Debunking The Good Mother Myth

It was white supremacist patriarchal capitalism the whole time!

Nancy Reddy

has written a book that intersects with SO MANY of the themes of this newsletter, and if you’re an In Pursuit reader, you know that the myth of ideal motherhood is just that: a myth. In her new book, Nancy charts her own disillusionment with the ideal while also illuminating the making and the makers of the myth: white men in power. Generous, raw, and meticulously researched, The Good Mother Myth will validate you and set you free. 

Sara: I’d love to first ask you how your personal experience of motherhood planted the seed for this book.

Nancy: The short version is that I tried to tackle motherhood the way I’d done everything else in my life–reading all the books, finding all the experts, learning the rules, and trying to do everything right so I could be a good mom–and (spoiler alert!) it didn’t work. I had a mostly pretty great pregnancy, and a birth that felt great (though, full disclosure, remains the most physically painful experience of my life), and then I went home with this baby who just did not want anything to do with all the things I’d learned were supposed to soothe him. I tried so hard to be good, and instead I felt like a failure. So the book is basically the long process of me trying to figure out where I had gotten these impossible ideas about how to be a “good mom” and what we can do instead.

Sara: I so relate to this! There was something uniquely shocking about having a relatively “easy” pregnancy and birth, which are both temporary states of being, and then being forced to reckon with the reality of caregiving (forever and ever). So much of your book is about the history of maternal “science,” which I’m putting in quotes, because it was so highly unscientific so much of the time! The monkey experiment, for example, is relatively well known, and I was so fascinated to see how we’ve been taught to interpret certain findings about mothers, versus how we might interpret them if we view these findings from a more critical angle. Can you talk about how the monkey experiment is sort of a metaphor for the history of motherhood science in general? At least in the US.

Nancy: Those monkeys! If you took an intro psych class in college, you probably have an image of these monkeys and their cloth mothers burned into your brain somewhere, but if not, here they are.

Harry Harlow, who was a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, did these studies where he was trying to learn about what he called maternal attachment–basically, what does a baby need from its mother in order to grow into a healthy adult? To test that, he devised an experiment with these mother surrogates–he had a lab full of infant monkeys, and he’d raise them in cages with these wire and cloth mothers. In some cages, the wire mother had the food, but in others, the cloth mother fed the baby. What Harlow found–which was genuinely an important finding at the time–was that even when the wire mother was the one with the bottle of formula, the babies loved the cloth mother! They’d cling to it for hours and hours every day, zip over to feed with the wire mother, then go back and cuddle their cloth mother. So Harlow’s big finding was that comfort mattered just as much as actual food.

There’s this kind of radical note buried at the end of the first talk Harlow gave about that research–basically, if it’s not nursing itself that matters (as in, you don’t have to have boobs) but the comfort a baby derives from being held–a father could be just as good as a mother. But that finding got basically totally ignored! Instead, what other scientists and the press picked up was this image of the tiny baby and his totally available, constantly adoring cloth mother. And that became an image for what a good human mother should look–someone who truly has no thought in the world beyond her baby.

Sara: YES. This reminds me so much of Chelsea Conaboy’s research on care, and the ways in which caregivers’ brains change and adapt (NOT just mothers’). As a new mother absolutely desperate to “succeed” as a mom, and desperate to be armed with the knowledge of how to be a “good” mother, I’m blown away by how I leaned primarily on the work of men. William Sears, Harvey Karp, etc. Without ever really stopping to ask myself why these men (and so many men before and after them) are held up as experts about mothers. It’s really a condemnation of the way we’ve been culturally conditioned to not be more critical of how motherhood is constructed, you know? Because once you start to poke even a few tiny holes into the idea of maternal expertise, so many of these male “experts” just immediately begin to lose credibility. This quote from the book so beautifully encapsulated this for me:

John Bowlby’s insistence that a good mother would not only devote herself entirely to her child, but feel totally fulfilled by that work–it seems an idea that could only have been invented by someone with very little practical experience of the day-to-day care of a baby. That work is beautiful, yes, and full of joy and wonder, but it’s also exhausting and sometimes lonely and often just boring. Bowlby, a man who spent his life in clinics and conferences, studying mothers and telling them what to do, seems to have almost no knowledge of the ongoing labor of mothering and what trying to do that work alone could do to a woman.

Nancy: Part of what’s so fascinating to me about this is the way these researchers (who were nearly all men, as you point out) were able to take these ideas that had been kind of culturally ambient for a long time–women have maternal instinct that means they just know what to do, mothers should be the ones primarily in charge of caring for children, etc–and encase them in *science.* (I always see jazz hands there–it’s *science,* ladies!)

