Mother and Child Reunion
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A century on from the Suffragettes and almost half-a-century on from the second wave of feminism that proved so problematic for the brassiere industry, one would have imagined womanhood had progressed way beyond two archetypes that had long defined the female sex in the popular male imagination.
One was the Virgin Mary, revered as the ideal role model of womanhood throughout Christendom for centuries, even if she was always a tricky act for any earthbound woman to emulate, especially the whole Immaculate Conception bit. Images of Our Lord’s Old Mum as a visual mentor were as visible and potent a presence in Medieval England as images of Mao still are in China today, gazing down on the sinful with intimidating benevolence. Even when the Reformation viewed Catholic Iconography with the same bilious contempt as Johnny Rotten would have viewed a Yes LP in his 1976 Christmas stocking, and portraits of Mary herself were rebranded as Popish propaganda, that saintly, virtuous vision of pious purity with her babe-in-arms remained an idealised example of a woman’s ultimate ambition
The second archetype was the Damsel-in-Distress, stretching back to the romance of courtly love and immortalised in dozens of oral fairy-tales and nursery rhymes thereafter; she proved especially popular in Victorian literature, not to mention highly prescient due to the tightness of the bodice making real-life women prone to fainting and swooning while their unencumbered chaps maintained an unflappable upright stance. Unsurprisingly perceived as weak and feeble, the damsel was enshrined as the guilty party by the early feminists, the embodiment of the child-women dependent on a man coming to the rescue. Mind you, she had legal status too, passed on as a possession from the father to the husband, so it’s no wonder she was set in stone for so many decades.
Fast-forward to the 21st century and both women have unexpectedly resurfaced, even if they have received a secular and social makeover. The Virgin Mary is now the celebrity mother emblazoned on the front cover of ‘Hello’ or ‘OK!’ magazine, whereas the Damsel-in-Distress is now labouring under the misapprehension that she is a ‘feminist’, oblivious to the irony that her concept of feminism is essentially playing the part of the shrinking violet that enraged the Suffragette generation.
Pressure on a young woman to have children would, until fairly recently, largely emanate from her mother, but the rapid growth of mainstream (not to mention social) media has facilitated the need for faces to fill the endless hours of a medium that never sleeps, many of whom are essentially lifestyle gurus. First came the celebrity wedding; Posh & Becks have a lot to answer for. A wedding was always a big day out, but there were traditions and rituals adhered to that drew a distinct line between your average nuptials and that of the showbiz set, who tended to go a little overboard and regarded the ceremony as a mini-movie, with tacky sets and costumes to match. Since the elevation of Ordinary Joe and Ordinary Josephine to the status of the rich and famous, however, every engaged couple seem to believe they are entitled to their very own orgy of excess that mirrors whichever wedding is the toast of cyberspace this week. Churches or registry offices are no longer good enough; what about a hotel or the grounds of a stately home? Today, the event has to be planned like the staging of the Olympics, even if the bouncy castles that pass for wedding dresses render it closer to an edition of ‘Jeux Sans Frontiers’.
Next on the list is the baby. The traditional route for the child-woman is reinforced by a fresh influx of fashion-accessory brats whose yummy mummies promote with a witless pretentiousness that regards the bringing up of baby as a sacrificial duty to which the mother must be devoted as though joining an especially strict religious order. Everything else – career, friends, outside interests, even partner – are now incidental to the monumental mission that will define her for the next eighteen years. On every daytime TV chinwag, newspaper and magazine, the message radiates outwards to the women of the world: This is what you are here for. And, of course, breast is best. Woe betides the mother brandishing a bottle. Indeed, woe betides the woman who can’t have or (even worse) doesn’t actually want children. She has already lost so many friends to the baby bore’s brigade and yet the immense weight of the professional mother and child business is telling her she will never be a whole woman without the infant appendage; she will always be incomplete.
As for the Damsel-in-Distress, she has re-emerged cloaked in a bizarre interpretation of an ideology that was originally intended to render her redundant. When Mary Wollstonecraft wrote ‘Vindication of the Rights of Woman’ in 1792, she was mocked and reviled, labelled ‘a hyena in petticoats’ for daring to suggest that women were essentially trained to never mentally mature once they reach puberty; when militant Suffragettes suffered barbaric force-feeding in prison, they were released as physical wrecks and proceeded to engage in further lawless activities that would guarantee a return to that from which they had just staggered away. All were viewed as a gross inversion of femininity for deviating from the accepted norm and all had a cause they regarded as more important to what a woman could amount to than falling at the feet of a man who would save them.
