Author: ublsha002

By Marita Vyrgioti

In the Greek language, the word coincidence shares the same root with the word symptom; which creates a paradox. This sharing implies that when a coincidence (σύμπτωση) is repeated, it then becomes a symptom (σύμπτωμα).

On the 30th of January, Brian Donald, Europol’s chief of staff told the Observer that: “one of the most worrying aspects of the migrant crisis […] is that thousands of vulnerable minors had vanished after registering with state authorities’. It’s not unreasonable to say that we’re looking at 10,000-plus children. Not all of them will be criminally exploited; some might have been passed on to family members. We just don’t know where they are, what they’re doing or whom they are with”.

There is an oxymoron about the above statement. One of the leading members, of one of the greatest European organizations for investigating and prosecuting criminal networks, publicly and shamelessly announces that during his service as Chief of Staff in Europol, 10.000 children are missing in Europe. 10.000 minors that we “just don’t know where they are, what they’re doing or whom they are with”. His words have no trace of guilt, personal incompetence, and professional failure. Quite the opposite, his over dramatic tone echoes an individual responsibility disclaimer, and is being projected upon us readers as our collective responsibility: “It is our fault that those children have gone missing. We are all responsible for them”.

Moreover, there is a shocking coincidence in Donald’s statement: there is an implicit association with Videla’s statement in 1979. “They are neither dead nor alive. They are missing (Desaparecidos)”. Videla, the Argentinian dictator, in a quite similar fashion, refused all responsibility for the 30.000 men, women and children “missing” during his dictatorship. Desaparecidos was the word used to describe what these people went through, which actually translates into imprisonment, torture, sexual abuse, murder and disposal of their dead bodies in mass graves. Certainly, such historical comparisons will take us no further than declaring the European Union a dictatorship. However, for the moment, let’s stick to the fact that historical coincidences (συμπτώσεις) sooner or later become historical symptoms (συμπτώματα).

Such a historical coincidence is Brian Donald’s statement (on the 30th of January 2016) with the debut of the film Spotlight in cinemas, in the UK (on the 29th of January). Spotlight, which is nominated for 6 Oscar Awards, is a film about the exposure of the scandal of repeated child abuse by 296 Catholic priests in Boston. In the film, a team of reporters from the Boston Globe newspaper reveal that the Archbishop of Boston’s Catholic Church, Bernard Francis Law, along with a small number of lawyers and newspaper editors, were aware of the incidents of child sexual abuse by priests, had evidence of paedophilia from members of the Catholic Church and did nothing. In fact, when the scandal burst, in 2001, Archbishop Law resigned from Boston and was appointed, by the Pope John Paul II, as Archpriest of the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, until his retirement in 2011.

The most grotesque element in this coincidence is that in early November 2015, Brian Donald had advocated that migrants and refugees in Europe are “identified for exploitation, especially those of a young age, young women, and the unaccompanied”. By exploitation, he meant prostitution and illegal labour as the most likely outcomes. Funnily, this statement took place at a conference organized by the Santa Maria Group, set up by Pope Francis, and was officially organized by the Catholic Church.

Writing about the 10.000 missing children in Europe is a particularly difficult task. When a child loses their parent, the child becomes an orphan. On the contrary, there is no word to describe what happens to a parent that loses their child; language does not permit such sorrow to be symbolised. It remains ineffable, unspeakable, indescribable[1]. There is no collective responsibility for the disappearance of these children. There is only collective sorrow, grief, desolation and despair. Facing such a tragedy, the Europol’s Chief of Staff, like Pontius Pilate, washes his hands, but the future’s film industry will not vindicate him. In the same way, it did not vindicate the Archbishop Bernard Francis Law. In the far ahead 2046, we might be lucky to see the testimonies of Syrian children that were abused by trafficking networks in  Europe on the big screen. Those that they will have survived will describe, in every detail, the physical and bodily violence they experienced, the misery and abjection of the world they were brought up. And we will run to the cinemas to watch them, because their movie will be nominated for 6 Oscar Awards, and the actor playing Brian Donald for best supporting actor.

By Marita Vyrgioti

Last week, the President of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, Dr David Richmond, made quite a controversial proposal, one that would create a “public and political furore”, in his own words[1]. The British National Health System (NHS) has been dealing with a serious shortage of middle-grade obstetricians and therefore has suffered a general drop in the quality of maternity services offered, due to exhausting shifts and antisocial-hours of work, and to doctors’ burnout. In his recent interview in Guardian, Dr Richmond suggested a merger of the current 147 obstetric units into 118; a reduction of 20%. He supported his view saying that the concentration of obstetric experts in central units can result in high-quality maternity care and 24/7 consultancy, which would be impossible otherwise. The centralization of obstetric units will be combined with the boosting of midwife-led units, suitable for women who have a low-risk pregnancy.

There is nothing new in the claims of an ailing national health system. According to a survey conducted by the Japan Medical Association in 2008, UK obstetricians and gynaecologists are indeed hyper-productive, delivering the highest number of births among their fellow professionals across 15 countries: 468.1 births per doctor, a figure almost double than that in Canada, the second in terms of numbers of births[2]. The same report reveals that the UK maternity system is highly dependent on the support of 31,186 full-time midwives to 1,600 obstetricians and gynaecologists. A similar shortage is highlighted in a 2011 OECD report on the health workforce, which shows that between 2000 and 2009, there were 22.1 gynaecologists/ obstetricians per 100,000 females; with an OECD average of 26.8[3].

Five years and a Tory government later, these figures indicate that perhaps some of NHS’s weaknesses are structural: there is a long-term shortage of obstetricians and a significant reliance on midwives for childbirth. However, a question seems to emerge; ‘Do arguments about merging and centralizing obstetric units actually deal with the current problem or merely attempt to institutionalise it’?

Published almost four years ago, MaMSIE’s special issue on ‘Austerity Parenting’ seems particularly pertinent to these emerging questions. In the editorial note, the guest editors Tracey Jensen and Imogen Tyler argue that changes in the welfare system affect first and foremost mothers; rendering them one of the most vulnerable and precarious social groups. They also trace the so-called ‘interpellations of impossibility’ that inform parenthood in austerity regimes: ‘to be at once held more responsible than ever before for the future successes (and failures) of your children and yet at the same time to be increasingly vulnerable (through the retreat of state support, public services and welfare benefits) to the conditionalities and precarities of late capitalism’[4]. In a sense, Jensen and Tyler claim that policies or measures advanced to deal with austerity, make parents more precarious through a twofold process: less welfare support and more personal, individual responsibility. In other words, such policies render parenthood a strictly personal matter. So, does the same happen with childbirth as well?

Having said this, how can we—academics and researchers working on the maternal, mothers or future-mothers—evaluate the Dr Richmond’s proposals, through the lens of ‘Austerity Parenthood’? For instance, closing down 29 maternity units appears as a promise to pregnant women and future parents in general: to purge a malfunctioning, wasteful and inefficient system. However, at the same time, this narrative conceals the multiple implications mothers will have to deal with: traveling further to give birth, squeezing themselves into fewer maternity units, or resorting to private clinics, just to name a few. Moreover, what seems to be at stake in establishing segregation between an ‘expert-led centralized clinic’ and a ‘local midwife- unit’?

Perhaps, Dr Richmond was right in one thing: these proposals should, indeed, create a ‘public and political debate’ (and not a furore) on the current inadequacies of NHS’ Maternity Services and open-up a dialogue on the possible ways to deal with them, beyond, austerity solutions.

[1] Denis Campbell, ‘Doctor’s chief calls for string of maternity unit closures’, The Guardian, 21 January 2016, http://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/jan/21/dozens-of-maternity-units-should-be-closed-down-says-doctors-chief

[2] Narumi Eguchi, ‘Do We Have Enough Obstetricians?–A survey by the Japan Medical Association in 15 countries’, JMAJ, 52:3 (2009), 150-157.

[3] OECD, Gynaecologists and obstetricians per 100,000 females, 2009 and change between 2000 and 2009, Health at a Glance (2011), http://goo.gl/d8bLB9.

[4] Tracey Jensen, Imogen Tyler, ‘Austerity Parenting: new economies of parent-citizenship’, Studies in the Maternal, 4:2 (2012), http://doi.org/10.16995/sim.34

Marita Vyrgioti is a Ph.D student in the Department of Psychosocial Studies and an Anniversary Scholarship Holder from the School of Social Sciences, History and Philosophy, at Birkbeck University, London. She currently works under the supervision of Professor Stephen Frosh, on a thesis titled: ‘Devouring: a Psychosocial Critique of Sovereignty’. Before joining MaMSIE as an intern, she worked as an Editorial Assistant at Common Ground Publishing and as a Researcher in Educational Programs at the European Public Law Organization (EPLO).

By Rosalind Howell

I’m not the only one who, since having children, has had an urge to write about the experience. There are many blogs, as well as memoirs and whole parenting magazines often written by mothers, for mothers. Amongst this body of writing there can be very distinct tones; one is the confessional style memoir which tries to capture the difficult thoughts and feelings that assail the author in early motherhood, such as Rachel Cusk’s 2001 book, A Life’s Work. Another is the ‘how-to’ article which shares with the reader a particular parenting secret or skill that the author has recently become convinced of and wishes for us to join her in. I received one of these recently from the Huffington Post, `The blog` initially assured me that its aim was to ‘soothe my frazzled parent brain’, the title of the article then screaming warningly at me, “The single most important parenting action we can take today!” Both of these popular styles of writing originate in some way from the writers’ own rich and complex lived experience of being a mother and/or mothering. Yet, what ends up on the page can often be perceived as either excessively shocking and provocative or excessively bossy and tyrannical. Both in their own way perhaps also wish, anxiously, to seek reassurance.

