As time went by new practices came into force and production began to take place in the home something that the mother would supervise while the father went out to work. Slowly two separate spheres of influence were developing those in the home and those outside of it. Women were still responsible for child rearing and maintenance of the household. However the mother was responsible for training the girls and the father was responsible for training the boys. This is an example of socialization and many feminist writers argue that role training or cognitive learning by the mother of the daughter is one of the factors that attributes to the continued practice of mothering by women. Chodorow (1978) presents this idea in her work but whilst seeing it as valuable denies that it is a sufficient explanation for why women perpetuate the concept of motherhood.
This is the general view of parenthood pre industrialization and capitalism. With the change in production and the shift away from the home, the two separate spheres of the public and private become even clearer. Women’s domain was seen to be the private sphere at home and men’s domain was seen to be the public sphere of business and politics. The role of the mother was now reduced solely to care giving for both their husbands and children as they were now less responsible for the production in the home. The emphasis in parenthood shifted onto a more personal footing, especially as religious ideas were given a new impetus. In the BBC online resource (Abrahms, L, 2001 [online]) it shows Queen Victoria as the model mother as “an icon of late 19th century feminity and domesticity” (Abrahms, L, 2001 [online]). Motherhood was portrayed as a vocation for which all women were destined, and if they chose to rebut this then they became deviants of society, as motherhood was the pinnacle achievement for women. Increasingly, as society began to develop a social conscious, motherhood also meant women had a great social role in bringing up healthy happy children.
The introduction of schools and external childcare solutions began to revolutionize motherhood. With more time available to them and the role of educating their children slipping away from them women turned to the public sphere to occupy themselves. Also as medicine and living conditions improved infant mortality rate fell and women began to have fewer children. However it is really the event of two world wars, which leads to the most dramatical change in the role of women and therefore the concept of both fatherhood and motherhood. Women were needed to work while men went away to fight in both world wars. The world wars also left many women widowed and children fatherless due to the sheer number of deaths. There was a significant lack of men of a certain age group due to the wars and many women now had to provide for their families, so going to work was inevitable.
In the 20th Century there were many issues with effected and revolutionized the concept of parenthood. Most notably there is the rise in women’s rights and feminism, women were given the right to vote in 1918 and gradually gained access to all areas of work and education. The role of the traditional family began to deviate with the ease of divorce and the consequential decline in marriage. In 1923 women were allowed to use the same terms as men for divorce and in 1969 ‘irretrievable’ breakdown was introduced as a term for divorce, this meant that whilst in 1961 there were 27,224 divorces the figure doubled in 1969 to 55,556 cases of divorce, and then again by 1972 to 124,556 (National Statistics [online]). Consequently the marriage rate has been on the decline since, the number of first time marriages peaked in 1970 with 340,000 marriages but in 2001 this reached an all time low at less than half of that to 158,560(National Statistics [online]). This has meant an increase in the number of lone parent families; in 2004 1 in 4 children were in lone families compared to 1 in 14 in 1972 (National Statistics [online]). There have been medical advances that have influenced the concept of parenthood. The introduction of the pill in 1961 meant women now had a choice about whether they became mothers and when they became mothers. The pill’s popularity can be seen by the fact that between 1962 and 1969 users rose from 50,000 to 1 million in the UK alone and the figure at the moment stands at approximately 11 million women who use the pill alone not counting the other forms of contraception that have become available. Artificial insemination was the other major medical breakthrough that has affected the concepts of parenthood with the first test tube baby being born in July 1978 artificial insemination has since led to issues such as surrogate mothers and insemination by donor. The case of Baby M in 1987 was one of the widely publicized cases of surrogate motherhood and the issues involved with this.
I will look first at the issue of surrogate mothers and how they affect the concept of motherhood. Due to the rise of infertility in our society contract motherhood has become a way of easing the pain for many couples that want to have babies. However Gibson (1994) critiques this social practice and makes some interesting points about our materialistic society, which has come to see human beings more and more as commodities. It has been argued that women have more control over their bodies than ever before but Gibson (1994) puts forward the view that women increasingly are loosing this control especially with regards childbirth as mothers are being controlled by the fathers or doctors wishes on abortion, fetal surgery and childbirth. Gibson (1994) states “there is a strong and arguably growing tendency for physicians and judges to regard pregnant women as simply ‘the fetal environment’ and sometimes a hostile environment from which the fetus must be protected.” (Gibson, 1994, p403) From this clinical view the child itself can be seen as an object which can be owned or bought and in what can be seen as a prenatal and family led society which attempts to reinforce the so called ideals of the traditional family owning such a child is apparently essential for happiness.. In the Baby M case however the surrogate mother after giving birth and holding her child was unable to go through with handing the child over. Similarly occasions where donors want access to a child can be seen in the case of Mary K and Jhordan in 1978, that Laquer (1990) comments on. Jhordan as a friend of a lesbian couple donated sperm in an informal agreement for the couple to have a child. Once this child was born though Jhordan wanted a role in the child’s life. This new technology causes problems as an extra person is brought into the parent equation in many cases. This causes problems socially as religious and government ideals still want us to hark back to the days of the supposed ideal of the nuclear family, but now we have a three-parent family. As with divorce in many surrogate or donor cases gaining ownership of the child becomes all-important. The battle that ensues in contract motherhood cases can amount to who puts in more to the baby physically the mother of the father, as we see in the case of Baby M. However as concepts motherhood and fatherhood cannot be reduced down to biology, they are about nurturing and caring for a child in both an emotional and physical sense. The divide as well between the concept of motherhood and fatherhood seems to be shifting as men even as donors want to become more involved and women as surrogate mothers seem to be content with not being involved with offspring.