Today, their alleged heirs start Twitter campaigns and Facebook petitions to engineer the dismissal and downfall of a public figure who has the nerve to air an opinion contrary to theirs; they react to any innocuous and well-meaning compliment on their appearance as though Peter Sutcliffe has waved his hammer at them; they elevate an unwarranted grope that could be rectified with a slap and a torrent of four-letter words so that it is on a par with rape, belittling the act of actual rape in the process. They don’t focus on the big issue or the wider picture as their predecessors did, they devote their energies to the trivial niggle and the minor gripe, but their platform is one that magnifies the trivial niggle and the minor gripe so that it takes on the appearance and gravitas of the big issue and the wider picture. Twitter is a virtual housing estate in which two housewives gossip about nothing more important than ‘her at No.7’; but Mrs Smith and Mrs Jones believe they have a right to be heard throughout the neighbourhood and are convinced their opinion is the general consensus. By overreacting to the mildly offensive with a squeal and a scream, and not concentrating on the genuinely offensive with the balls and gumption that feminism used to equate with, they are regressing back to the weak and feeble woman of old whilst desperately looking for something to vindicate the label they have pilfered and perverted. Perhaps they should consider carrying a bottle of smelling-salts in their handbags just in case a man they pass on the street smiles at them. Is this really what Emily Davison died for?
Both the new Virgin Mary and the new Damsel-in-Distress would not recognise their reincarnation; their self-portrait would be one of independent women, sisters doing it for themselves. They are oblivious to the fact that they are enacting roles as restrictive and repressive as those their mothers, grandmothers and great-grandmothers fought and struggled to free themselves from, and this utter absence of self-awareness is crucial. Nothing wrong with having a baby if that’s what you want; nothing wrong with equality between the sexes; but making one’s baby one’s business and running away in tears if a stranger tells you that you look good today is not progress. It is a second and permanent childhood.
Petunia Winegum
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December 11, 2014 at 11:43 am -
Other stereotypes: Eve, the evil seductress of Adam, bringing about the downfall of man; and the Slut, who seeks sex for self-fulfilment and her own enjoyment, and cares not about having offspring nor the enjoyment of her partner.
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December 11, 2014 at 6:09 pm -
Eve? Nice girl but not very bright…and not really #evil seductress material. You’re probably thinking of Lilith who wanted to ride Adam like a rodeo queen.
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December 12, 2014 at 7:03 am -
Lilith was my sort of girl, but it’s Eve who got the churchy types frothing.
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December 12, 2014 at 9:10 am -
If Adam was the first man then Lilith must have been…… :-c …. eek!!
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December 11, 2014 at 12:15 pm -
There’s a huge social dichotomy here however. There is the voice of the preacher, led by the law currently, fretting manfully about the frailty of the abused female but down on the shop floor we have Ibiza Girl fellating strangers in bars for a laugh, and well able to look after herself and the same forces will celebrate her right to that freedom. You’re probably closest with the nosy neighbours analogy. Many old men seem to be the victims of the moralising crossfire just now though.
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December 11, 2014 at 4:12 pm -
Motherhood is now seen by the young and feckless as a passport to Instant Sainthood when, due to so selflessly spitting a new life screaming into this senseless world, they can cast aside their failings to embrace Holy Motherhood.
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December 11, 2014 at 4:42 pm -
I agree with most of what you are saying. Me, I’m neither Virgin nor Damsel. Indeed, I’m one of those contrary women who didn’t actually want children — and was lucky enough to meet, and fall for, a man who felt exactly the same. And, as it turned out, the expatriate life we thereafter chose was far from an ideal environment for kids. (Indeed, for many of the wives who elected to stay in UK “because of the children”, it wasn’t conducive to staying married either!)
I was an early 1970’s ‘feminist’. Not the bra-burning type: my 34A chest needs a padded push-up. But, after I married, and wherever we lived, I worked and contributed to the joint income. Sometimes my contribution was greater, sometimes lesser. But it was always treated as joint income. We didn’t even have to ask each other whether we could buy this or that: we both knew the limits of our income/expenditure. It never ceases to amaze me that, even in this day and age, there are widows (statistically, we outlast our spouses) who are financial ignoramuses. In some cases perhaps not willingly, but because “He” always dealt with that and, in life, deflected any questions about finances. Or, even worse, because it was easier to remain ignorant. Either way, life will be a ruthless task-master when you find yourself on your own.