Despite praise for A Life’s Work, Cusk has said there have been times when she wishes she had never written it. Her story of the bewilderment, loss and rage she felt on becoming a new mother provoked in some readers a corresponding rage. She became the mother that other mothers loved to hate. One Mum­netter (not alone in her strength of feeling) described with relish, how she ‘wakes up most days feeling like slapping her’. Cusk mentioned she has been stopped in the street whilst with her children and shouted at by other outraged mothers with children. Whilst there is something in Cusk’s outpouring of feeling that can feel rather relentless to read, I was also struck, as I read it for the first time recently, by her vulnerability, the sensitivity of her observations of her daughter, and her tenderness for her. Why then were such excessive feelings of hate and rage stirred up in Cusk’s female readers?

“Nothing”, according to psychoanalyst Adam Phillips “makes people more excessive than when talking about excess”. He suggests a child will tantrum in order to find out if his parents are robust enough to withstand his hatred, rage and frustration. Likewise, as adults, our intense, overwhelming feelings and extreme reactions can leave us fearful of being rejected by others for being ‘too much’ for them. Our reactions to other people’s excess then, can give us a clue about our own fears, longings and internal conflicts. Phillips goes on to say that, our knee jerk reaction to someone else’s perceived excessiveness is often because of a wish to punish them, “and often excessively”. Certainly such violent reactions, as from the mums­netter above do seem to have put Cusk’s detractors into the role of sadistic and punitive parents.

But what of the intensity and extremity of feeling that mothers feel for their own children? Rozsika Parker has suggested in her book Torn in Two, that there can be a collusion among women to deny maternal ambivalence. Ambivalence in this Freudian sense describes the coexistence of opposing feelings of love and hate. These come from a common source within us and are independent of the object of our attention. Mixed feelings, rather, are a more realistic weighing up of an external situation, and are therefore much less emotionally charged. Love and hate (or ambivalence) are interdependent feelings; they inform one another and can be a good indicator of what is important to us. We are ambivalent about those things that matter most to us. D.W Winnicott said famously that the acknowledgement of maternal ambivalence is necessary for an infant’s emotional development. In a seminal, and now much quoted paper, “Hate in the countertransference” he suggests that the mother’s acceptance of her own complexity of feeling has a pivotal role in helping the baby learn to tolerate her own hate, loss and disappointment in relationships. What Parker does is to reverse this idea and focus on the mother’s experience. She says, maternal ambivalence, ‘if remaining manageable’, can increase a mother’s creative capacity for thought and therefore aid her development and growth. So, being able to bear and then perhaps put words to the complex mix of feelings involved in being a mother, and mothering, could be good for everyone.

But theory like this might soothe the woman in the mother but not the baby in her. Before having children I have read Winnicott in a smug, rather envious way. Winnicott describes the mother baby relationship from the point of view of the baby, and emphasises that a ‘good enough’ mother creates an environment (or not) from which the baby can grow and thrive. The deprived baby part of me was certainly drawn to this Winnicottian view, pre­having children anyway. As Lisa Baraitser has said in a talk on feminist interpretations of psychoanalysis we read Winnicott when we are in a good mood and for me it felt good to read when I was a potentially, more­than­good­enough­mother but not so good immediately afterwards when faced with the complexity and vulnerability of being in the position of mother as well as that of needy baby. Rachel Cusk’s book put some people in a very bad mood partly because the bad or the difficult was perceived as outweighing the ‘good enough’. Perhaps too, there was a more general difficulty in hearing the story of mother’s experience as part of a complex picture, and not simply experiencing it as a further attack on our wounded baby selves ­ many of Cusk’s critics , for example, were angry on behalf of her children.

I didn’t read A Life’s Work earlier in my mothering career partly I think, because I feared my own ‘excess’ of feelings would be stirred up uncontrollably and interfere with my being able to cope with life as a new mum. Although my new mother feelings are now not so raw, I seem to revisit them again and again in different guises. My very dissatisfactory experience of breastfeeding, for example, overwhelms me at times now when I experience my children as insatiable in their demands from me for food, time, love or energy. When my daughter recently started a new school, a part of me suddenly felt engulfed with fears that the world was hostile, unsafe and rejecting, much like the reaction I had as a new mum to some midwives, health visitors and other mothers of newborns. Like Cusk, my anxieties made it difficult for me to find solidarity with other women, simply because they were in the same boat (with a newborn). This perceived lack of support and connection to other mothers is not, I would suggest, something that we find it easy to read about. Perhaps it’s as hard to accept that mothers are ambivalent about each other as it is to accept that mothers are ambivalent about their children.

On the other hand, Naomi Stadlen in her book What Mothers Do, challenges the idea of maternal ambivalence in both Winnicott and Parker. She says it is unfounded presumption by these theorists that all mothers are ambivalent about their children, and suggests that the Winnicott paper on this subject has been taken on as a truth despite containing no actual evidence. Her experience of talking to groups of mothers over many years has left her with the sense that it is the love and joy within motherhood that is somehow not allowed a voice in our culture, not the difficult feelings that get plenty of air­time from published writers. These women, who are prevented from writing by the demands of motherhood, she suggests, may experience higher than average levels of resentment. In some ways it feels like Stadlen can’t tolerate the expressions of overwhelming feeling in writers such as Cusk. That she too, finds it all a bit excessive. She may also be hinting though, that there’s an opportunity here for a different kind of writing.

So one question might be, in what other ways could maternal experience be put into words? And, what other kinds of conversations about being a mother/and or mothering that felt more satisfying and more complex, could then be opened up rather than shut down? What are some of the effects of mothers writing about mothering? For example, did the process of writing helps to render, in Parker’s terms, maternal ambivalence manageable for Cusk? Did it have the same effect for some of her readers? Perhaps others simply felt that, she evacuated her difficult feelings into them via the page, and left them feeling angry and hopeless.

There may be a cultural presumption that there is something inherently excessive about autobiographical writing, as if it is necessarily unchecked, unrestrained and undigested. The popularity of the parenting blog attests how we can be used to a very edited, polished and censored form of writing where difficult feelings are omitted and easy answers given. Those difficult feelings may not just be omitted from the writing but possibly even from the mind, emerging only as bullying imperatives for other mothers (The single most important parenting action we can take today!)

Where then does the messiness go? The excessive mess of overwhelming feeling, unarticulated thoughts, bodily felt experiences and violent and guilty resentments. One cultural place that acts as a dustbin for these disavowed feelings is the car­crash stories of celebrity parental failure that we love to hate. And Cusk’s story was partly read like this, (“at least my hateful feelings aren’t as bad as hers!”)

In Stadlen’s story our culture has rendered the pleasures of motherhood a guilty secret. In Cusk’s, those same pleasures are often hijacked into a bullying agenda from mother to mother to ‘Be Happy’. Parker, though suggests there is an episodic nature in these difficult and joyful experiences of motherhood. Both pleasure and pain can be acute and intense, less likely to be consistently one thing or the other. In order to understand this more, we may have to read and write maternal experience rather differently. If, as Parker has suggested, maternal ambivalence can be born and digested within individual women to produce creativity and growth, maybe the writing of it can benefit a wider group of mothers and even influence the cultural representations of motherhood that exert such pressure on women. Our own maternal ambivalence being of course inextricably entwined with societies deeply ambivalent relationship to mothers and what they represent .

Finding words for those intense experiences of motherhood, often which start out so raw and un­articulated, and are such sources of pleasure and pain, does, i think have the potential to offer alternative stories to mothers that are infinitely more digestible and altogether more hopeful. More than soothe or reassure they may, to paraphrase Jacqueline Rose, in her article ‘Mothers’, help make the writing, reading and living of maternal experience, more than worth it.

References

Cusk, R.( 2008) A Life’s Work. Faber and Faber

Parker, R (2005) Torn in Two: The Experience of Maternal Ambivalence. Virago.

Phillips, A (2011) On Balance. Penguin

Rose, J. Mothers (2014) In: The London Review of Books, Vol. 36, no. 12

Stadlen, N (2004) What Mothers Do: Especially when it Looks like Nothing. Piatkus

Winnicott D.W (1958) Hate in the Countertransference. In Collected Papers: Through Paediatrics to Psychoanalysis. Karnac.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rachel­macy­stafford/the­single­most­important­parenting­action­we­can­take­today_b_8054388.

html://www.mumsnet.com

youtube.com The Maternal in Contemporary Psychoanalysis and Feminist Thought

Rosalind Howell is a trained Movement Psychotherapist. She currently facilitates workshops for staff teams who wish to develop their reflective skills. She also holds quarterly women’s talking circles at her home. Since giving birth to her three children she has also given birth in herself a passionate desire to express her ideas in writing. Her articles have appeared in E-Motion journal and Juno magazine.

Becoming Oneself: The Problem of Gendered Complicity

Birkbeck Institute of the Humanities and the Department of Philosophy

Tuesday 23^rd June 2015

Birkbeck College, Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HX

Main Building Room 612

9.30am – 5.30pm

 

 

9.30am – 10am: Registration

10am – 10.30am: Susan James (Birkbeck College): Welcome and Introduction

10.30 – 12.15pm: Charlotte Knowles (Birkbeck College): Falling and Fleeing: A Heideggerean Analysis of Complicity

Response: Sacha Golob (Kings College London)

12.15 – 1.15pm: Lunch

 

1.15pm – 3pm: Lisa Baraitser (Birkbeck College): Mothering Freedom: Some Thoughts on Natality and the New Visual Culture of Childbirth

Response: Ruth Cain (University of Kent)

 

3 – 3.15pm: Break

3.15 – 5pm: Nancy Bauer (Tufts University): Simone de Beauvoir on Motherhood and Destiny

Response: Clare Chambers (University of Cambridge)

 

5 – 5.30pm: Alison Stone (University of Lancaster)

Closing Remarks and Discussion

Introduction

Extant literature on ‘reality’ programmes such as A Baby Story (1998), Maternity Ward (2001) and One Born Every Minute (2010- ) make reference to the various ways in which representations of pregnancy and childbirth on television can be seen to either romanticise or demonise the birth experience in relation to notions of authenticity, reality and rigid stereotyping (Maher 2004, Stephens 2004, Morris and McInerney 2010). At a time when women are said to be ill-informed about the birth experience (Maushart 1999) and naïve in relation to notions of age related infertility (Bonifazi 2003), the role and responsibility of ‘reality’ programming might be understood as a key player in educating a future or expectant mother about the experience of childbirth. Therefore, examining the depiction of pregnancy and childbirth in factual and fictional programming is an important part of both media and motherhood studies because the medium has the power and scope to inform and educate alongside its ability to entertain a contemporary audience.