Like, Harlow is able to produce all these graphs that show the amount of time the baby monkeys spend clinging to their mothers, and that feels like really definitive hard evidence. Mary Ainsworth, the psychologist who created attachment styles, developed a whole laboratory protocol that ostensibly proves the quality of a kid’s connection to his primary caregiver. (I wrote about attachment styles recently for Slate. The good news is that if you’ve ever worried about giving your kid the “wrong” attachment style, you can free yourself! The foundational science is so, so flimsy.) And there are all these statistics and math that make it look, on the surface, like good science.

But you’re exactly right: the second you start looking closer at a lot of these studies, they start to feel a lot less certain. Why did Harlow use rhesus macaque monkeys, for example? It wasn’t because they were a great model for human behavior, though he was quick to make connections between his monkey babies and human babies. They were small, well-suited to the climate of Wisconsin (they’d play in the snow!), and their temperament was better suited to the kinds of experiments he wanted them to do than other, larger primates who might have had more in common with human mothers.

And of course there’s the broader problem of who’s doing the science in the first place. This was an era where women were pretty systematically edged out of the sciences because of nepotism policies that meant a couple couldn’t both be employed at the same university. (It’s not overtly discriminatory, but you can guess who gave up their jobs!) Once those policies changed, and there were more women doing that research, it really changed what they found.

Sara: As I researched and wrote Momfluenced, the maternal ideals that loomed over me as a new mother gradually lost more and more power. It’s really wild how understanding the root of so many of these widely accepted features of motherhood can free you from their thrall. And equally infuriating to consider how so many of the systems that make mothers’ lives difficult are rooted in the grand project of maintaining white supremacist patriarchy. Thoughts? Lol. I mean, the good mother myth exists largely as a way to uphold capitalism.

Nancy: Yes! In a lot of ways, that’s the big project of the book–to articulate these impossible, contradictory ideals that I had about how to be a “good” mom, and then to figure out where they came from. I had such a tangle of bad ideas about motherhood, and they were buried so deep that I couldn’t even have articulated them until a couple of years into this project! And then, as I was able to learn more about the origins of these ideas, I was able to let go of those ideas that didn’t serve me and certainly didn’t help my kids.

And yes re capitalism! Sarah Wheeler described this book as a kind of “whodunit?” – like, who afflicted us with all these bad ideas? And one answer is Freud because nearly all of these researchers were trained in psychoanalysis and absorbed all these wild ideas about babies and gender. But capitalism is the other one. It’s no coincidence that all this research about moms emerges from the postwar period. During World War II, tons of women had been working in the war effort and sending their kids to state-supported daycare–and then veterans return home and there’s a lot of panic about how to get men back into the workforce and women back home with their babies. So suddenly science says the most important thing a woman can do is have a bunch of babies and devote herself to caring for them all on her own.

Sara: I’d love to ask you what you make of the idea that the left has to publicize its narrative of motherhood being joyful and fulfilling in order to counteract the right’s death grip on “family values” et al. For me, it feels like agreeing to play by their rules. And it feels fundamentally weird to lean on like - the “right” branding of motherhood - as a way to gain political power. The entire problem with the good mother myth is that it presumes one correct way to embody motherhood, so I don’t see how the left firming up our own maternal ideal is going to help!

Nancy: I love this question, but I kind of hate the conversation, or the premise of it–like, that the left needs to talk about how joyful motherhood is. I mean, of course it is! The love I feel for my children has changed my life, and my relationship with them is a source of incredible meaning and joy truly every day.

But that individual experience of mothering, of caring for my kids, of loving them and being loved by them–that’s not what we’re usually talking about when we say motherhood is hard. Motherhood is hard in America for a whole bunch of structural reasons that we all know about–our nightmare health insurance system that makes prenatal care and birth expensive and often inaccessible, the lack of paid parental leave, the incredible challenges of finding affordable high-quality daycare. Like, we know what the problems are, right? And we know what policy changes make things better. I’m thinking now about Rebecca Gale’s recent reporting about Vermont’s efforts to pay its childcare providers more, and how that makes the lives of parents and childcare workers so much better.

And I think you’re right about “motherhood is joyful” as a political argument. Say all the leading feminist writers decide to take that up as their cause and write a year’s worth of op-eds about it–then what? Will this administration, this Congress hear that and decide to change policy in a way that will make the lives of mothers easier? I don’t think so.

