Love, Work, and the Meanings of Motherhood

Love, Work, and the Meanings of Motherhood Katherine Arnup. Education for Motherhood: Advice for Mothers in TwentiethCentury Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994. xiü + 251 pp.; Ul. ISBN 0-8020-2861-6 (cl); 0-80207361-1 (pb). Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Grace Chang, Linda Rennie Forcey eds. Mothering: Ideology, Experience, and Agency. New York: Routledge, 1994. χ + 387 pp. ISBN 0-415-90775-6 (cl); 0-415 90776-4 (pb). Susan Pedersen. Family, Dependence, and the Origins of the Welfare State, Britain and France, 1914-1945. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. xv + 478 pp. ISBN 0-52141989-1 (cl). Ellen Ross. Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870-1918. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. xvii + 308 pp. ISBN 0-19-503957-2 (cl); 0-19-508321-0 (pb). Molly Ladd-Taylor In recent years, feminist scholars have produced an impressive number of books that dispel the myth of stay-at-home motherhood as woman's essential nature, or even the "traditional" norm. Taking as their starting point the historical and cultural variations in motherhood, these four books iUuminate the ways mothers are imagined in the dominant culture —especially in terms of medical advice, policy, and the media—and explore the alternative conceptions of mothering that exist alongside the dominant model. Contrasting the ideologies of motherhood with the actual work of mothering, they reveal motherhood as "contested terrain." In Education for Motherhood: Advice for Mothers in Twentieth-Century Canada, Katherine Arnup surveys the changing advice to mothers in twentieth -century Canada and assesses its impact on women's lives. She begins with the personal, recounting her own negative experience with a doctor's advice after the birth of her first child. Arnup sees her book not as an "attack on expert advice," but as an attempt to situate that advice historically in order to "empower" women to sift through the mass of information and to interrogate its usefulness (p. xiii). Arnup argues that Canadian women's experience of mothering changed significantly between 1900 and 1960, as a result of medical and technological developments, shifts in gender ideology, and politics. Situating the medicalization of childrearing in historical context, Arnup rightly begins with the early twentieth-century campaign against infant mortality. In Canada, as in Britain and the United States, the years before © 1996 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 8 No. 3 (Fall) 220 Journal of Women's History Fall the First World War saw appaUingly high mortaUty rates and the rise of a women-led infant welfare movement to reduce them. In 1907, approximately one in five Toronto babies died in their first year; death rates were even higher in Montreal, which had the dubious distinction of the highest infant mortality rate in North America. Canadian health workers, led by Dr. Helen Macmurchy, chief of the federal Division of ChUd Welfare, established well-baby clinics and milk depots, registered births, visited new mothers in their homes, and distributed childrearing Uterature. The infant welfare campaign focused on maternal education, and, in Arnup's view, it offered little in the way of concrete help. Mothers who needed money, food, health care, and housing received instruction instead. (Universal health coverage was not enacted in Canada until the 1960s.) The Canadian government distributed volumes of advice literature , including the popular The Canadian Mother's Book; newspapers, magazines, and radio stations ran regular columns on child care. By the 1950s, commercial childrearing manuals such as Dr. Spock's The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care replaced government pamphlets as the most significant source of child care advice. "New standards of mothering, based largely on an Anglo-Saxon middle-class family model, attempted to dictate a way of life for modern mothers and their children" (p. 117). The middle section of Arnup's book examines the medicalization of pregnancy, birth, and child care, especially infant feeding. It also traces the dramatic changes in the medical advice, from the rigid emphasis on regularity and habit-training of followers of the American psychologist John Watson in the 1920s to the more "permissive" approach of Dr. Spock after the Second World War. Noting the "disjuncture between the requirements of the advice and the reality of mothers...