Rather than offer what Joke Hermes refers to as an ‘exceptionally knowledgeable’ (1995) reading of such television texts, it is crucial that we take as our starting point, the voice of the actual rather than assumed, imagined or hypothetical audience here. In this way, and only in this way will we be able to understand the pleasures, frustrations and public health messages on offer on the small screen. As one mother in the audience stated:

Given how much we unconsciously learn or assume is true from the depictions (of pregnancy and childbirth programming), I think they contribute significantly to the myths about pregnancy and childbirth that may only be dispelled via good antenatal classes or the experience of one’s own pregnancy and childbirth.

In order to identify the ways in which mothers in the television audience respond to representations of pregnancy and childbirth on television I created an online questionnaire, and requested responses through a number of social, charitable and networking associations including the NCT, Media Parents, Mumsnet, NetMums, nursery chains and women’s networks (Feasey 2013a). The questionnaire asked mothers in the audience to speak about their preferred, favourite, admired and more negative depictions of motherhood on television, spanning different decades, channels, genres, factual and fictional categories, presenters, pundits, actors and characters, and much of these responses inform the book length study Mothers on Mothers: Maternal Readings of Popular Television (forthcoming). However, it is the question that relates specifically to pregnancy and childbirth programming that was overlooked in that volume that I seek to address here.

I asked mothers in the audience if they ‘liked to watch reality shows or television drama about pregnancy and childbirth?’ with the added guidance, should they chose to read it asking if ‘programmes such as One Born Every Minute and The Midwives are educational, entertaining, nostalgic or frustrating to watch? And querying why they ‘like to watch fictional television drama such as Call the Midwife about expecting mothers and labour?’

Reality programming: sensationalism, fear and the nostalgia of childbirth

Just under half of the respondents made it clear that they do not watch any form of factual programming that focuses on the experiences of pregnancy or childbirth, but what is fascinating here is their reasons. These women did not simply state ‘no’ or leave the section blank but they took the time to give brief or extended reasons for their lack of engagement with such texts.

The notion that these programmes are ‘too dramatic’ and ‘unnecessarily affected’ or ‘theatrical’ is interesting here, especially given that shows such as Channel 4s One Born Every Minute are made, marketed and oft applauded as ‘reality’ by the shows creators, midwives and contributors. One Born Every Minute is a British reality pregnancy and childbirth programme that focuses on the late pregnancy and childbirth narratives of a number of women in a busy maternity unit. The series is referred to as ‘fly-on-the-wall’ in line with the documentary tradition because it is filmed by 40 small, fixed, remote-controlled cameras in the maternity unit, including reception, the neonatal ward, the operating theatre and birthing pool, which, although not invisible, are not intrusive as they seem to blend in with the other technological paraphernalia that adorns each room in the ward (Feasey 2013b). Indeed, the programme has been commended for its natural depiction of late pregnancy and childbirth by Sue Macdonald, the education manager of the Royal College of Midwives. Macdonald tells us that the programme gives an accurate portrayal of childbirth that can be both ‘natural’ and in need of intervention. She goes on to say that the show can act as an educator for pregnant women because ‘it does help women think about what it’s going to be like and help them plan what they want for their birth’ (Macdonald cited in Saner 2011). However, this is not necessarily how the show is read by many mothers in the audience:

I found them irritating and obviously picking the parents for the drama and entertainment factor.

 I can’t stand One Born Every Minute, it picks the difficult or sensationalist birth stories, which is frightening or saddening.

This refusal to watch what were seen as dramatic birth stories was even more pronounced for those mothers in the audience who were already scared by the idea of childbirth or who had themselves experienced first hand or knew of a traumatic, or what Naomi Wolf refers to as an ‘ordinary bad birth’ experience (Wolf 2002).

I used to watch One Born Every Minute but now that I’m pregnant for the first time I find it slightly scary to watch, as I’m apprehensive about the process of giving birth.

I watched One Born Every Minute before I had my baby, before I even got pregnant. Once I got pregnant I couldn’t watch it. I also had quite a traumatic birth, so I find I can’t watch it any more really.

Some audiences refuse to watch because of what they view as the over-dramatisation of the birth-experience; others find the traumatic births realistic, but it is then this realism that prevents them from watching the show in case of what one mothers refers to as ‘flashbacks’ to her own traumatic experiences. Several women here make the point that shows such as One Born Every Minute have the power to inform a generation of new mothers, but that they are instead, misinforming them about the lived experience of pregnancy and labour. Another group again, comprising mothers, midwives and other health professionals shun the programme for its lack of verisimilitude to the lived reality of childbirth.

I cannot stand One Born Every Minute. The midwives consistently show poor practice and it does not show birth in a good light.

The portrayal of midwifes isn’t realistic. In the programme they sit round chatting with the mums-to-be for ages. In my experience I’d press the buzzer and have to wait around 20 minutes for attention and the midwives were way too busy to sit around chatting.

Other criticisms of the show take the form of its over representation of the socio-economically disadvantaged mother, based on the assumption that maternal participants are paid for their pregnancy and child-birth ‘performance’ in front of the camera. And even though Channel 4 does not offer a financial reward to mothers who appear on the show, this does not mean that there is not a working class bias to the women included in the production, or what one mother refers to as a ‘skewed picture of society and birth’. Another respondent echoed this comment as she tells us that ‘I do think that the show attracts a certain type of participant, typically lower socio-economic status, lower education and therefore I don’t believe this show is fully representative of the whole variety of experiences and reactions to childbirth’. One might well wonder what would convince any woman to agree to be filmed during labour, and the sentiment behind appearing on the programme is overwhelmingly that families want a professional, yet still personal ‘record’ of their baby’s birth, while also using the show to inform and educate other women about the possibilities of childbirth. For example one couple who appeared on the show announced that:

We were apprehensive, because it is a very private thing … But we thought it would be a good memento for the babies. We also wanted to promote neonatal care … Everyone on the programme was so supportive, so it never felt intrusive. It’s emotional for both of us looking back and seeing those intimate moments. At the time you’re so wrapped up in it that it’s nice to be able to replay it later …  Because we had tried for a long time to get pregnant, I think it was important to show people that through all the heartache good things can happen (cited in Saner 2011).

In terms of criticisms of reality pregnancy and childbirth programming, one mother speaks of the role and responsibility of the maternal cliché, making the point that while One Born Every Minute plays to ‘lots of clichés, e.g. the surge of love or elation on seeing your baby for the first time’ this may ‘not be the case for all women as some feel calm, others panic, others feel numb’. And this sentiment echoes the work of maternal scholars and sociologists who have previously suggested that not only is the ‘good’ mother (one who blossoms during pregnancy, bonds with her baby on contact and then spends every waking moment tending to the diverse needs of a baby, then toddler, then infant, adolescent and adult with no thought to her own needs, wants or desires) a romanticised ideal for some mothers, but that the continued cultural power and pervasiveness of this ideal is harmful to those women who do not or cannot conform to this ‘accepted’ image of contemporary motherhood (Oakley 1979/81, Maushart 1999, Arnold 2003, Green 2004, Borisoff 2005, Douglas and Michaels 2005, Warner 2007, Feasey 2013b).

Although a number of women in the audience have diverse reasons for overlooking or critiquing One Born Every Minute, just over half of those who responded to my questionnaire were entertained and in some cases, informed by, and took comfort in the programme in question. We are told that several women prefer pregnancy and childbirth reality shows to their scripted counter-parts because programmes such as One Born Every Minute ‘don’t try to gloss over the realities of actually having a baby’. Rather, they were said to ‘give a good insight into the reality of childbirth in all its guises’ and therefore ‘demystify the whole experience’ of childbirth. And likewise, ‘I appreciate that it is heavily edited as a Docudrama, but expectant parents do watch it, and it does show some interesting aspects of birth’. However, when this self-same respondent notes that she only ‘sometimes watches … less than I used to’ she echoes a significant number of comments as many women made the point that they were only committed to the show for the duration of their own pregnancies and that due to their own lived experiences, they no longer needed the life lesson or reassurances that these programmes offered:

I suppose I now feel that now I’ve ‘done it’ myself I don’t need to watch anyone else or gain any more information!

I enjoyed watching for a short time, mainly when I was pregnant or shortly after I had my children, but I no longer watch them much. I now have enough reality in my life not to need any more!

For those women who continue to watch pregnancy and childbirth reality programmes after pregnancy, the overwhelming motivation for doing so is nostalgia, to use the programme as a reason to think back to their own pregnancy and birthing experiences, be it days, weeks, years or decades previously:

Yes I love the reality shows, it brings beck memories of my own labour and births.

Reminds me of the pain of labour and the indescribable joy of the birth of your child.

For those who continue to watch the show long after their own pregnancies and childbirth experiences, there are those who speak less of a specific nostalgic experience, and more of an enjoyment of what can be generally understood as ‘the human condition’:

My husband and I love to watch One Born Every Minute because it’s the beauty and wonderfulness of human life with all the possibilities of life and love.

Reality television programmes (such as One Born Every Minute) are interesting and entertaining (emotion and sharing a very special moment in somebodies life) – both before and after I had children.

While mothers in the audience were enthralled by the depiction of new life and growing families in reality programming, so too, they took pleasure in watching the minutia of family interaction and the funny ‘silly’ or amusing behaviours of the pregnant women, midwives and the revolving door of family, friends and birth partners. But another set of voices emerged, they were in the minority, but I wonder how much of this is to do with female self-censure and notions of ‘appropriate’ feminine dialogue. Some women spoke of envy, a sense of missing out, in part to do with primary or secondary infertility struggles, or on the back of their experiences as adoptive mothers or lesbian co-mothers.

