I am Not a Mother

I do, however, spend all of my time researching mothers.  I have started to feel like motherhood is stalking me.  I'm not talking about a biological clock or a deep desire to have children at the moment.  I just read about it all the time.  ALL.  THE.  TIME.  And now, when I read newspapers, check my friends' blogs, listen to the radio, go to class, go to work, talk to almost anyone, motherhood is an overly common topic.


I have started to over analyze everything.  I don't know how you mothers stay sane with all the craziness: conflicting advice, judgments, horror stories, etc.  One mother's method makes her a child abuser in another mother's eyes.  Another mother is a bad mother for going to work (because her family needs the money), while another is judged for staying at home.  Some mothers are overly saccharine about their "calling."  Others are much less enthusiastic.  Oh, and don't let me forget cultural factors that go with religion, nationality, etc.  I know most of you just deal, but I tell you, it is ridiculous.  Unfortunately, it's not new.


Below for your reading pleasure is a mid-eighteenth-century childcare book introduction by an esteemed instructor at the Philadelphia College of Physicians.  It, of course, was one opinion of several on women's abilities to birth and care for children.

“Sir, It is with great pleasure I see at last the preservation of Children become the care of Men of Sense : it is certainly a matter that well deserved their attention, and, I doubt not, the Public will soon find the good and great effects of it.” … “…a means of preventing the murder of many, but of saving more, by introducing a more reasonable and more natural method of nursing.  In my opinion, this business has been too long fatally left to the management of Women, who cannot be supposed to have proper knowledge to fit them for such a talk, nothwithstanding they look upon it to be their own province.  What I mean is, a philosophic knowledge of Nature, to be acquired only by learned observation and experience, and which therefore they unlearned must be incapable of.  They may presume upon the examples and transmitted customs of their Great grandmothers, who were taught by Physicians of their unenlightened days; when Physicians, as appears by late discoveries, were mistaken in many things, being led away by hypothetical reasonings to entertain very wild conceits, in which they were greatly bewildered themselves, and misled other to believe I know not what strange unaccountable powers in certain herbs, roots, and drugs; and also in some superstitious practices and ceremonies; for all which notion, there being no real foundation in Nature, they ought to be looked up as the effects of ignorance, or the artifices of designing Quacks…”

Cadogan, William.  An Essay upon Nursing and the Management of Children,  from Their Birth to Three Years of Age, Tenth edition. Boston: Cox and Berry, 1772.  Originally printed in England in 1748.

There's a lot more where this came from, but let me just say it's 50 pages of unrelenting critique of all previous  methods of child care.  I do agree some of those methods were not okay.  I do not agree with the part where he asserts that women are inherently unreliable and can't learn to properly take care of their babies, so their husbands need to oversee everything in detail to make sure their wives aren't killing their babies.  But then again, I didn't live in eighteenth-century England.  Thank God!