Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- New Introduction
- Preface to the Original Edition
- 1 Childbirth and the ‘Position’ of Women
- 2 In the Beginning
- 3 Remember, Pregnancy is a State of Health
- 4 Journey into the Unknown
- 5 The Agony and the Ecstasy
- 6 Mother and Baby
- 7 Learning the Language of the Child
- 8 Menus
- 9 Domestic Politics
- 10 Into a Routine
- 11 Lessons Learnt
- 12 Mothers and Medical People
- Endnote – Being Researched
- Notes and References
- Appendix List of Characters
9 - Domestic Politics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 April 2022
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- New Introduction
- Preface to the Original Edition
- 1 Childbirth and the ‘Position’ of Women
- 2 In the Beginning
- 3 Remember, Pregnancy is a State of Health
- 4 Journey into the Unknown
- 5 The Agony and the Ecstasy
- 6 Mother and Baby
- 7 Learning the Language of the Child
- 8 Menus
- 9 Domestic Politics
- 10 Into a Routine
- 11 Lessons Learnt
- 12 Mothers and Medical People
- Endnote – Being Researched
- Notes and References
- Appendix List of Characters
Summary
After I’d been going out with him for a year he said, oh I’d love to walk down the road with you, be married to you and have a little baby. It's like a dream come true.
It's not really what I hoped it would be, the marriage thing. Being a mother you have to stay in, somebody's got to stay in to look after the baby. And the man still gets out as much as he used to, he's really just like a single man. He comes home and sees the baby when he wants to, and he can get away when he wants to …
It takes two to make a baby. After that fathers are, biologically speaking, unnecessary. The meaning of ‘fathering’ is insemination; ‘mothering’ means child-rearing. But if biology makes fathers dispensable, society carves out particular roles for them. These roles are shaped by history and circumstance, so that fatherhood in pre-industrial France differs from fatherhood in the African Congo, and both appear foreign to an English urban businessman fathering his first child in the 1970s.
Yet in a sense the problem for every society is the same. If men are to feel involved with (or at least responsible for) their children, they must be impressed by a sense of indispensability: they must feel necessary. Our industrialised culture achieves this end via a logic of economic dependence: women and children must be supported by men. The logic is reinforced by an appeal to a set of ideas about the nature of both men and family life. A proper man fathers children, who are then visible confirmation of his sexual and social normality. A proper family is made up of a male and female parent and their children: a ‘family man’, a ‘housewife’ and the patter of tiny feet (or ‘may all your troubles be little ones’).
Looked at another way, the problem for men is how to share the experience. The seed that started it off is lost inside a foreign body and the long months that preface its re-emergence can often be a kind of limbo.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- From Here to Maternity (Reissue)Becoming a Mother, pp. 188 - 223Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2018