I do watch, I probably shouldn’t, I am always torn between joy for those women on screen and my own desperation to be in their shoes.

 I have the joy of my own family, and I wouldn’t change it for the world, but as an adoptive mother I never went through the highs and lows of pregnancy and childbirth and I have often watched programmes like One Born Every Minute and wondered about what could have been …

Women habitually watch, refuse to watch or view pregnancy and childbirth reality programming for a limited time due to a relatively small number of reasons, education and childbirth instruction, vicarious and nostalgic experiences, a broader sense of the human condition or a veiled notion of envy. What was clear however in all responses, be they applauding or critiquing the reality genre, the notion of the real (or lack thereof) was crucial to their commentary. With this in mind then, it is enlightening to see the ways in which these same women respond to depictions of pregnancy and childcare when removed from the genre codes of realism and verisimilitude.

The fictional drama: pregnancy, childcare and the role of the midwife

Call the Midwife (2012- ) is a BBC drama based on books written by Jennifer Worth, a midwife working in the 1950s East End and supplementary testimonials from others midwives from the period. With this in mind, it is perhaps unsurprising that respondents remarked on the quality of the production, irrespective of their comment concerning pregnancy and childbirth on the small screen. In short, there were three key reasons given for watching the show and they are inextricable linked, namely: historical interest, feelings of nostalgia for a personally experienced or more hypothetical time, and the ability to compare pregnancy, childbirth and health practices from the 1950s to the present day. In terms of historical interest we are told that:

I like the dramas as they show us what pregnancy and childbirth was like before and the challenges they faced.

I watch Call the Midwife sometimes … it’s really well done and fascinating/interesting again to see the way things were done in a different era.

While these mothers spoke of their historical interest in a by-gone era of health and medicine, the majority of women who spoke favourably about the show found entertainment and emotion in their ability to not only look back, but in comparing the 1950s depictions with more contemporary health, medicine and social norms:

I like Call the Midwife for historical interest. I read the books before the series was made and it was fascinating to see what has changed – and what hasn’t – in the past 50 years.

Drama is different as its obviously going to be a little unrealistic for dramatic purposes or for the storyline. Call the Midwife is good as its enjoyable seeing how things have moved on.

Although many women spoke of notions of historical interest and a fascination for charting different healthcare practices over previous decades, there were also those women who spoke of a more specific feeling of nostalgia. More mature mothers in the audience used the word nostalgia rather than more general terms of historical interest as the programme both harked back to a bygone era and spoke to them about their own lived experiences of family life during the period in question:

I love Call the Midwife because of its nostalgic era. It’s a gentle programme that’s endearing to watch, no swearing or violence. But wonderful characters and relationships.

Watching Call the Midwife gave me such pleasure. I was born in 1947, so the time is nostalgic. I remember well the child health clinic, the Virol, orange juice and brewers yeast tablets; having a friend who contacted polio wearing callipers. His mother gave birth to twins and they were placed in the bottom drawer of the wardrobe until a wicker washing basket could be bought, as money was tight. The washing basket could be used later and money was well spent. Washing nappies has become a thing of the past.

The programme can be said to remind audiences of a different period, when norms of etiquette and domesticity were understood to be safer and more chaste. In this way the programme can be seen to offer a ‘romanticized nostalgia for the good old days’ (Grainge 2003). However, the show might perhaps be less a yearning for a preferred but irretrievable past and more a ‘fabricated approximation of the past’ (Drake 2003) so that those selectively stylised clothes, home furnishings and hospital rooms ‘operate as catalysts for recollection’ (ibid) and mobilise a feeling of a past security, reassurance and comfort. The feeling of comfort for a by-gone era tended to be experienced by younger mothers watching the programme, while more mature mothers and grandmothers in the audience vocalised nostalgia based on their own lived experiences, memories and recollections. This is not to say that their own memories are not in some way rose-tinted, but this is a different viewing position than those looking at the programme as an initial introduction to the historical period.

While most mothers watching Call the Midwife were fascinated and enthralled by the notion of difference and change between 1950s birthing practices and those of today, a small number of women made the point that pregnancy and birthing is a universal, timeless experience, unchanged since time immemorial:

I loved Call the Midwife … although since having a baby it has been a more emotional watch. I like it more because of the historical and universality of motherhood/giving birth.

As fictional drama, albeit based on the accounts of a practising midwife, the programme is removed from the genre codes and conventions of reality programming. And yet one mother notes that the programme ‘is actually sometimes more realistic about childbirth, despite it being fiction’. That said, like its reality counterparts, the show is held up to similar audience critiques, in that it is simultaneously too dramatic and too sentimental according to different women in the television audience. In terms of traditional notions of romanticism and sentimentality we find:

Call the Midwife I felt was in a way romanticised even with some negative endings. The drama series was ultimately a drama and was meant to make you feel.

I enjoy fictional programmes such as Call the Midwife … they are nostalgic and well written, I’m often ‘sucked in’ and find myself cheering for a character or crying when an emotional scene is aired! I suppose I quite like the fact that child birth on these shows is rather romanticized … reality being rather less attractive.

While one mother applauds the show for its ‘sympathetic depiction of birth’ that presents childbirth ‘as a part of life as opposed to a dramatic medical emergency as normally depicted’, another suggested that the show was, like its reality predecessor, too sensationalistic. In terms of being too sensationalistic, we are told that ‘I did enjoy Call the Midwife as it focused on the midwives and what they could do with limited resources. However, as the series went on it did get frustrating that every episode seemed to include a rare and catastrophic event’.

While both factual and fictional programming are accused of both dramatising and romanticising representations of late pregnancy and childbirth on the small screen, both were understood, according to different maternal audiences, to be at times, frustrating, educational, emotional and entertaining. What was interesting here however is what these shows contribute to mass media depictions of feminism, femininity and a woman’s role, as several mothers made the point that One Born Every Minute and Call the Midwife depict strong, courageous and resourceful women, removed from predictable notions of objectification and stereotypical sex-role stereotyping. Those women who spoke of their interest in watching the eponymous midwives routinely spoke of the ‘strength, courage and capabilities’ of these women in what are deemed ‘adverse & challenging situations … the midwives are strong female role models’. In my desire to learn a little more about why mothers watch, or refuse to watch, depictions of pregnancy and childbirth on screen, I have discovered something perhaps even more significant to the field of film, television and media studies, and that is that powerful women exist on television, just perhaps not in the genres and programmes that we might routinely expect. Much recent feminist scholarship examines, unmasks and interrogates the representation of women in contemporary television, including the depiction of the matriarch in the prime-time soap opera, the single girl in the situation comedy format, female empowerment in adult animation, the kick-ass heroine in the fantasy teen and science fiction text, the abrasive female detective in the cop show and the exhibitionism of women in reality programming, and yet it is here, in depictions of midwives and medical professionals that we find female strength and stamina.

Conclusion

While Channel 4s One Born Every Minute and the reality pregnancy and childbirth genre was critiqued for both scaremongering and reassuring women about the ‘reality’ of childbirth, the long-running show continues to be most popular with new mothers and younger mothers when compared to those who spoke favourably about the BBC One Drama, Call the Midwife. And although there were a small number of concerns about the routine over-dramatisation of problematic births in the latter production, most middle aged and more mature mothers in the audience spoke with enthusiasm about the period production both because of and in spite of its commitment to pregnancy and childbirth through the midwives of the period[i].

Although there is limited evidence here of the ways in which pregnant women watch the reality genre for pregnancy advice and childbirth instruction, perhaps we should look to the fictional drama as the most important educator. In the final episode of the fourth series, Doctor Turner/ Stephen McGann prescribed the sedative thalidomide to a pregnant mother[ii]. And while many women in the audience are now prepared for much of the drama that will no doubt make up the fifth series of the show in question, there are many who will be shocked and surprised at the outcome of a seemingly innocent prescription. And it is for this reason that Call the Midwife is essential viewing, not just for new or existing mothers, but to a generation of young women unaware of the outcome of taking that seemingly harmless drug.

