satisfying unconscious desires and rewarding the mother herself.(12,14,15)

Another consequence of omnipotent motherhood is the asexual mother.(14,16) Female sexuality outside the circuits of reproduction or the willingness to relate to others thus seems threatening. An indicator of the desexualisation of motherhood would be the lack of questioning about how the mother became pregnant, which leads to the automatic assumption that somewhere there is a man/father/husband who remains undisturbed.(13)

The Mother of the Postmodern Era

According to sociologist Alain Ehrenberg (2000), today's society has been abandoning the criteria of the first half of the 20th century based on a disciplinary model of what is permitted and what is prohibited, broadening perspectives, freedom of choice, and promoting personal fulfilment. Traditional authority is being called into question, and, instead of norms or patterns of upbringing, multiple possibilities emerge from which to choose.(14)

From this point of view, motherhood is beginning to be seen as contrary to personal fulfilment. The number of children is decreasing, and career options and activities outside the home are increasing for women and mothers. The postponement of motherhood is becoming accepted, as evidenced by a widening generation gap.(14)

Parenting itself is beginning to be seen as a collective task. An example is the postnatal leave being granted to fathers in some countries.(15)

On the other hand, the new and growing problems faced by children and young people today (behavioural problems, violence, drug and alcohol addiction, early sexuality, antisocial behaviour, etc.) are no longer seen solely as maternal failure.(15)

Motherhood and culture

To argue that motherhood is a cultural practice also means relativising commonplaces about it, since it implies assuming, from the outset, that the meaning of this practice is closely related to the cultural, social, and economic context in which it occurs.(16)

Approaching the phenomenon of motherhood in this way raises once again the old and false opposition between nature and culture, since automatic responses bring back the aforementioned notions about the ‘nature’ of women, the ‘maternal instinct’, and the ‘feminine essence’.(16)

When analysing motherhood, cultural aspects are usually associated only with its phenomenology, not its existence. In traditional terms, no one would dare to argue that motherhood is a cultural rather than a biological fact today. In other words, it is a gender issue.(16)

Apart from childbirth and breastfeeding, all other activities, behaviours, abilities, attributes, and characteristics were modified according to the prevailing gender value system.(17)

However, technological development has also begun to destabilise aspects related to conception, pregnancy and childbirth, and even more so breastfeeding, introducing heated debates about their ‘naturalness’. Seeing it this way does not imply denying the apparent presence of biological factors in conception, pregnancy, childbirth, and breastfeeding. However, in our day, the real possibilities of avoiding or suspending a pregnancy are so accessible in general terms that not doing so is an act of will, even if the motives remain unconscious.(17)

The contours of motherhood begin to take shape when work moves outside the home. It has been suggested that the growth of industrialisation led men, women, and children to cease being involved in the tasks they shared with work in the home. The “private” sphere emerged from then on, and women were left in this new sphere, markedly different from the public sphere.(17)

From then on, women's position was belittled, either through devaluation or through an equally complex mixture of idealisation and contempt.(17)

At the beginning of the 20th century, a new phenomenon emerged: childhood began to attract more and more attention as a specific and central phase of life, and children's growth and future began to be formulated as key social goals.(18)

Parallel to the social construction of motherhood, the social construction of childhood took shape, which was equally determined by history and culture and operated as a counterpoint to formulating the maternal imaginary.(18)

In recent years, changes in family and working life, advances in medical technology, and the multiplicity of interpretations and practices promoted by the women's movement have continued to shape the meaning of motherhood. Feminist responses have been many and varied. Some theorists see motherhood as a path to psychological development and social change. Others emphasise the repressive aspects of motherhood and attribute to it a central role in devaluation and subjugation to silence and otherness. Still others seek to avoid the dichotomy by focusing their attention beyond motherhood and closer to womanhood, sisterhood, or the shared position with the daughter.(18)

In the mid-1980s, feminists' ambivalence towards motherhood gave way to a new pleasure in bearing witness to and representing the maternal experience.(18)

In recent years, another perspective has begun to gain ground; various academic works have raised serious questions about the effects of changing customs and the crisis of patriarchy on the function and social role of men and women in the reproduction of the social group and the care of new social subjects.(18)

At this stage in the development of feminist theory and gender studies, it is clear that motherhood is a historical and cultural phenomenon, definitively determined by both the moment and the context of its production, and in which the subjective and structural dimensions come into play to construct the meaning of this complex social practice which consists, in short, the reproduction of the social group and the care of new social subjects.(19)

However, in the Latin American context, studies analysing the social construction of motherhood based on the history and cultures of the region are still in their infancy.(19)

Art explores motherhood

Between 1936 and 1939, the artist Francis Bartolozzi produced the series War Drawings while working for the Altavoz del Frente, an organisation dependent on the Government of the Republic. They were not made public until the 1980s because the artist hid them under her mattress and kept them there throughout the dictatorship.(20)

Eighteen of these drawings were shown in the collective exhibition Yo, la peor de todas (I, the worst of all), which I curated in 2017 at the Museum of Navarre. The series, which mainly features women carrying children, sacks, bags, and household goods, explores the daily life and suffering of the population during the Civil War and offers a very particular view of the conflict, far removed from heroism and the front line. It is a peripheral and feminine perspective.(20)

In her drawings, the burden becomes a driving force that activates new imaginaries and produces a subjectivity different from that of the militiaman on the front line, but also different from that of the artist as an individual genius, autonomous and exclusively dedicated to creation, which was the prevailing conception of the artist at the time. The iconography of the charge is also present in the works of other women artists of the period, such as Manuela Ballester, who in ¡Votad al Frente Popular! (1936) depicts a woman carrying a child as an emblem of Republican femininity. Juana Francisca, who, in the Spanish Republic Pavilion in Paris in 1937, presented an image of a woman carrying a dead soldier.(20)

Through carrying, Bartolozzi proposes a different way of understanding relationships with others based on carrying, sustaining, and caring. Anchored in vulnerability and interdependence, and far removed from subject-object relational logic, Bracha Ettinger proposes the concept of ‘carriance,’ which has no direct translation into Spanish and implies carrying something or someone. The positions embodied by Bartolozzi and her contemporaries invite us to think from other logics about images' affective, empathetic, and political qualities.(20)

Feminist art emerged in the late 1960s and broadly encompasses the efforts and achievements of the feminist movement to make art made by women more visible in art history and artistic practice. A distinction must be made between “art made by women”, which can be the same as that made by men in terms of themes and genres, and “feminist art”, which aims to be different, to address other issues, and to challenge traditional values in art.(21)

The movement began in the 1960s, flourished throughout the 1970s, and its effects continue. The growing prominence of women artists in art history and contemporary artistic practice can be attributed to this feminist art movement.(21)

The artists dealt with subjects typically excluded from traditional art, such as female biological functions or motherhood. It is therefore a political art form, intended to be made by women and about women and their social situation, dealing with issues such as rape, racism and working conditions. The media varied, from performances to minor arts such as embroidery, fabrics, cut paper, and patchwork.(21)

The Women's Building in Los Angeles was a prominent museum known for its feminist art exhibitions.(22)

Within feminist art, the pattern painting (decorative painting) or Pattern & Decoration movement stands out. Its name derives from “pattern”, a decorative motif. This movement emerged from a group of Californian artists opposed to minimalism, who used “feminine” craft techniques. This trend is personified by Tony Robbins, Valérie Jaudon, and Myriam Schapiro.(22)