Volume 9 Number 3 1996
Motherhood and Modernity, Christine Everingham, Open University Press, 1994, £11.99 paperback, £35.00 cloth.
This book is an innovative attempt to situate the activity of mothering within debates round modernity, and particularly to argue for the possibility of an emancipatory feminist project that can uphold women's autonomy as mothers. The theorisation of autonomy is crucial to Christine Everingham's argument, and engages her in an interesting series of debates with various critical approaches to the study of modernity - notably, radical and liberal feminisms, poststructuralism and the critical theory of Habermas. Everingham brings equally high standards of scholarship to both these theoretical arguments and to the analysis of her own ethnographic research that occupies the book's central chapters. It will thus be of interest both to those who will value its sophisticated and comprehensive illustration of major contemporary theoretical dilemmas and to those who seek a better understanding of the micro social processes within which mothering occurs.
The book begins with a critical overview of major theoretical approaches to motherhood, and in the process Everingham's own distinctive position begins to emerge. Her arguments are wideranging, and, in parts, rather condensed, so that it is difficult fully to do justice here to the complexities of her critique; however, a good starting point is her insistence on the active agency of both mother and child in the construction of subjectivity. This leads her to reject accounts that position the mother and child as relatively powerless, an approach she identifies with the Foucauldian perspective in, for example, Walkerdine and Lucey's work. This is criticised for over-emphasising the regulatory power of mothering discourse, and therefore confining women's agency to the possibility of resistance or capitulation to that power. Everingham wants to insist on the power that both mother and child exercise in the mutual and conflicting assertions of their own autonomy. However, her approach also leads her to reject social-psychological accounts that restrict the notion of agency to instrumental-rational action.
Her argument with social-psychological perspectives centres on their use of the concept of the child's 'needs'. Such accounts presume that these needs are objective facts that can be communicated by the child to the mother so long as she learns to recognise them. Hence the developmental account of mothering sees mother and child involved in a purely cognitive process that occurs through the mother responding to the child in a subject-object relation. The conflicting claims of the mother's and child's autonomy (a subject-subject relation) are left out of the picture. Psycho-analytical accounts are here brought into focus for their ability to offer an understanding of conflict experienced through the body. The Freudian-based framework is criticised, however, for suggesting that an initial 'connectedness' experienced by mother and child is a natural, pre-social state which the child then moves away from as she enters the moral order. Everingham's argument is that there is no point at which mother/child interaction can be seen as pre-social or instinctual, since the mother's subjectivity is active from the start in constructing and being constructed in the process of the child's individuation. The crucial element lacking from both Freudian and object-relations accounts is that of the interpretative activity that both mother and child engage in within the process of recognising and resolving their conflicting needs. This means that mothering cannot be conceived of as a realm outside the activity of reason, and brings the author to the work of Habermas.
Everingham sees Habermas' distinction between communicative and strategic reason as a fruitful one, since it rescues that dimension of reason that is not instrumental/purposive. It is, Everingham suggests, through communicative action that the mother interprets the needs of her child, an activity which she calls "taking the attitude of the child". If this process works successfully, both mother and child will achieve "mutual recognition". However, she criticises Habermas' argument that modernity brings social spheres such as the family greater autonomy, and hence potential emancipation, from the state-regulated practice of instrumental reason. Taking up other feminist critiques of Habermas, she argues that women's position within and outside the family as primary care-givers, means that their autonomy is distinct from men's. In particular, the social practice of childrearing involves women in important kinship and communal ties that are not confined to some 'private' sphere of action. This social aspect of mothering is examined through her ethnographic study.
This research consists of participant observation of three New South Wales play groups, attended by mothers and their children. Each play group is characterised by a particular mothering subculture, displaying different "maternal attitudes". Each one is also socio-economically differentiated: one, the "suburban group" is predominantly middle or employed working-class, the "kinship group" is largely from a State benefits-dependent demographic group, while the "alternative" group is highly educated middle-class with strong "counter-cultural ideals". There is a wealth of extremely interesting data here, showing the myriad ways in which women reconcile their own autonomous needs with those of their children (although it is a pity that we do not get as detailed observation of the 'child's eye view' as we do of the mother's). Everingham's data show how nurturing is never simply an isolated activity carried out exclusively within the mother/child dyad. Instead, it involves the mothers in constant discussions with other women over how to interpret their children's behaviour. Through "empathy", the other members of the play group help to confirm a mother's reading of her child's needs, in accordance with its particular sub-cultural values, a process which actively helps construct the child's and mother's intersubjectivity.
In her concluding chapter, Everingham suggests what the implications for an emancipatory feminist politics might be of this active and communal conception of mothering. Recognising the limitations of a purely micro-level politics of difference, she argues that the feminist praxis needs to campaign on both generalised and local levels - for the structural conditions under which women can achieve the "mutual recognition" of autonomy within their specific socio-cultural nurturing contexts. In this respect, she shares Habermas' anxiety about modernity's potential "colonisation of the life-world", in that "mothering culture" (in all its forms) may be subjected to economic-rationalist state policies, which understand nurturing only as the instrumental task suggested by the term 'child-care', and ignore its subjective dimensions. This means that she rejects early second-wave feminist calls for the state to take over child-rearing. But her emphasis on the communal conditions of mothering also means that she opposes attempts to contain child-rearing within the private sphere of the nuclear family where women and children are left isolated. It is these necessary communal ties that transform the nature of communicative action for women, so that the voluntaristic element in Habermas' account needs to be re-worked to take account of the fact that women-as-mothers are not individuated in the same way as men.
Everingham's study raises powerful questions concerning the meaning of motherhood in the contemporary condition. Not all of these are adequately answered within the scope of this book, and the next one should therefore be eagerly awaited. One of the issues that perhaps a British readership would particularly find lacking is a sufficiently rigorous conception of class. The different groups within the ethnographic study provide the key here, for it is not entirely clear how, why and with what implications they may themselves produce different outcomes - in terms of mothering practice, mother/child autonomy, intersubjectivity, etc. For example, the ethnographic data suggest that the mothering activity in the "kinship" group is characterised more by a subject-object relation than are the other groups (p.102-3). Evidence for this comes from Everingham's observation of a "reparative discipline cycle", whereby a child's distressed response to the mother's admonition impels the mother to reconcile the relationship, resulting in a strengthening of their bond (p.100). This cyclical process does not appear to occur to the same extent in the "kinship" group as in the other two, but occurs particularly intensely within the "alternative group". Elsewhere (p.92-93), Everingham claims that this latter group also has the strongest orientation towards child-centred nurturing, and this, presumably, provides an explanation for their greater feelings of guilt and the desire for reparation after a disciplinary event. However, these two aspects - the tendency to s.s./s.o. relations, and the adherence to child-centred ideals - are not explicitly connected. I suggest that this results from the author's failure to incorporate into her theory the implications of class-based access to different "maternal ideals". Some integration into the theoretical framework of the notion of 'cultural capital', or alternatively of the ways in which mothering discourse differentially positions working-class and middle-class women, as Walkerdine and Lucey's account manages to do, may have helped in this respect. Although Everingham insists on the need to take full account of "power relations", it is not altogether clear how these are conceived, a point which is perhaps related to the Habermasian concept of agency on which she relies. Had she returned to her ethnographic data in her concluding chapter, this dimension might have been more clearly theorised. In spite of this caveat, however, the book constitutes a stimulating intervention into the ongoing debate between different approaches to maternity.
Reference
Walkerdine, V. and Lucey, H., Democracy in the Kitchen, 1989, Virago.
Bella Dicks
University of Wales
College of Cardiff.
