Femininity (30 page)

When applied to women, nurturance embraces a love of children, a desire to bear them
and rear them, and a disposition that leans toward a set of traits that are not gender-specific:
warmth, tenderness, compassion, sustained emotional involvement in the welfare of
others, and a weak or nonexistent competitive drive. Nurturant labor includes child
care, spouse care, cooking and feeding, soothing and patching, straightening out
disorder and cleaning up dirt, little considerations like sewing a button on a grown
man’s raincoat, major considerations like nursing relationships and mending rifts,
putting the demands of family and others before one’s own, and dropping one’s work
to minister to the sick, the troubled and the lonely in their time of need.

When nurturance is given out of love, disposition or a sense of responsible duty,
the assumption exists that whatever form it takes—changing a diaper or baking a tray
of raisin-nut cookies—the behavior expresses a woman’s biological nature. When nurturing
acts are performed by men, they are interpreted as extraordinary or possibly suspect.
When nurturance is provided by maids, housekeepers, kindergarten teachers or practical
nurses, its value in the marketplace is low.

Are women the nurturing sex by anatomical design? In the original sense of nurture,
what the body can do to support new life, of course the answer is yes. Femaleness
in humans and other mammals is defined by the manner of reproduction: gestation and
nourishment inside the womb followed by nursing the dependent young upon birth. Few
would deny that the nurturant responsibilities of motherhood begin as a biological
process, and that suckling connects the labor of birth to the social obligation of
continuing care. Or so the rhythms of nature undisturbed by human civilization suggest.

In the depths of the forest or on the grassy plains of the savanna, wherever groupings
of mammals exist in the wild, milk is the crucial lifeline from mother to infant.
Cleaning, carrying and protecting from danger are closely related acts, although the
indifferent mother is not unknown. Active maternal nurturance is the stable core of
the social order for animals that live in groups, marked by strong bonds of kinship
and positions of high rank and power (for some) that frequently pass to the next generation.
Behavior that appears more pronounced in the male of some species—fighting, displays
of dominance, defense against predators, grabbing the best and largest portion—does
not compare in social cohesion to the bond of maternal relation. In hunting and gathering
bands, the earliest form of human society that was once universal, the dual purpose
of female work was central
to group survival. Responsible for bearing and rearing the next generation, as well
as for collecting and preparing the basic foods for everyday needs, woman the mother
and gatherer matched the productive labor and communal importance, at least, of man
the hunter, as she does today in the Kalahari desert where remnant foraging groups,
the !Kung San, continue their traditional ways.

It was no fault of women or men, or even of their ambitious yearnings, that as civilization
advanced, the unchanging nature of biologically determined work became increasingly
tangential to societal progress. To gain dominion over nature and bend it to human
will, the restless intelligence of the Homo sapiens brain required a carefree reproductive
system and physical strength, attributes that were characteristically male. With the
cultivation of land and permanent towns, with the unleashing of competitive drives
and personal ambitions that led to the accumulation of property and the rise of stratified
classes, the necessary tasks of reproduction and nurture were no longer at the vital
center of human endeavor. Inexorably and conclusively, the logic of femaleness with
its inherent capacity for two kinds of purposeful labor, reproductive and “other,”
became a less powerful force in the social order than the single-minded capabilities
of males.

Examining the social contribution of women’s work in four pre-industrial economies
(foraging, slash-and-burn horticulture, animal herding and intensive farming), the
anthropologist Sharon Tiffany suggests that the perception of motherhood as woman’s
sole valuable function goes hand in hand with severe prohibitions on other opportunities
for work, and with a devaluation of womanhood in general, in economic systems where
men unquestionably dominate the means of production and the balance of power. When
motherhood, child tending and housekeeping chores become a socioeconomic and cultural
ideal that excludes the performance of income-producing work, female sexuality in
turn becomes a male concern that reflects male interests. The right to free sexual
expression, the right to control fertility and to choose whether or not to be a mother,
and the right to value a girl child and her promise as much as a boy and his are determined
by considerations that are male-defined.