Bibliography

• Arnold, Abby (2003), ‘The Rhetoric of Motherhood’, The Mothers Movement Online, Available at: http://www.mothersmovement.org/features/rhetoric_motherhood/rhetoric_motherhood.htm (accessed 10/08/2010).
• BBC (2015) ‘Comic Relief Does Call the Midwife’ BBC One, Available at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p016f8l9 (19/03/2015).
• Bonifazi, Wendy (2003), ‘Midlife Motherhood: Late Expectations?’, Nurseweek, Available at: http://www2nursingspectrum.com/articles/print/html?AID=10670 (accessed 10/08/2011).
• Borisoff, Deborah (2005), ‘Transforming Motherhood: “We’ve Come a Long Way”, Maybe’ Review of Communication, 5:1, 1-11.
• Douglas, Susan and Michaels, Meredith (2005) The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How it Has Undermined All Women, London: Free Press.
• Drake, Philip (2003) ‘Mortgaged to Music: New Retro Movies in 1990s Hollywood Cinemas’ in Memory and Popular Film, ed. Paul Grainge,  Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp.183-201
• Grainge, Paul (2003) ‘Colouring the Past: Pleasantville and the Textuality of Media Memory’ in Memory and Popular Film, ed. Paul Grainge, Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp.202-219
• Feasey, Rebecca (forthcoming) Mothers on Mothers: Maternal Readings of Popular Television, London: PeterLang
• Feasey, Rebecca (2013a) ‘Mothers on Mothers: Maternal Readings of Popular Television: Questionnaire’. Available at: https://motherhoodandtelevision.wordpress.com/questionnaire/ (accessed 20/03/2015).
• Feasey, Rebecca (2013b) From Happy Homemaker to Desperate Housewives: Motherhood and Popular Television, London: Anthem.
• Green, Fiona (2004) ‘Feminist Mothers: Successfully Negotiating the Tensions Between Motherhood as Institution and Experience’ in Mother Outlaws: Theories and Practices of Empowered Mothering, ed. Andrea O’Reilly, Toronto: Women’s Press, 31-42.
• Hermes, Joke (1995) Reading Women’s Magazines: An Analysis of Everyday Media Use, Cambridge: Polity Press.
• Maher, Jennifer (2004), ‘What do Women Watch? Tuning in to the Compulsory Heterosexuality Channel’, in Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture, eds. Susan Murray and Laurie Ouellette, London: New York University Press, pp.197-213.
• Maushart, Susan (1999), The Mask of Motherhood: How Becoming a Mother Changes Everything and Why We Pretend it Doesn’t, London: Pandora.
• McGrath, Nick (2014) ‘My Thalidomide Family: Every time I Went Home I was a Stranger’ The Guardian, Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/aug/01/thalidomide-louise-medus-a-stranger-when-i-went-home (accessed 19/03/2015).
• Morris, Theresa and McInerney, Katherine (2010), ‘Media Representations of Pregnancy and Childbirth: An Analysis of Reality Television Programs in the United States’, Birth: Issues in Perinatal Care, 37:2, 134-140.
• Oakley, Ann (1979/1981) Becoming a Mother (Reprinted as From Here to Maternity. Harmondsworth: Penguin), Oxford: Martin Robertson.
• Saner, Emine (2011), ‘How C4’s One Born Every Minute Made Childbirth a Reality TV Hit’, Guardian.co.uk, Available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/mar/22/one-born-every-minute-tv-c4-childbirth(accessed 10/08/2011).
• Stephens, Rebecca (2004), ‘Socially Soothing Stories? Gender, Race and Class in TLC’s A Wedding Story and A Baby Story, Understanding Reality Television, ed. Su Holmes and Deborah Jermyn, London: Routledge, 191-210.
• Warner, Judith (2007) ‘The Motherhood Religion’ in Maternal Theory: Essential Readings, ed. Andrea O’Reilly, Toronto: Demeter Press, 705-725.
• Wolf, Naomi (2002) Misconceptions: Truth, Lies and the Unexpected on the Journey to Motherhood, London: Vintage.

PROJECT AFTERBIRTH

International Open Call for Artist Parents

 On Monday 6th April 2015, Project AfterBirth launches an international open call inviting professional contemporary artists of any gender working in any visual, performing, text, film or digital art discipline to submit work they created in response to their own or their partner’s pregnancy, birth and/or early parenthood experiences. Submission deadline is Friday 15th May.

By the end of June 2015, a dedicated panel of international arts professionals will announce a selection from submissions which will feature in an exhibition about the impact of early parenthood on the artist. This exhibition will launch at White Moose gallery in the South West of the UK on 2nd October 2015 with the aim to tour to a number of UK, European and USA art spaces in 2016-18.

The Project AfterBirth selection panel comprises founding artists/curators Kris Jager & Mila Oshin(Joy Experiment, Exeter, UK), Stella Levy and Julie Gavin (White Moose, Devon, UK), Joy Rose(Museum of Motherhood, New York, USA), Helen Knowles (The Birth Rites Collection, Manchester, UK) and Francesca Pinto (The Photographer’s Gallery, London, UK).

The panel will be looking for high quality and engaging work, reflecting a variety of personal perspectives on 21st century pregnancy, birth and early parenthood experiences by a mix of emerging and established professional contemporary artists working in traditional and new media.

Submitted work may also contribute to an interdisciplinary research initiative led by Project AfterBirthand a team of academics from the fields of obstetrics, mental health, midwifery, media studies, social justice, and women and gender studies, which aims to shed light on current Western pregnancy & birth practices, to investigate their impact on early parenthood experiences, and to inform their future. A further objective is to present submitted work on a new online archive dedicated to contemporary art, social activism and research on the subject of new parenthood.

For more information or to join the mailing list, visit: http://www.projectafterbirth.com.

Please also LIKE Project AfterBirth on Facebook and/or follow developments on Twitter.

For all PRESS ENQUIRIES please email projectafterbirth@lionartprojects.co.uk.

Project AfterBirth is supported by:

 Logo image credit: Hilary Paynter, ‘Another Life’, 1977, reproduced with kind permission from the artist.

By Rosalind Howell

In December the NICE guidelines were updated to reflect changing cultural attitudes to pregnancy and birth. They acknowledge that for women, birth is a ‘significant and emotionally intense life experience’ and also acknowledge the effects of birth are far reaching and so far little is known about this.

Having given birth three times in the last four and half years, I have felt caught between two modern paradigms, the medicalised, intervention-full hospital birth, and the gentle, pain free, (even orgasmic) homebirth. These extremes seem to reflect a cultural unwillingness to reconcile some of our most difficult and challenging feelings around birth and motherhood.

The popularity of hypnobirthing classes, as well as websites such as sacredbirthing.org and sarahbuckley.com, reflect the desire by many women who are pregnant or hoping to conceive to positively affect the experience of childbirth for them and their baby. Perhaps too, women are looking for a discourse that acknowledges that birth is significant for women as well as babies – that as women become mothers, transformations can take place. However, as we not only set ourselves up for feeling guilty, judged and not good enough, if we end up in hospital or receive some other kind of medical intervention during childbirth, we may also be avoiding thinking about an important component in the development of relationships.

We are told that pain during childbirth can be a ‘myth’ (Mongan), that birth can be sensual and pleasurable (orgasmicbirth.com). It should be ‘soft ‘and ‘conscious’ (sacredbirthing.org) in order not to traumatise our baby, and that in our birth and our mothering our watchword at all times should be ‘gentleness’ (sarahbuckley.com).

Naturally this puts women under tremendous pressure to birth in a certain way. They may feel guilt and anxiety before, during and after birth if their experience does not look and feel like these descriptions of an ‘ideal’ birth.

Psychoanalysis tells us that all relationships can be characterised by ambivalence. D.W Winnicott even went so far as to list 18 reasons why a mother hates her baby (“The baby is a danger to her body in pregnancy and at birth. He is ruthless, treats her as scum, an un-paid servant, a slave.”) He suggests that it is vital for a mother to acknowledge her most difficult feelings around her baby (without resorting to retaliation) in order to assist the child’s developmental journey from experiencing relationship with the (m)other as a fantasy, to one based on reality.

Discourse that idealises birth, that only allows the idea of a gentle birth to be ok, that ascribes only gentleness as the characteristic of a ‘good enough’ mother is doing a disservice to women and children. By disavowing violent, aggressive, even hateful experiences we miss the opportunity to describe fully the complex experience of birthing, being born and developing in all its pain and joy.

Fantasises of the symbiotic nature of the mother/baby relationship do women the double disservice of not allowing their more difficult feelings regarding becoming a mother and thereby missing its potentially transformative powers. It is the violent separation as the baby leaves the mothers body that haunts us for the rest of our lives, and fantasies of pain free, easy, birth deny not only the physical but also the emotional pain of that first separation (Kristeva).

Writing in 1977, Julia Kristeva claimed that we were in thrall to the traditional religious representations of motherhood – the cult of the Virgin Mary. As she noted, the 4^th century orthodox church attempted to prove that Mary remained a virgin after childbirth, thereby not only denying mothers their sexuality, but also the violence of birth where their tissues are torn through birthing.

Writing again in 2005, Kristeva maintained that what remains of religious feeling in our culture still colours our thoughts and feelings about motherhood. When the author of sacredbirthing.org describes how she ‘received a message’ to create ‘a new kind of birth for the master race coming’ it is a rather crude example of the way, as Kristeva says, women collude with societies ‘overvaluing’ of pregnancy, the ‘sacred womb’ and the ‘marketing of the perfect child’. Yet as women we must cope with the imperfections of our children and our mothering and face the fact that our baby is not our own imaginative conception (Winnicott).

In her journal writing, written shortly after the birth of her son, Kristeva says: “… a mother doesn’t give birth in pain she gives birth to pain… it settles in… a mother is branded by pain” (my italics).

So what other pain characterises the mother’s relationship to her child? The pain of increasing separation as the child grows towards adulthood; of not being able to protect one’s child completely from suffering; of the loss of one’s pre-mother self… the list is long.

By wanting to take the violence and the pain out of the discourse around childbirth – and call it ‘sensation’ for example (hypnobirthing.co.uk) – might we be trying to deny the part of motherhood that is inherently painful and as a result actually make it harder for those feelings to be borne by us?

Winnicott says, “sentimentality in a mother is no good at all from a child’s point from view”. In other words, the child can only learn to acknowledge and tolerate her own complex mix of feelings regarding human relationships if the environment she is in doesn’t deny the ambivalence inherent in mothering. As relations between mothers and babies move out of fantasy and into reality, real exchange is possible (Phillips & Taylor).

As birthing women we don’t want to be overwhelmed by the fear of pain, violence, separation and loss but this is less likely to happen when all feelings, including difficult ones are allowed to enter the birthing arena, thought about and so more easily born.

Women need kindness and compassion from their caregivers and those seeking to give advice, not sentimentality. Perhaps as mothers to be we look to ‘birth experts’ such as sacred birthing.org for a type of support we are afraid we won’t get from our own mothers and our midwifes. Yet this type of discourse is offering something akin to ‘magical kindness’, a very primitive form of kindness that carries with it the belief that we can somehow be rescued from all our difficulties (Phillips & Taylor).

As the NICE guidelines recommend a ‘normalising birth’ route for women with low risk pregnancies, might a normal birth be one that allows all aspects of the experience into the birthing room: the love and the hate, the soft and the not so soft, the pain and the pleasure?

NICE guidelines also now state that information regarding ‘low risk’ births should be presented to women in a less risk based way. Perhaps too, we should also be re-thinking the idea of risk in pregnancy and childbirth. As Kristeva suggests, we are still failing to grapple with the real questions of having children. What are the risks and benefits for me as a woman to step onto the path of motherhood? What are the risks and benefits to the child, the father, and to society as a whole?

