Motherhood has long been discussed as one source of women's oppression. The article below briefly describes several aspects of this perspective.
By the Grupo Feminista f^iercoles, Apto. 668, San Cristobal 5001-A, Tachira, Venezuela, tvlarch 1980.
A resume by ISIS
This rather lengthy article begins by explaining why the group has decided to work on motherhood.
"The basic identity which brought us together as a group — our concern to meet and come to grips with our situation as women in society — has obviously been the main object of our discussions. As a result, we wanted to find out what elements were common to all our situations, and as we went through our experiences we realized that maternity is the biological, psychological and social fact that totally marks us and determines our personality.
"Motherhood for us is the central point around which all other problems of women's history up to today focus. We have always been mothers or potential mothers or even non-mothers. As women we are destined to accept motherhood as the fundamental purpose of our existence.
"This acceptance in fact is what brings us to the two culminating moments of our existence and our alienation as individuals: the moment when, seeing that maternity gives us greater prestige we use it as an instrument of power and manipulation; and above all the moment when, in educating our children, we continue to underpin and perpetuate the same patriarchal sexist ideology which dominates us. This means that we ourselves become the principal instrument of our own oppression.
The group goes on to examine motherhood as it is affected by four major elements : religion, instinct and sexuality, social role, and birth and cultural dependence. Religion, the group says, has always defined women as a function of men — as an object of pleasure, producer of his children, and custodian of the family. Women have been condemned to be lower, evil and dirty, dating back to the concept of woman being created from a mere rib of man. The authors show that women's lower status is to be
found in many different religions, with frequent reference to the fact that their role is to produce children for men. The Catholic church — so influential in Latin America — sustains the image of the traditional family, opposing any sign of change. "The great enemies of the christian family are birth control and divorce which the church actively combats. One of the primordial aims of marriage is the procreation and education of children, and for that the church opposes birth control and defends maternity as
much against the couple who does not want children as against demographic policies of population control." As women, the group says, we have had to sacrifice everything for the maternal role — our dreams and our desire to live our own lives.
her class, is the biological one of producing children. "Every woman is a uterus, an ovary, a matrix, a womb." Yet women are also responsible for educating children, and inevitably pass on this strict definition of sex roles to them and thus unwittingly perpetuate their own oppression. Even if and when they enter the labour market, women are made to feel that their work is not indispensable to society and that eventually their jobs will give way to the most "happy" and "normal" event of marriage and
motherhood. A heavy consequence of this is that women are caught in a contradiction : the role of wife, sister and mother contradict that of worker, labourer, artisan, professional or artist; the reality of women's lives does not gel with the image of the "ideal woman" presented to them by the media. Yet if they do not act as they should, do what is expected of them, they are treated as maladjusted and any alternative behaviour is seen as negative and is censored.
The act of giving birth is one of the most important events in a woman's life. It is something which cannot be controlled by will, and in which the whole body is involved.
Over the ages, and until very recently, the pain of childbirth has been considered as essential and inevitable. The rise of modern medicine to deal with this pain, however, has not really helped the situation. In a capitalist underdeveloped country like Venezuela, the medical system is linked to the dominating classes, and to the process of capital accumulation. Medical technology is transferred from the West — especially the USA — and is marketed in the form of sophisticated and expensive drugs and equipment which are used with less care and know how than in their countries of origin. The western medical system considers birth as a medical act and the labouring
woman a sick person. Women have thus become mere patients in an alienating experience in which they have totally lost control.
The group goes on to examine the concept of "maternal instinct" which, it finds is often used as an excuse not to educate or inform women about anything surrounding birth and motherhood. It is something assumed and therefore not even discussed. Acceptance of the "maternal instinct" is a powerful mechanism in women's oppression — women are not "natural" if they don't automatically accept motherhood. But there are a whole series of questions never raised about "instinct" — what is an instinct ?
Can you define it biologically? Psychologically? Perhaps the most important thing to note about maternal instinct is that it can be used to justify women's role as mother, without any reference to her own sexuality. Women's sexuality has been historically seen as linked to reproduction. In a patriarchal society, this is quite coherent, and women have for decades completely negated their sexuality in favour of reproduction. "Having lost sight of their own sexuality and by accepting a purely reproductive union, women have fallen into precisely what patriarchal society wants for them : motherhood. But the uterus-woman will become less and less relevant to a world preoccupied with the problem of overpopulation."
In the end, the group says, there is a dream that we as feminists are striving for: to be able to reconcile motherhood with simply being; to have the possibility of living a childhood in which we can develop our own physical and intellectual capacities and come to terms with our sexuality; to accept menstruation without shame or fear, motherhood without losing a full life as an individual, enjoyable sexuality without taboos; to be mothers by choice and to take control over motherhood through birth without violence; to begin a new kind of relationship with men, children and society.