Coltrane (1997) highlights this in his example of Gary and Susan Carter, he uses Chodorow’s (1978) suggestion that the ability to nurture is present in both girls and boys but men suppress this as an attempt to maintain the masculinity and the example of the Carters to show that Motherhood and Fatherhood are not so dissimilar in the 20th century. Although the Carter’s equal split of work and childcare met with negative responses from the social world, as a family it worked for them. Throughout the latter part of the 20th century there does seem to be a rise in the contribution of the father to the family, Smith (1995) looks at the ‘Children of the 90’s’ study and it shows an increase in father’s care of their babies between 1950 and 1990. Similarly in line with the example of the Carters the study also shows an increase in the employment of mothers, however in many of the cases studied unlike the Carters it was not the father who then took over childcare but a female relative or childcare organization. However this is only one outlook on fatherhood we cannot ignore the fact that 1 in 4 children live in lone parent families and 22% of children in families live in a single mother family (National Statistics [online]).
The image of the absent father is one that has been paraded by the media, and the idea of holding the father financially responsible for any children he produces has become a state issue with the rise of the child support agency. Each parent’s experience as a lone parent is different there are those who are alone through choice, through divorce or separation, or because of the death of a partner, however none can deny that being a lone parent can have a strain on the parent child relationship for financial and emotional reasons. Although in society all lone parents are demonized as being a drain on state resources and morally wrong in many cases for both parent and child, despite the negative aspects, it can be better for them to be lone parent family. Shaw (1991) states from her studies that “Most women do maintain that there is still a stigma attached to the label of ‘lone parent’” (1991, 155) however they do consider that this is the best option and are wary of remarrying to form the traditional family unit.
The concepts of motherhood and fatherhood are such vast subjects that it would be impossible for me to consider the subject at any other than a brief level. However I feel I have explored some of the issues from time and some modern issues surrounding the concepts and tried to display the varying forms of parenthood. We each come to this issue though with out own emotional baggage from our own families making it that much harder a subject to consider objectively. Therefore it is also difficult to come to any definitive conclusion about the developments of motherhood and fatherhood and why these have taken place. Family and the concepts of parenthood are very subjective issues and vary over not just time, but class, race, location and age and they are constantly changing. Religion and government might try to tell us what is the right way to parent but as we can see from many of the cases mentioned here there is no right way but that there is a need by society to recreate no matter what the means or consequences.
Bibliography
Books
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Chodorow, N, 1978, The Reproduction of Mothering, University of California Press, London,
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Coltrane, S, 1997, Family Man, OUP, Oxford,
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Engels, F, 1972, The origin of the family, private property and the state,Lawrence & Wishart, London
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Gibson, M, 1994, “Contract motherhood: Social Practice in Social Context’, in Jagger, A, (ed), Living with Contradiction, Westview Press, Oxford, pp 402-417
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Laquer, T, ‘The Facts of Fatherhood’, in Hirsch, M & Fox-Keller, E (eds), Conflicts in Feminism, Routledge, London, 1990, pp205-231
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Shaw, S, 1991 ‘The conflicting experiences of lone parents’, in Hardey, M & Crow, G, (eds), Lone Parenthood: Coping with constraints and making opportunities, Harvester Wheatsheaf, London, pp126-143
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Smith, J, 1995,‘The First Intruder: Fatherhood, a historical perspective’, in Moss, P (ed), Father Figures: Fathers in the Families of the 1990’s, HMSO, Edinburgh, pp17-27
Electronic Source
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Abrahms, L, 2001, BBC History Ideals of Womanhood in Victorian Britain, Retrieved on 19th November 2005 from, http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/society_culture/welfare/idealwomen_01.shtml
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National Statistics Online, Retrieved on 19th November 2005 from, http://www.statistics.gov.uk/default.asp