Mothers in the firing line

IT was a gem of bathroom graffiti for years - "My mother made me a lesbian" (or a neurotic, or whatever your preferred identification). The response was "If I buy her the wool will she make me one too?"

Diane Eyer probably never found it funny but today she might well view the joke as prophetic. According to Ms Eyer, the habit of blaming mothers has now become a way of life, a convenient reflex for a society that sentimentalises child rearing but has abdicated its collective social and economic responsibilities. "Mothers are coming once again to be seen as the root of all evil - the original Eve of our Puritan past," she writes in the introduction to her recently published book, Motherguilt: How Our Culture Blames Mothers For What's Wrong With Society.

The BBC's Panorama last week underlined Ms Eyer's point when it reported on a study in Dagenham. "Do you feel guilty for being a working mother?" it asked. "Here's something to make you feel worse." Researchers monitoring 600 children assessed the effect of their mothers working part time and full time. "Mothers are key far education," Dr Margaret O'Brien of the University of London concluded. "Those working part time are present at important times of the day for, homework and discussion of what's happened during the day." Although there has since been some controversy about the way the TV programme used the research, the message sent out to working mothers was dire.

If mothers don't seem to be measuring up today, the truth is that they never could. Diane Eyer points out that they have been traditional scapegoats in the US since the nation's foundation. The current backlash, however, broadens the range of usual suspects. For the first time in history, all mothers - married, single, working, on social welfare, divorced, even stay home - are in the firing line. And those taking aim are not the usual perpetrators (the collective "patriarchy") but the very people and institutions who are regarded as women's allies. Baby gurus like Dr Spock and Penelope Leach, child psychiatrists, paediatricians, women's magazines - that offer guilt management techniques to working mothers - and even the women's movement, have all contributed to a culture of what Ms Eyer calls "motherblame".

But surely mothers are more popular than ever in the US? President Clinton has talked about his for five years, Hillary Clinton is one and even Newt Gingrich has one. The "soccer mom emerged as a key voter in the US presidential election.

"Yes, the good mother is a prominent image, right now. That's at the core of the problem" explains Ms Eyer from her home in Pennsylvania, "Here is this idealised angelic mother. No one can measure up to that ideal and so we have the pleasure of blaming the inadequate ones for every societal failing from drug abuse to terrorism."

Diane Eyer traces the origin of the backlash to the mother's "sacred texts". These are the numerous baby and childcare books by Benjamin Spock, T. Berry Brazelton, Penelope Leach and "their fellow clergy" who "perpetuate a constricting stereotype of mothers as little more than architects of the perfect child". That role is naturally a full time job yet 52 per cent of mothers with infants, 60 per cent of mothers with children under six years of age and 76 per cent of mothers of school age children are in the American workforce. Apparently unshaken by the statistics psychologists like Penelope Leach say that: "If you continue to work, you give up raising your child," condemning the majority of American mothers to a permanent state of guilt.

"Psychology is especially culpable here," Ms Eyer, herself a psychologist, says. "The Freudian model in particular replaced religion as a means of fashioning this ideal of the completely fulfilled mother." Underpinning that ideal is a faith in maternal instinct and in the importance of mother infant bonding and attachment - the conviction that a mother is the only person who can really understand and satisfy her child.

"That version of motherhood took hold in the 1830s when the US was developing from an agrarian to an industrial society," Diane Eyer explains. "Women would henceforth be hearth angels... Even feminists of the time argued that women needed the vote because they were home makers.

The birth rate declined at the turn of the century, yet 95 per cent of married women stayed at home. Scientific theories of hygiene turned housework into domestic science and new theories of child development gave biological motherhood a quasi professional status. Soon child rearing experts were teaching anxious mothers about infant cognition and her biological destiny became a full time profession. Flash cards for babies and exclusive kindergartens for gifted toddlers were not far off.

Experts were in control by the beginning of the century. "As more psychologists began to populate the landscape, mothers' careers as data gatherers soon disappeared and thenceforth only scientists could gather data and formulate rules,"

Ms Eyer points out. Countless studies of monkeys, rats, and geese confirmed the unique and fragile relationship of human infants to their mothers. "`At risk', `attachment', `bonding,' it's a wonder mothers don't break out in a rash every time they hear these psychobabble terms," Ms Eyer writes, questioning their scientific validity. As parents had fewer children, however, there was increased pressure to "get it right" the first time and pseudo scientific child rearing theories multiplied.

Meanwhile, the family itself was disappearing as the divorce rate boomed in the 1960s and 1970s. And, wait a minute, wasn't there a book called The Feminine Mystique? Wasn't there something called feminism to liberate the domestic princess and the suburban mom?

"Feminism was certainly a way of protesting - those restrictions," agrees Ms Eyer. "But in doing so it may have thrown the baby out with the bath water by not giving due respect to women who chose to stay at home. It never has given the motherhood role much thought.

Motherguilt documents a backlash but Eyer insists that hers is not just another conspiracy theory, written to reinforce women's sense of victimisation.

"WE'RE not talking about some council of wicked people who decided that this is how mothers should be," Ms Eyer says. "All of us have been taught that these are our ideals and only greater awareness will reveal that there is something dysfunctional in the way we see mothers. Resistance to the author's call for greater involvement of fathers and government agencies in childcare has not come solely from her ideological opponents. "I was really struck by the fear many women feel that if they give up this hallowed ideal of motherhood, if they share the spotlight with the father, they won't have one thing that is exclusively their own," Eyer admits.

For many divorced and single mothers who live in poverty that fear is, of course, one they would gladly confront. Nor would it, presumably, bother their children. "There is no precedent for the variety of unstable early relationships that so many infants and toddlers now experience in our society," Ms Eyer writes, insisting that "mothers are not causing the problems afflicting American childhood."

In calling for the eradication of the good mother icon, she repeatedly emphasises the need for loving, stable families. Not the 1950s TV sitcoming, family, however, and not one based on "exclusive mothering" mythology.

"Women work; multiple caretaking of children is here to stay," Ms Eyer says. "We should dump the ideal of the good mother altogether and develop the ideal of the honourable parent."