Thousands of years ago in the pantheistic religions of the Eastern and Western worlds,
worship of the Mother Goddess (Astarte, Isis and many others) was a reverent acknowledgment
of the life-giving powers of woman and nature. Reflective of patriarchal domination
over woman and land, monotheistic belief turned away from the concept of primordial
birth and superimposed the divine will of a male deity on the act of procreation.
Motherhood plays no part in the Genesis myth of creation: Adam is not born of woman;
he is fashioned directly by the hand of God. Eve, his helpmate, is fashioned in turn
from man’s proverbial rib. With this unusual reordering of biological birth, the submission
of woman to man was given a firm theological basis. The historic terms under which
motherhood was sanctioned (only in marriage, to insure inherited wealth) further eroded
maternal power and placed upon pregnancy elements of coercion, punishment and shame.
As Christianity spread and suppressed the pagan religions, gestation in the womb was
reduced to a caretaker function; and the pain and peril of childbirth, ironically
a consequence of the large human head and its capacity for knowledge, came to be seen
as the wages, of original sin.

As the means of survival shifted perceptibly from agricultural systems to industrial
economies, the traditional scope of women’s work suffered new forms of attrition.
The hearth, the broom, the spinning wheel and the cradle had been honored symbols
of the female share in the household partnership of productive family labor, but the
home itself as a central place of work was diminished in importance when spinning
and weaving, among other skills, were gradually supplanted by mass production. Developing
technology, mechanized power, specialization of labor and a system of wages increased
the mobility and status of men in the economy at large, but the isolated performance
of women’s domestic work remained “free,” except when performed by servants. Even
milk from the breast suffered a drastic loss in status when a wet nurse of the peasant
class or milk from a cow or goat (and later a powdered formula) were found to suffice,
and moreover to improve the chance for infant survival when maternal breastfeeding
was unavailable, insufficient or discouraged by social custom.

While the power of law and religion combined to prohibit a woman from seeking out
income-producing work that was stamped as male, an appeal to her feminine nature was
duly employed to assuage her ambitions and keep her content. In a poignant example
of feminine sentiment used as a wedge against female ambition, childbirth itself was
placed under male supervision when the skills of midwifery were surpassed by medical
study from which women were barred as unfit by their delicate nature. Armed with the
newest antiseptic and surgical knowledge, a doctor in the nineteenth century did have
more to offer than a midwife limited to traditional skills, a sorry fact that did
much, to destroy a historic bond of sisterhood at the urgent moment of new life. Yet
a woman doctor, or a woman who wished to become a doctor, was typically caricatured
as unwholesomely mannish or likely to faint at the sight of blood—fated to fail one
way or another in her foolish attempt to transgress the limits of her sex. Only the
soft, unchallenging aspects of human behavior remained in the female province—a sweet
disposition, the habits of neatness, a gentle desire to care for others—and these
were enshrined as the superior values of unspoiled femininity as a moral ideal: the
dutiful daughter, the good little wife and the virtuous mother who were grateful to
live within the protected enclosure of their shrinking domestic sphere.

Refinement of one’s feminine nature by staying at home in love and devotion was not
meant for women of the working poor who labored side by side with their men on the
land, or those who came to the city with their families to put in twelve hours a day
at the mills. Neither did women at the upper levels of society need instruction in
the feminine impropriety of labor. Born to a fashionable life of esthetic indulgence
and a continual round of social engagements, they showed the usual eagerness of their
privileged station to hand over all practical work, including the rearing of children,
to the care of servants. It took the scrambling ambitions of a powerful new middle
class—hardworking, ingenious, acquisitive and insecure—to impose the ideal of the
aristocratic, leisured lady on women of its own kind as a hallmark of upward direction.
It took a bourgeois value system propelled by industrious struggle and material gain
to pridefully create a woman of total economic dependency in a home in
which she now ranked as an ornamental possession, and to see her as a reward of free
enterprise, a tribute to the virile success of men.

