"Mother's Intuition": A Feminist Intervention

I think "mother's intuition" is a made up idea that serves a patriarchal power structure, and I want to explain why.  It's going to get very feminist here for a while, so if that's not your cup of tea, you might want to skip this post.  Conversely, if you're one of those people who frequently tells me they don't understand what the point of literary studies is, or you don't understand what I mean when I say I can apply what I learn in my studies to my everyday life, this might be the perfect post for you to read.  

Last spring I wrote a paper on the role of mothers in George Eliot's Middlemarch.  Doing so required me to do a lot of research into the figure of the idealized “Victorian Mother.”  If we think the idea of the "supermom" sprung up after women joined the workforce, we're wrong.  The societal expectations for mothers have never been higher than they were in Victorian times.  Most Victorian mothers didn't work outside the home, but they were much more likely to die trying to have children, they were expected to have a whole gaggle of kids, they were supposed to care for their children without much (if any) help, and their childcare responsibilities were not supposed to interfere with their ability to keep a perfectly clean and orderly house.  AND-- let's not discount this, either-- they were expected to do all of these things in really, really uncomfortable clothes.

 Carolyn Dever has this excellent book (Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud) in which she examines how and why Victorian fiction frequently depicts mothers as dead or otherwise absent.  What she learned from her research is that the frequency of absent mothers in novels far exceeds the real life statistics of maternal death and abandonment during the period.  Working from this discovery, Dever analyzes how the "absent mother" figures as a vehicle through which the role of the mother becomes idealized.  This idealization of the "angelic" or "perfect" Victorian Mother contributed to the creation of an impossible cultural standard of motherhood to which no living, breathing mother could possibly measure up.  Queen Victoria herself, who had 9 children, was often upheld as an embodiment of the perfect Victorian mother, but her personal correspondence reveals that she actually found motherhood quite difficult.  If the woman with the most privilege struggled to raise a family, imagine what motherhood must have been like for women without her means.

This feminist analysis of the paradox of the idealized Victorian Mother reveals the ways that this socially constructed notion served to limit female power.  On the one hand, the highly patriarchal Victorian culture claimed to celebrate the role of the Mother-- to prize her over all else.  While this would seem to elevate a woman's status, it actually worked in quite the reverse.  Because this standard of motherhood was impossible to achieve in everyday life, the image of the Victorian Mother functioned to bind women to their domestic roles.  The expectations created by the Victorian Mother figure were nearly impossible to meet and literally impossible to exceed.  Female correspondence of the period reveals that feelings of maternal inadequacy were commonplace.  Society limited the power of women by making them feel like their successes were not noteworthy and like their inability to measure up to an impossible ideal proved their incompetence.  Further, attempting to live up to these expectations put these women on a hamster wheel of futility that limited the amount of time, effort, or intellectual energy they could devote to anything else.

So what does this have to do with the idea of “mother’s intuition”?  I believe the widespread belief that mother’s have some kind of psychic connection to their child and can know implicitly what their child needs functions in a similar way.  I’d been told about “a mother’s intuition” so many times that I was waiting for it to kick in.  It didn’t.  When Nora was born, I had no idea what to do with her outside what I read, was told, or figured out through trial and error.  Now that she’s eight months old, I can usually decide out what’s wrong with her almost instantly and quickly mend the problem.  This is because I’ve spent the past 8 months constantly tending to her needs and succeeding and failing in my attempts to perceive her state of mind.  I have so much practice with caring for her that it almost seems to come naturally.  I don’t know she’s hungry because I recognize a special tone in her cry: I know she’s hungry because I know when she ate last, I see that she’s fussing while doing something that normally placates her, and I recognize this scene because it has played out 8-15 times every day since she was born.  As my friend Anne-Marie recently pointed out on facebook, Katherine Anne Porter once wrote “I don't believe in intuition. When you get sudden flashes of perception, it's just the brain working faster than usual. But you've been getting ready to know it for a long time, and when it comes, you feel you've known it always.”  As usual, I think Porter’s right on the money here.

So how did this idea of “mother’s intuition” develop such a strong cultural cache?  I don’t know, but I have a theory.  I don’t believe that women are “naturally” more attuned to their children than men are, but because of the way domestic duties have historically been distributed, women have had to be more attuned to their children.  I imagine mother’s intuition took off as an idea that explained why women seemed to understand their children better than men did.  It serves a patriarchal power structure to suggest that women are “naturally” more attuned to their children: it lets men off the hook for not being attuned to their children and it reinforces the idea that women should be wholly responsible for childrearing.  Additionally, the cultural belief that this intuition is something all “good” mothers naturally have functions as a way of minimizing their own perceptions of the value of their work.  Mothers who develop this knowledge about their child’s needs through round-the-clock hard work are taught to believe that this knowledge is not a product of their hard work but is, rather, something they naturally had.  Women who do not feel like they have this knowledge, or who feel like they don’t have enough of it, are made to feel abnormal and inadequate.  It’s easy to control someone when you are able to convince her that her proficiency at something is not something she has earned, but rather, something she automatically possess.

I fell victim to this myself.  Especially when Nora was colicky, I spent a lot of time beating myself up about the fact that I had no idea what to do to help her.  I thought I should know.  There were plenty of days where I felt wholly inadequate as a mother and even wondered if my shortcomings were responsible for her colic.  I wish I could go back in time and have this conversation about mother’s intuition with myself.  What would I say to myself, or any other mother who feels like she doesn’t have “mother’s intuition”?  I’d say this: Nobody does.  It doesn’t come “naturally,” it comes through hard work.  If you put the time and the work in, you’ll eventually get the results you’re looking for.  And guess what?  Your baby’s father can do the same. 

What would I say to a woman who thinks she possesses mother’s intuition and takes pride in it?  I’d tell her: I hope you’re not offended by my suggestion that mother’s intuition is not a real thing.  I hope you realize that what I’m really saying is that you have done the hard work necessary to develop an understanding of what your child needs.  I’m saying you deserve to be commended for your perceptive abilities and the knowledge you’ve acquired through applying them.  I’m saying that you know what your child needs not because you’re a woman, but because you love your child enough to do what it takes to figure out how to care for him/her.  I’m saying this is real, valuable, meaningful work that you’ve done, and as such, you absolutely have the right to take pride in it.  And I’m saying your baby’s father and your society should recognize and reward your knowledge as valuable rather than suggesting it is some kind of unearned birthright.

And now back to my regularly scheduled program: Jean Toomer's Cane.