References

Kristeva, J. (1977) Sabat Mater. In : Moi, T. The Kristeva Reader. Blackwell, (1986).

Kristeva, J. (2005) Motherhood Today. www.kristeva.fr

Mongan. M (2008) Hypnobirthing: The Mongan Method: A Natural Approach to a Safe, Easier, More Comfortable Birthing. Health Communications

Phillips, A. Taylor, B. On Kindness. Penguin, (2009).

Winnicott, D.W.  Hate In the Countertransference. In Collected Papers: Through Paediatrics to Psychoanalysis Karnac. 1958.

www.hypnobirthing.co.uk

www.orgasmicbirth.com

www.sacredbirthing.org

www.sarahbuckley.com

Rosalind Howell is a trained Movement Psychotherapist. She currently facilitates workshops for staff teams who wish to develop their reflective skills. She also holds quarterly women’s talking circles at her home. Since giving birth to her three children she has also given birth in herself a passionate desire to express her ideas in writing. Her articles have appeared in E-Motion journal and Juno magazine.

By Rebecca Feasey 

Infertility is a common experience among women within and beyond the UK, and this experience ‘is not usually discussed publicly, at least in detail’ (Striff, 2005: 189). Although a woman’s infertility story is generally only witnessed by the medical profession, there has been a recent trend in the women’s tabloid and gossip sector whereby celebrities share their infertility stories with a willing public. With this in mind I hope to briefly outline the codes and conventions of the celebrity infertility narrative in order to consider the ways in which these confessional discourses might be considered as an extension of the informative public health campaign or, alternatively, as a more stigmatising discourse.

Infertility

Although there is no single definition of infertility, it routinely refers to a couple that cannot conceive despite having regular unprotected sex (NHS 2014a). Women who are able to become pregnant, but then have repeated miscarriages, are also considered infertile (CDC 2014). In order to fully understand the commonality of this experience, it is worth noting that one in six couples in Britain may have difficulty conceiving while an estimated 25 per cent of all women and their partners will experience an episode of infertility during their lifetime in the United States. And, according to the World Health Organisation, these rates have remained stable for several decades (Warren-Gash, 2013).

Age-Defying Physiques and Fashions

The fashion industry, marketers and media environment have started to tell audiences that ‘40 is the new 30’ (Michault, 2005), or that ‘40 is the new 20’ (Cosmopolitan, 2014) due to the ways in which fashion-forward celebrities are seemingly defying the aging process in terms of both their physical appearance and sartorial choices. Likewise, the cosmetics industry seems committed to making mature skin more radiant than ever before, and the ‘latest statistics from the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons show demand for anti-aging procedures soared in the past year – even despite the recession’ (Peacock, 2013).

40 may well be the new 30, or indeed, the new 20 in terms of physical appearance and surface attractiveness, however, it is worth remembering that even though 95 per cent of couples who have regular unprotected sex will conceive naturally within two years of trying, ‘the chances of becoming pregnant are much lower in older women’ (NHS, 2014a), however age-defying their appearances.

Age-Defying Physiques and Infertility

Indeed, many of the 40-something women who the mass media applaud for their youthful physiques, on trend fashions and smooth visages are those self-same celebrities who have struggled with infertility. While stars such as Courtney Cox, Sarah Jessica Parker, Marcia Cross, Sharon Stone and Nicole Kidman are championed in the beauty and fashion sector for looking ‘youthful […] despite having passed the dreaded “middle-age” milestone’ (Daily Mail, 2013), it is worth thinking about the ways in which these women might be understood as both fashion and fertility role models.

After all, if one considers the ways in which celebrities in general, and female celebrities in particular, have been formally and informally positioned as public health campaigners for diseases such as breast and cervical cancer (Ashton and Feasey, 2013), then it is possible to extend this argument and consider the ways in which women such as Sarah Jessica Parker might be understood in this self-same way as an unofficial spokesperson for infertility.

Championing the Celebrity Infertility Story

After all, although a celebrity’s willingness to share their diagnosis and treatment with the public might be understood as a calculated self-exposure exercise, such candid confessional discourses about infertility can bring this topic into the public consciousness, and in this sense be beneficial for other infertile women and as a broader public service regarding age-related infertility.

Indeed, an exhaustive number of contributions to newspaper blogs and postings congratulate these women for speaking publicly about their infertility. This outpouring of appreciation is understandable and indeed to be expected if one considers where and how this information is available. Celebrity infertility stories are routinely found in the women’s gossip and tabloid sector, alongside a range of blogs and celebdocs, and these media forms have historically relied on the celebrity confessional. My point here then is that while celebrities have long been relaying intimate stories of romance, family and heartache, they have more recently begun to share their most candid infertility narratives. Rather than deride these women for trivializing their infertility stories for financial or fame reward, it is worth noting that these stories are of significance to those women who too are struggling with infertility, more so in fact than more factual or news based accounts of disease or affliction (Ashton and Feasey, 2013). Time and again, blogs thank performers for being open and seemingly candid about their infertility stories (Yuppy Mom, 2010; BustedKate, 2013; Wertman, 2013; Gorenstein, 2014).

Courtney Cox and her then husband David Arquette struggled with infertility because although Cox managed to get pregnant, immunity problems meant that she struggled to stay pregnant. After suffering several miscarriages, Cox turned to IVF and at the age of 41 had a healthy baby girl. After the birth of her daughter Cox spoke publicly about her use of IVF and made it clear that ‘in vitro is a wonderful thing that people can do in this day and age’ (nobabyonboard, 2014).  Likewise, after suffering from secondary infertility, Sarah Jessica Parker, then 43, and husband Matthew Broderick spoke about their use of a gestational surrogate to carry their twin girls after exploring a variety of ways of expanding their family’  (Knight, 2010).

IVF and Surrogacy are viable fertility options, with obvious success stories, and in one sense then the ways in which stars such as Cox and Parker share their birth stories is helpful in terms of educating women about their fertility options.

The Partiality of the Celebrity Infertility Story: The Healthy Newborn

That said it is of course worth mentioning several concerns that are pertinent to these and a myriad of other celebrity infertility narratives. Firstly, these women tend only to announce their infertility struggles once they are holding their healthy newborn, which in itself sends out a rather misleading finale to the infertility narrative. Erin Striff makes this point when she tells us that:

[P]ublic fertility stories are often structured as a “near-miss,” in that we know of a celebrity’s previous failed rounds of IVF only when they may at the same time perform their successful achievement of pregnancy … the struggle with infertility only becomes acceptable to discuss in the public eye if it has been overcome in some way, reiterating the feeling that infertility is something to be ashamed of (Striff, 2005: 195).

In short, celebrity infertility has become, to some degree, accepted, but only on the back of a successful fertility story. Even though Sharon Begley of Newsweek reported that ‘getting a baby’ through assisted procreative technologies was almost as easy as getting a tattoo (cited in Sterling, 2013: 124), the truth is that these procedures fail more often than they succeed, and this reality is rarely spoken of as part of the celebrity infertility story.

The success of IVF depends on the age of the woman undergoing treatment, with 32.2 per cent success rate for women under 35, a 20.8 per cent success rate for women aged 38-39, a 5 per cent success rate for women aged 43-44 and a 1.9 per cent success rate for women over 44 (NHS, 2014b). Therefore, even though there have been numerous technical advances relating to assisted conception in recent years, ‘IVF remains, at best, a hopeful art driven by the best of intentions and less than complete knowledge’ (Hall, 2005: 71). The overwhelming majority of these personal stories have a happy ending which ‘minimize[s] the infertility experience perhaps making those who actually experienced the harsh realities [of] infertility feel even more isolated and stigmatized’ (Sterling, 2013: 99).

The Partiality of the Celebrity Infertility Story: The Cost of Treatment

Secondly, IVF is expensive, and even though the NHS does offer 3 rounds of IVF for women under 40 and one round of IVF for women over 40 there are specific criteria that these women must reach. And if these women are not eligible then private treatment costs approximately £5000 depending on treatment needed per cycle (NHS, 2014b). And in terms of surrogacy in the UK, although the law states that ‘no surrogate may receive any form of payment during or after a surrogacy agreement’, intended parents must pay for reasonable ‘expenses incurred by the surrogate’ ranging from about £7,000-£15,000 (Surrogacy UK, 2014) on the back of the costs incurred if a woman is ‘planning to use the services of an IVF clinic’ (ibid).  Therefore, although one might refer to infertility as just a ‘90s affliction’ that could be overcome with fertility treatments (Sterling, 2013: 124), the reality is that these techniques are unavailable to the average woman. Gorenstein says it best when she tells us that money can’t buy you the ‘ability to conceive a child on your own. Though it can certainly help you get the best treatment’ (Gorenstein 2014).

However even though success rates and financial constraints are given scant attention in the successful celebrity infertility narrative, my third point here is that links between aging and infertility for women, and the role of egg donation are notable in their absence.

The Partiality of the Celebrity Infertility Story: Egg Donation and Age as a Contributing Factor

Fertility declines with age, indeed, a growing number of fertility clinics refuse to admit 45-year-old women for treatment (Gatrell, 2008: 48). And yet, since 2000, the tabloid and women’s magazine sector has routinely covered stories and presented photo-shoots with a growing number of older celebrity figures from the film, literary and political arena delivering healthy babies, with no mention of egg donation. To name but a few:  Marcia Cross (44) Cherie Blair (45), Mimi Rodgers (45), Marcia Gay Harden (45), Iman (45), Susan Sarandon (46), Halle Berry (46), Arlene Phillips (47), Angela Bassett (47), Kelly Preston (47), Holly Hunter (47), Geena Davis (48), Wendy Wasserstein (48), Helen Fielding (48), Elizabeth Edwards (48) and (50) and Beverly D’Angelo (49).

Schlosberg tells us that Marcia Cross is unique on the celebrity motherhood circuit for openly discussing the use of donor eggs. That said, ‘even then she only says it’s common knowledge how difficult it is for women in their forties to get pregnant with their own eggs. She always stops short of admitting to using them herself’ (Schlosberg, 2011).