Marxist theoreticians of the nineteenth century might analyze reproduction as the
means by which the exploited masses provided their oppressors with cannon fodder and
factory hands, but they could find no place within their strict definitions of work
and class for motherhood and nurturance as genuine forms of productive labor. Viewing
the new rich in a kinder light, Social Darwinians attempting to explain the human
struggle developed the concept of survival of the fittest as an exclusive matter of
male-against-male competition. In the first half of the twentieth century it fell
to the Freudians to puzzle over the unhappiness of middle-class women with their suppressed
ambitions, and to offer the solution of marriage and motherhood as full-time work.
The goal of a healthy, mature and adjusted woman was to rid herself of mannish, competitive
drives, as she was to transcend her immature, mannish clitoral pleasure. Complete
fulfillment and sexual satisfaction could reside only in her vagina, her uterus and
her feminine role.

Two centuries before the Christian era, the moral goodness of motherhood was extolled
by the Romans in the story of the widow Cornelia, mother of the noble Gracchi, who
sacrificed the chance of remarriage and wealth to devote her life to raising her sons,
whom she proudly called her “jewels.” Cornelia’s example soon was surpassed, however,
by another mother whose impact on the feminine ideal has been felt for nearly two
thousand years. Created by the Catholic Church on a few scant references in the Gospels,
not always favorable at that, the story of Mary, mother of Jesus, is a moral exhortation
to the high purpose of motherhood as the pinnacle of feminine ambition that excludes
the reality of sex.

As Marina Warner reminds us in her brilliant treatise,
Alone of All Her Sex,
the Virgin is not tainted by worldly desires. She never gets angry or seeks to impose
her will. She prayerfully intercedes with the difficult Father, but she does not interfere
with His commands or wishes, nor with the commands or wishes of His Son. The Madonna’s
perfection resides in her
simplicity, her chastity, her gentle devotion, her merciful compassion, her modest
humility and her dutiful submission, and her luck in having been chosen as the Holy
Womb and Comforting Breast for the Son of God. For these humble qualities she is ultimately
rewarded as a Queen in Heaven. Alone among women, she has pleased the Lord. (The suckling
goddess was an important fixture in religious iconography as far back as discovered
civilization. In Roman legend the Milky Way was created when Juno, who was nursing
Hercules, squirted her milk across the night sky. Warner records that the one female
biological function permitted the Virgin in Christian faith was the act of nursing,
yet by the sixteenth century contemporary prudishness and the upper-class custom of
employing a wet nurse led to the virtual disappearance from art of the suckling Madonna.)

Collected and told by the brothers Grimm, German folklore in the eighteenth century
put forward another vision of motherhood that was also a moral lesson. In
Hansel and Gretel, Cinderella
and the tale of
Snow White,
the story turns on a mother who is not really a mother at all. She is, instead, an
uncaring stepmother, a stock figure of selfishness, overweening pride and personal
ambition. Unmindful of her nurturant duties or actively plotting to get rid of her
children (her husband is either too busy, too weak or too blinded by love to notice),
the Wicked Stepmother is a cautionary example of maternal negligence and rejection
who always gets her comeuppance in the end.

By the mid-twentieth century another negative parable of motherhood had assumed the
proportions of popular myth. Stereotyped in modern American folklore as the nagging
Jewish Mother, although hardly restricted to one ethnic type, she was a melodramatic
matriarch past her childbearing years who could not accept that her job was over and
done. A caricature of overbearing nurture, this mother belittled and bossed her husband,
scrubbed the floor on her hands and knees when the maid had finished, overcooked the
food in her efforts to provide a nourishing meal, and made her son feel guilty for
not calling home. In psychoanalytic thinking, the “domineering” or “suffocating” or
“overprotective” mother was held responsible for humankind’s problems (homosexuality
and criminal behavior, including rape, among them) as much as the “rejecting” mother
who refused to accept her feminine role.