Sara: I interviewed Angela Garbes about the Instagrammifcation of maternal ideals a few years ago, and she essentially hypothesized that the more one was removed from a particular ideal, the less emotional power it holds. Like, the ideal mother has been constructed as white, thin, heterosexual, wealthy. And I think it’s interesting to think about how the ideal functions to both exclude those who can’t or refuse to adhere to it, while also keeping those whose identities give them more access to the ideal - trapped by the desire to embody it. It’s a real killing two birds with one stone type of situation.

Nancy: I think she’s exactly right about that. I can only speak for my own identity/set of cultural locations, but I think a lot of this was especially hard for me (as a white, married, straight-sized, college-educated etc etc new mom) because it felt like, I’m so close to being able to achieve it! (Except of course that the whole trap of goodness is that you can never actually really achieve it; you’re just eternally reaching after it, and spending more money and time and worry to try to get to this impossible state.)

I have a friend who has triplets, who she’d had after years of fertility treatments, and when I published an article a couple years ago about the mythology of the “golden hour” after birth, the idea that the time right after you give birth is going to be a dreamy moment to start bonding with your baby, she was like, oh, I cannot relate to that. She was on hospital bedrest, she had a c section. There was no expectation that her pregnancy or her birth or the moments afterward were going to be infused with this magic–and in a way, she said, that made her freer to actually deal with what was happening, instead of working through these myths of the postpartum period.

I’d also say that I’ve learned a lot from the writing and scholarship of Black mothers in particular. I am always thinking about Dani McClain’s We Live for the We and the way she writes about motherhood being something that propels a lot of Black mothers into public life–into trying to make things better for every kid in their community, not just the ones who live inside their house. Her work feels like a really important corrective to the incredible whiteness and privilege of the tradwife moment and the idea that a mom’s most important job is to protect her own children, no matter the cost to other people’s children.

Sara: Speaking of Instagram, how has millennial culture, and its fetishization of imagery and curation, added fuel to the fire of the good mother myth?

Nancy: I mean, that’s more your area of expertise than mine, but I think imagery and curation is so much of the problem, and I think it’s only gotten worse since I had my kids. When I joined instagram in 2013, right after my first kid was born, I planned to use it as a site to share baby photos with family and friends. And the only other people whose photos I saw there were people I knew in real life, so even if I saw an adorable baby photo and felt awful because I was struggling with breastfeeding *and* I couldn’t get my baby to stop crying long enough to get a cute pic of him in a baby bear onesie, I at least had some context for that person beyond that curated image. I was also texting with her in the middle of the night so I knew it wasn’t constant cuteness and soft-focus joy at her house, even if it looked that way online.

But now, I think we’ve lost so much of that context, and we’re often looking at people who we only know through the lens of that curation. And that’s really central to the problem of goodness as I’ve come to think of it–that when we’re trying to be a “good mom,” we’re really trying to enact some external standard or to look like someone else’s image of a “good mom.” It’s hard to focus on what we need and what our kids need when we always have that kind of instagram lens on our lives–how does this moment look?

Sara: How can the individual divest from the good mother myth? And what can we do structurally to slash the good mother myth’s tires?

Nancy: This is going to sound corny, but I really believe it: I think that telling our stories, being truly honest about what’s happening in our lives, that’s one way we give up on goodness. In those first postpartum months, I was so crazed with exhaustion and anxiety that I kind of couldn’t put a nice front on things. I’d be at my job at the writing center on campus and some nice person, just trying to make chit chat, would be like, oh, how old is your baby, how are you doing? And they definitely just wanted a little polite answer, but I’d lean in and be like, well let me tell you—

And there are parts of the book that feel like that, that feel very exposing of my own flaws and fuck ups. It’s been scary to have, like, parents I know from drop off at my kids’ schools tell me they’re reading it because it feels like, well, get ready to read about my nipples and my marriage and my postpartum anxiety. But I also know that at the book events I’ve done, when we’ve asked people to share, that’s such a source of meaning and connection. We all have these stories about how we’ve felt like failures and who’s shown up to support us and how we’re trying to show up for the new moms in our lives now.

The structural stuff feels really hard to talk about because I’m so demoralized about this administration. But I think a) we demand more of the men around us especially, and b) we work at the local and state level on the things that are possible now. Chamber of Mothers is one group doing a lot of advocacy at every level, and being in conversation with other moms who are mad and trying to change things has been enormously meaningful for me. (If you’re also looking for a way to channel your anger, you can join a local chapter!)