Doctors have been heard commentating that ‘the probability of conceiving and delivering a child with a woman’s own eggs at forty-five is virtually zero (Sterling, 2013: 99), and as such older mothers who themselves struggled with fertility lambast ‘nameless celebrities for not sharing the truth about infertility and for making mature motherhood seem so effortless (Cited in Sterling, 2013: 67). In this same way, blog posts echo this point when they ask ‘wouldn’t it be lovely if just one celebrity would come forward, be vulnerable and say: “I am a mother via egg donation and I am proud”’ (Global IVF, 2013).

I am not of course suggesting that these women have used assisted reproductive techniques, indeed, most have not admitted reproductive help of any kind, I am merely pointing out the exceptional nature of their celebrity birth stories that might mislead a generation of women as to the reality of their own fertility options. My concern is simply that the successful celebrity infertility narrative masks statistical facts relating to fertility, pregnancy and new motherhood. And although there is a growing trend towards delaying motherhood, as women are seen to have children in their late 30s and beyond, it is worth noting the rise in what is understood as ‘reproductive complacency’ (Global IVF, 2013). After all, a ‘survey of educated young professional women found that 90 per cent thought that they could wait until age 45 to start having their own biological children, even though next to none over 44 are able to, despite advanced technology’ (Bonifazi 2003 cited in Feasey, 2013: 146). After all, the ‘live birth rate for women using assistive reproductive technology … with fresh, non-donor eggs or embryos is 15% at age 40, 5% at 43, and 2% after 43’ (ibid, 146).

Conclusion

To conclude then, the average age of a first time mother in the UK is growing (ONS, 2014); more women than ever before are having children in the late 30s and early 40s and beyond (ibid); Assisted Reproduction Technologies are advancing; the number of women taking advantage of such techniques is increasing and more celebrities than ever before are presenting their infertility stories in the women’s tabloid and gossip sector.

Although one might suggest that the celebrity infertility confessional can offer hope through identification with the celebrity revelation by defying the privacy of infertility treatment, the partial account on offer here could perhaps lead to reproductive complacency, false hope or go further to reinforce the sense of stigma and failure that many infertile women are said to be experiencing (Woollett, 1994: 54), none of which can be understood as helpful to individuals or beneficial to society.

Reference List

• Ashton, D and Feasey, R (2014) ‘This is Not How Cancer Looks’: Celebrity Diagnosis and Death in the Tabloid Media, Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism – Celebrity News. 15:2, pp.237-251
• BustedKate (2013) ‘Celebrities Who Have Talked About Their Miscarriages’ BabyMed [Online] Available at: http://www.babymed.com/blogs/bustedkate/celebrities-who-have-talked-about-their-miscarriages (March 24 2014)
• CDC (2014) ‘Reproductive Health: Infertility FAQs’, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [Online] Available at: http://www.cdc.gov/Reproductivehealth/Infertility/ (March 24 2014)
• Cosmopolitan (2012) ‘Is 40 the New 20’, Cosmopolitan [Online] Available at: http://cosmo.intoday.in/story/is-40-the-new-20/1/8599.html (March 24 2014)
• Daily Mail (2013) ‘Why Forty Really is the New Thirty’, IOL Lifestyle [Online] Available:
• http://www.iol.co.za/lifestyle/people/why-forty-really-is-the-new-thirty-1.1498868#.UzAgd40nS70. (March 24 2014)
• Feasey, R (2012) From Happy Homemaker to Desperate Housewives: Motherhood and Popular Television, London: Anthem Press
• Fertility Authority (2014) ‘Infertile Celebrities’, Fertility Authority [Online] Available at: http://www.fertilityauthority.com/articles/infertile-celebrities (March 24 2014)
• Gatrell, Caroline (2008), Embodying Women’s Work, Maidenhead: Open University Press.
• Global IVF (2013) ‘Celebrity Infertility Secrets?’ Global IVF [Online] Available at: http://globalivf.com/2013/06/10/celebrities-infertility-secrets/ (March 24 2014)
• Gorenstein, Sarah Preston (2014) ‘Celebrities Really Are Just Like Us’, Parenting [Online] Available at: http://www.parenting.com/blogs/trying-conceive/sarah-preston-gorenstein/celebrities-really-are-just-us (March 24 2014)
• Hall, Stephen (2005) ‘The Good Egg’ in Cells: An Anthology of Current Thought, ed. Jillian Lokere, Rosen Central, pp.46-72
• Michault, Jessica (2005) ‘Is 40 the new 30? Stars Redefine Age’ [Online] Available at http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/10/style/10iht-rfor.html?_r=1& (March 24 2014)
• Knight, Katherine (2010) ‘Sarah Jessica Parker: Carrie’s back with Sex And The City’, Express [Online] Available at: http://www.express.co.uk/expressyourself/156290/Sarah-Jessica-Parker-Carrie-s-back-with-Sex-And-The-City (March 24 2014)
• NHS (2014a) ‘Infertility’, NHS Choices [Online] Available at: http://www.nhs.uk/conditions/infertility/Pages/Introduction.aspx (March 24 2014)
• NHS (2014b) ‘IVF’, NHS Choices [Online] Available at: http://www.nhs.uk/Conditions/IVF/Pages/Introduction.aspx (March 20142014)
• – nobabyonboard (2014) ‘Celebrities with Inertility’, nobabyonboard [Online] Available at: http://www.nobabyonboard.com/moviestv.html (March 24 2014)
• ONS (2013) ‘Live Births in England and Wales by Characteristics of Mother: Statistical Bulletin’ ONS, [Online] Available at: http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/dcp171778_296157.pdf (March 24 2014)
• Peacock, Louisa (2013) ‘The Pursuit of Beauty: What Compels Women to go Under the Knife?’, The Telegraph [Online] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-life/10071794/Cosmetic-surgery-What-compels-women-to-go-under-the-knife.html (Match 24 2014)
• Schlosberg, Suzanne (2011) ‘Nicole Kidman Dishes on Fertility Woes’, ABC NEWS [Online] Available at http://abcnews.go.com/Health/WomensHealth/nicole-kidman-talks-openly-infertility/story?id=12968754&page=2 (March 24 2014)
• Sterling, Evelina (2013) ‘From No Hope to Fertile Dreams: Procreative Technologies, Popular Media, and the Culture of Infertility’, Georgina State University, [Online] Available at: http://scholarworks.gsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1069&context=sociology_diss (March 24 2014)
• Striff, Erin (2005) ‘“Infertile Me:” The Public Performance of Fertility Treatments in Internet Weblogs’, Women & Performance: a Journal of Feminist Theory, 15:2, pp.189-206.
• Surrogacy UK (2014) ‘Common Questions Answered’ Surrogacy UK [Online] Available at: http://www.surrogacyuk.org/intended_parents/your-questions-answered (24 March 2014
• Warren-Gash, Charlotte (2013) ‘Worldwide Infertility Rates Unchanged in 20 Years says World Health Organisation’, BioNews [Online] Available at: http://www.bionews.org.uk/page_232839.asp (24 March 2014)
• Wertman, Tonya (2013) ‘Infertility and the Media’ SheKnowsParenting [Online] Available at: http://www.sheknows.com/parenting/articles/991979/infertility-celebrities-and-the-media (24 March 2014)
• Woollett, Anne (1994), ‘The Mandate for Motherhood: Having Children – Accounts of Childless Women and Women with Reproductive Problems’, in Motherhood: Meanings, Practices and Ideologies, eds Ann Phoenix, Anne Woollett & Eva Lloyd, London, Sage, pp.47-65.
• Yuppy Mom (2010) ‘Celebrities & Infertility’, Yuppy Mom [Online] Available at: http://thepregnantyuppy.blogspot.co.uk/2010/01/celebrities-infertility.html (24 March 2014)

Rebecca Feasey  is Senior Lecturer in Film and Media Communications at Bath Spa University. She has published a range of work on celebrity culture, contemporary Hollywood stardom and the representation of gender in popular media culture. She has published in journals such as the Quarterly Review of Film and Video, the Journal of Popular Film and Television, the Journal of Gender Studies, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. She has written book length studies on masculinity and popular television (EUP, 2008) and motherhood on the small screen (Anthem, 2012). She is currently writing a research monograph on the ways in which women respond to representations of motherhood on television (Pater Lang, 2015: http://motherhoodandtelevision.wordpress.com/).

The great maternal theorist Sara Ruddick argues that the practice of mothering “is to take upon oneself the responsibility of child care, making its work a regular and substantial part of one’s working life” (1995: 17).  The work to which Ruddick refers revolves around what she sees as three major demands, which involve preserving a child’s life by looking after his/her/zer health, nurturing a child’s emotional and intellectual growth, and raising a child in a manner that is acceptable to the “social groups of which the mother is a member” (19-21). When we think critically about these duties, however, it soon becomes obvious that there is no need for this mother work to be carried out by a biological or legally adoptive mother. Indeed, as Ruddick points out, there is no “reason why mothering work should be distinctly female” either, as “Anyone who commits her or himself to responding to children’s demands…is a mother” (XIII).  These tasks involved in raising a child from infancy are crucial work, but they need not be – nor are they always – performed by the mother identified on official documents.

Because custodial mothers cannot always be present, a great many of us will have experienced those moments when we were mothered by day care workers, nannies, neighbours, aunts and uncles, or family friends. We could refer to such work as “babysitting” but the truth is, there are moments when the interactions transcend that term and its casual connotations. Terms such as “babysitting” trivialize the work that can happen in such contexts, making it seem as though no real parenting is being done during these sometimes day-long sessions of care. Of course, anyone who has ever spent time with care-givers besides one’s legal guardians knows that is not the case.

For example, you may recall the neighbour, Mr Peterson, who looked after you when your mom had to work late. He ended up comforting you and rushing you to the hospital when you accidentally fell on the front steps and needed stitches. That neighbour was there for one of your most traumatic childhood memories. He held your hand before your mom could get there. He assured you that you were in no danger of bleeding to death and may even have fetched you a lollypop to distract you at the ER.

