Similar disjunctures between the rhetoric and reality of motherhood can be found in many other places. Nineteenth-century Britain is often viewed as a high point of emphasis on maternity and domesticity for women; on closer investigation this turns out to have been an ideal limited only to middle-class women. In a country with two million nannies, few upper-class women actually mothered (or were expected to mother) their own children, while few lower-class women had the ability to spend much time on child care, as their lives were filled with factory or in-home labor. In colonial and more recent Latin America, women were encouraged to follow an ideal of seclusion, modesty, and devotion to their families termed marianismo after the Virgin Mary, the mother of Jesus, but poverty made this impossible for most women. Official propaganda in the Stalinist Soviet Union exalted motherhood as a patriotic duty and used motherhood as a metaphor for nationhood, but women were also expected to have full-time jobs and earlier institutions that had made their mothering easier such as communal kitchens were no longer supported by the state.
The rhetoric of motherhood itself has also been used in very different ways. Most often it has been used to urge women to stay out of the workplace and concentrate on family concerns, to become, as conservative Japanese authors recommended, “good wives, wise mothers.” Nineteenth-century reformers often used motherhood to argue for an expansion of women’s public role, however, stressing that education would make women better mothers. They asserted that having the vote would allow mothers to assure the well-being of their families and children, and to clean up corrupt politics in the same way that they cleaned up their households. Since the 1960s women in Latin America have protested the abduction and murder of their sons and husbands by various military dictatorships through public protests. The most famous of these, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, gathered weekly in the late 1970s and early 1980s, wearing white headscarves embroidered with the names of the “disappeared” and painting their silhouettes on walls. During Armenia’s 2018 “Velvet Revolution,” a largely peaceful protest that forced the resignation of the president, mothers took to the streets pushing baby strollers. In 2020, middle-aged women in Portland, Oregon wearing yellow shirts formed a “Wall of Moms,” linking arms to protest police violence in one of the many Black Lives Matter protests of that summer. Most of the women were white, but neither their privileged racial status nor their motherhood protected them, as federal agents fired tear gas and flash-bang grenades at them, just as they did at other groups of marchers.
Fatherhood has also been linked to politics and the exercise of power in both real and metaphorical terms. The words for “father” and “leader” are etymologically related in many languages, and the male originators of institutions and structures were often labeled “fathers” – the Church Fathers, the Founding Fathers. Hereditary monarchs such as kings, emperors, and czars were praised as the fathers of their people and used paternal language in their attempts to build or maintain their own power. They employed ideologies of kinship to mask their control over others, and hoped such language would encourage respect and obedience. Paternal rhetoric was also used, however, to criticize leaders for not living up to what was expected of a good father and could, in fact, become part of the language of revolution. Criticism of the French kings in the period leading up to the French Revolution often described them as bad fathers, not caring properly for their people; in the case of Louis XVI, the last king, he was also seen as too influenced by his queen Marie Antoinette, the archetypal bad mother whose lack of concern for her subjects was expressed in her (probably invented) comment to hungry people clamoring for bread – “let them eat cake.”
In most conceptualizations of the stages of life for a man, fatherhood did not mark a clear break the way motherhood did for a woman, but in many societies it did bring real differences. In some Muslim areas, a man gained (and continues to gain) a new name once his first son was born – usually beginning with “abu,” meaning protector of or father of – and no longer uses his original first name. In some parts of the world, a husband restricted his ordinary activities while his wife was pregnant or giving birth, or even mimicked her pregnancy with special clothing or rituals, practices labeled “couvade.” Certain positions of authority in groups and institutions in many cultures were limited to men who were fathers, for this was a sign both of their potency and their stake in the future. Fatherhood played a particularly strong role in areas where society was conceptualized as an amalgam of families or households rather than as individuals, for the adult male head of household was both in charge of the smallest political unit and the representative of that unit to the wider world.
Ideologies, Norms, and Laws Prescribing Gender Inequity
The historical record provides countless examples of calls for male dominance and female dependence or other types of gender inequity; every chapter of this book will discuss some of these. Religious literature urged women to be subservient, and described the divine plan as one of patriarchal gender inequality. Medical and philosophical works noted that women were physically, mentally, and morally weaker than men, clearly in need of male guidance and protection. Popular rituals and norms transmitted orally from generation to generation established sharp gender boundaries, generally limiting the ability of women to move or act and criticizing or punishing those who did. Sexist and misogynistic stories, songs, jokes, jests, and images reinforced these ideas, often in ways that were malicious and cruel, as in vicious songs and jokes about wife beating and rape, or woodcuts and cartoons showing such acts. The gender inequity in most written norms and laws has been so striking, in fact, that much early women’s history involved pointing out ways in which women transcended, subverted, or ignored such restrictions, and attempting to convince readers that the situation for women in many societies of the past was not as dreadful as the laws made it seem.
Many of the customs and norms now perceived as the most extreme involved a restriction of women’s mobility. Of these, the Chinese practice of footbinding has received the most attention, a practice that began in the period about 1000 among entertainers at the imperial court and was firmly entrenched among the elite and middle classes in northern China by about 1200. In order to bind a girl’s feet, her toes are forced down and under her heel until the bones in the arch eventually break; this generally began when she was about six, though a woman’s feet needed to remain bound all her life to maintain their desirable small size and pointed “golden lotus” shape. Explanations of footbinding have involved a wide range of factors: fantasies among male poets and literati that eroticized small feet and a swaying walk and linked these with nostalgia for the past; a change in the ideal of masculinity in Song China from warrior to scholar, which meant that the ideal woman had to be even more sedentary and refined; a desire to hide the actual importance of women’s labor by families eager to prove they were rising socially and economically; Chinese sexual ideas that linked bound feet with improved reproductive capacity and stronger infants. Dorothy Ko has emphasized that no one explanation suffices, and that the reasons for footbinding changed over its thousand-year history and were different for men and women. She notes that women were not simply its victims; they internalized Confucian notions of the importance of self-sacrifice and discipline, and the connections between bound feet, reputation, domesticity, beauty, and self-respect. Thus it was mothers who generally bound their daughters’ feet in what became a female rite of passage, and women worked together to make the exquisite embroidered shoes that further represented their high status. Because of its centrality to core social