However, being a ‘feminist’ doesn’t mean that I subscribe to the current hysteria. During my working life, I did meet the sort that tried to take advantage of a female employee. Usually, a firm rejoinder was enough. Of course, I was never going to stay with the company for more than 3-4 years. Had I been trying to forge a career there, I may well have been more reticent.
It does pain me that we seem to have reached the point where, seeing a child in distress, a man would be reluctant to offer help for fear of being cast as a paedophile. How does that benefit society? Or does “think of the children” now mean quite the opposite of what was intended?
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December 11, 2014 at 6:26 pm -
Thank you for a sensible post. Few and far between, sadly.
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December 11, 2014 at 6:28 pm -
There is no way I would now go to the aid of a minor in distress, and in discussing the matter with my close friends they take the same view; nor would I ever stop for a female hitch-hiker. Perhaps I am just very attractive but whenever I have worked I have been sexually encouraged by the female employees – and not just when I was just out of short trousers. I have little objection to females taking off their bra-less tops for my benefit or their sitting on my lap or flaunting their underwear for my pleasure, but may I sue? Were the sexes reversed I see the industrial tribunal awarding me a five-figure reward by way of compensation for the abuse which I suffered – and of course which has ruined my life.
Interesting to see that Peter Birts has just sentenced a Hijab wearing mother of six form Luton to a term of five years imprisonment for encouraging terrorism. Would anyone be influenced? – it’s not as if she is Helen of Troy: a woman who sees Jihad as a ‘game for big boys’ and who apparently knows a route to Syria – as if I might reveal the route to Narnia. This seems to me like hopeless overkill. One moment women are naive and vulnerable the victims of big-bad men and the next worse than a pantomime villain.
I could say more.
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December 12, 2014 at 12:17 am -
I agree, my husband and I had a similar financial arrangement. When he died suddenly our solicitor said I was lucky and that she saw so many widows who had no idea about insurances or anything else to do with money, often there wasn’t even a will causing huge delays and distress. We also lived abroad a lot and I am with you 100% on the rest of your post. I have never felt used, abused or mistreated by any man, the vast majority are decent and we were quite capable of dealing with others. Things seem to have gone backwards from my 60s generation.
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December 11, 2014 at 5:43 pm -
Some witty and incisive prose Uncle Petunia but perhaps a little brief on the list of feminine archetypes and the ones you have chosen whilst well critiqued are perhaps the least exciting. Jung never came up with a definitive list but there is some consensus that there are probably four main ones Mother, the Amazon, the Hetaira, and the Medial though a rather longer more romantic list was postulated by one psychoanalyst based on seven Greek goddesses Hestia, Athena, Demeter, Aphrodite, Hera, Artemis, Persephone. Personally I find any woman (and I have been fortunate to know a fair few) who can engage intellectually AS A WOMAN on equal terms utterly beguiling ……and coz I am shallow if she is a great looker and its over a bottle of the bubbles I am well aware that I am totally and thoroughly happily outclassed.
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December 11, 2014 at 6:14 pm -
Hah! Oh, yes, I could have listed plenty more; but amongst the women I know who have no kids, the perception – primarily, it has to be said, by other women – is that they are somehow missing out because motherhood makes a woman ‘complete’. Combined with the section of female society currently bleating about male ‘harrassment’, these two archetypes seemed to me to be the most dominant of the moment.
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December 12, 2014 at 9:13 am -
In the celebrity world where they seem to have popped so many pills and potions that their ovaries no longer work they seek to adopt of course and we all know how well alien adoptions work from the experiences of the Scott-Johnsons and the Pinks, to name but two examples although I could have mentioned one or two celebrity casualties of the desire to multiply at arms length. Onward Motherhood!
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December 11, 2014 at 6:27 pm -
Missed Hecate there!
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December 11, 2014 at 9:25 pm -
I can’t understand why these pretty young things are worrying and filling their pulchritudinous pert bonces with this sort of thing.
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December 12, 2014 at 1:10 am -
These strange creatures will soon be marching around chanting”one clit good, two balls bad” and demanding the plebs feed, clothe and house them.
Oh, wait a minute, I geddit.
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December 12, 2014 at 5:57 am -
I can’t recall the source but I do remember an interesting observation:-
It seems that once a woman gains a label that says, ‘Mother’, she gives everyone else a little label that says ‘child’.
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