You may also remember Kate the camp counsellor who was there when you got your first period. She taught you how to use a tampon because you were unsure. You were scared but Kate helped you through it. You will always remember Kate. She has a special place in your heart because she helped raise you to adulthood.

Of course, we cannot forget Ms Oh, the teacher who looked after you on a school trip when you unexpectedly became ill. She also helped do the essential mother work of preserving your life.  She was not acting as your teacher when she checked your temperature and brought you tea. There was nothing educational about such activities, and yet they were necessary. The teacher in question was transcending her capacity as educator, just as you began to trust this adult on a new level, as something more than a provider of history or math lessons – as a protector and caregiver. Whether planned or not, such intimacies happen.  They may be remembered for a lifetime and often are. In such acts, the caregiver in question is not replacing a child’s legal mother as such, but collaborating with her, helping out by doing the work of mothering that needs to be done in that moment.

Perhaps you yourself have even loved a child who is not legally or biologically your own. Perhaps, while you know you are not their mother and do not wish to supplant her, you have worried for them when they faltered and taken pride in their successes. Perhaps you have experienced the joy of attending their school concerts, tearing up with joy when they get their solo just right. Perhaps you’ve had a child call you when scared, asking advice about school dances or bullies. Perhaps you’ve been there and been happy to be. Perhaps this makes you feel like the title of family friend, or baseball coach or piano instructor does not describe the truth – that you know what it is to love and help raise a child that is not your own.

The venerable Patricia Hill-Collins uses the term “othermothers” to refer to women in the African American community whose “feelings of responsibility for nurturing the children in their own extended family networks have stimulated a more generalized ethnic of care where Black women feel accountable to all the Black community’s children” (1997: 331).  She goes on to contend, “The notion of Black women as community othermothers for all Black children traditionally allowed Black women to treat biologically unrelated children as if they were members of their own families” (331).  There is much history and literature surrounding the concept of othermothering. It is however, a term that is culturally specific to African American experiences of mothering. I do not wish to participate in a process of cultural appropriation that ignores the history and context of this term in a particular community. It is for this reason that I believe we must develop the term “social mothering” further within the field of Motherhood Studies.

I first heard the term “social mothering” in Year 1 of My PhD. I took a fabulous and eye-opening course called Motherhood and Mothering with the famous Dr Andrea O’Reilly. It was she who began casually referring to “social mothering” as an umbrella term for mother work performed by community members outside of an African American context. As O’Reilly uses it, it is can also inclusive of all genders. It is a term that I find useful. It avoids cultural appropriation while describing care work that meaningfully contributes to the raising and shaping of a child.

Ultimately, the term social mothering is needed not just for descriptive purposes, but because we must end the assumption that legal mothers alone are the ones who can and should be responsible for raising children. Without the term social mothering at our disposal, we normalize a discourse that suggests it is a mother’s job to sacrifice everything to raise children without outside help from the community.

No legal mother can be there for all of a child’s needs. Nor should she feel guilty about this. Naming social mothering is a way of showcasing its importance as well as denaturalizing the privatization of motherhood that makes many parents feel overwhelmed and alone.  The sooner we admit the truth that no one – no matter how committed to their child – mothers in isolation, the sooner we can resist the discourse that suggests mothers should be able to go it alone.

Works Cited:

• Collins, Patricia Hill. (1997). The meaning of motherhood in black culture and black mother/daughter relationships . In Mary M. Gergen and Sara N. Davis (Eds.), Toward a new psychology of gender. (pp. 325-340). New York: Routledge.
• Ruddick, Sara. (1995). Maternal thinking (2^nd Ed.). Boston, Beacon Press.

Sarah Sahagian is currently a PhD candidate in Gender, Feminist and Women’s studies at Toronto’s York University, where she is writing her dissertation on the mothering of inter-ethnic children. She holds an undergraduate degree from Queen’s University and a master’s in Gender Studies from the London School of Economics. At the LSE she was the recipient of the 2008 LSE Merit Scholarship, a prize reserved for the 30 top entering master’s students at the university. Her writing has appeared in such publications as Chasing Rainbows, a popular anthology on gender fluid parenting, as well as The Journal of the Motherhood Initiative, The Huffington Post, Gender Focus, Bitch Media and The Beaverton. Sarah is the co-editor of the Demeter Press anthology Mother of Invention: How Our Mothers Influenced Us as Feminist Academics and Activists. You can follow her on Twitter here: @sarahsahagian.

By Rebecca Baillie

The strength of the recently concluded exhibition in Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire – the egg, the womb, the  head and the moon – was in its inclusivity and openness. To create a structure and then to renounce control  is difficult; difficult when parenting, difficult when curating and difficult to do as an artist. Helen Sargeant,  however, manages to do this quite effortlessly as she allows the experience of maternity to be contradictory and ambiguous through her sensitive, perhaps one could even say ‘maternal’, curation of this exhibition. Nestled in the heart of picturesque English country landscape and born of the 42 week open access blog (the length of a pregnancy) also called ‘the egg, the womb, the head and the moon’, the exhibition feels protected and gentle, even on the approach. Upon entering the gallery space – situated in a beautiful disused old Mill building – the tone of community and collective effort continues. On first glance, work included in the exhibition mirrors the diversity of the already mentioned blog. Sargeant brings together a wide-ranging and playful array of works, including her own.

Fragments of artists’ writing feature prominently throughout the exhibition, making the viewer aware of a consistently swinging dichotomy between mind and body, a human tension likely amplified during the states of pregnancy and motherhood. Such was previously highlighted in Ten Months, the pregnancy diary of Susan Hiller, in which she presented images of her pregnant belly in shifting lunar cycles alongside accompanying and supportive texts. In her sketchbooks from 2009, Paula McCloskey uses drawing as if it were words; confined to a lined notebook, the figures drawn seem to exist as part of an analytical system of working something out. By contradiction though, the book gives ideas physicality, and a more intimate response could be encouraged if viewers were able to touch the book and turn its pages. As an academic as well as an artist, McCloskey’s work, like that of Eti Wade’s, seems to pose the question of the possibility/impossibility of combining rigorous thought and intuitive mark marking. Does the conceptual become a hindrance that suppresses the freedom and play found in the drawing by Wade’s son that brightens the grey of an empty lecture theatre? How do we unite the physical and the intellectual without dulling down the power of either?

Tracey Kershaw‘s recent project, Tell Me About Your Mother, successfully combines something of both the visceral and the reflective nature of mothering. Visitors are asked to write comments about their own mother and then to post these through a small circular hole in the top of a wooden box. The results range from joy to pain and distress (a selection of comments have been typed out and pinned on the wall above the box). The box itself becomes a symbol of the womb, a bodily site inhabited by ideas. As the paper must be rolled to fit inside the small vaginal hole, we are reminded of Irene Lusztig’s current work Worry Box, and also historically, of Carolee Schneemann’s Interior Scroll performance of 1975. The pains of the maternal relationship read here in words are echoed physically in the gallery space as we watch Bird-Jones and Heald’s Once a Mother Always a Mother: The Swing and the Hook sound and video installation move aggressively back and forth. The implication seems to be that motherhood is a trap, a heavy weight and burden to bear. Having said this however, although pierced painfully with IVF needles, Tabitha Moses’ In Vitro light boxes reveal conception as a cosmic and miraculous event.

Overall, and beyond the ever-fighting internal battle between the strength of the body and the satisfaction of the mind, I was struck less by the theme of motherhood in this exhibition and more by what happens when a female collective forms; when art is created within a network of supportive and reflective women. True to this land (we are not far from Lancashire and the Pendle Witch trial), what happens here is something reminiscent of witchcraft. Standing amidst the work, I was thankful that we are not in a place or time where women engaged in the occult, in the deep imaginary and in the magical are feared (or at least not enough to be punished by law). I do not in any way intend for this mention of the witchcraft to be derogatory – the opposite in fact, as celebratory – and make the association through a lens of knowledge and acknowledgement of problems that such a suggestion may raise. Many highly respected artists, including Kiki Smith, Francesca Woodman and Ana Mendieta, choose to reveal strength in what might have been considered previously to be demeaning aspects of ‘femininity’.

Typically, theorists and art historians avoid acknowledging artists’ attraction towards old myths of the “feminine” and the “essentialist” notions of women and femaleness that are too problematic for constructivist beliefs; they often focus on certain works to support specific arguments, but overlook the entire oeuvre. Having interviewed countless artists, as well as recalling my own practice, I cannot ignore the importance of identification with nature and inclusion in female collectives as aids to make important aspects of the human condition visible. According to a more ancient and holistic combination of art, writing, science, the medical, the technical and the astrological, ‘the egg, the womb, the head and the moon’, does not separate visual practice from other revealing ways to discover more about the self and about others. Whilst Paula Chambers’ Pregnancy Nightmare retablos could just as easily be read as scrolled down spells, Teresa Wilson’s mixed media dolls appear almost living, imbued with spirits and the capacity for voodoo (similarly to many sculptures by Louise Bourgeois). Helen Sargeant’s new digital prints recall mandalas as she cleverly uses the signs and traces of her own family to create universal maps for all of humanity to learn from. As Frances Earnshaw and Mo Brown both make and bring together found objects in mixed media installations, a sense of ritual and repetition is evoked. The exhibition confidently recalls, for me, the importance of female archetypes, whether these are to be celebrated, criticised, or simply further reflected upon.

Rebecca Baillie is an art historian who has always practiced as an artist alongside conducting research and writing. Recently awarded a PhD, her academic specialism lies in the study of melancholia, surrealism and its legacies, and the maternal body in visual culture. In her artwork she uses photography, drawing and sculpture – whichever medium best supports the current idea. She is the curator of MaMSIE’s online ‘visual library’, and has published a variety of writings in the journal, Studies in the Maternal. She is currently a dissertation supervisor at Kingston University, as well as freelance writer and curator.