MOTHERHOOD

Ellen Ross

Motherhood, as defined here, is the cultural process of locating women's identities in their capacity to nurture infants and children. As a set of concepts it dates only from the late eighteenth century or the early nineteenth century in Europe. English dictionaries do not make these distinctions, yet "motherhood" can be differentiated from mothering, actually caring for children, and also from the biological events, pregnancy, birth, and lactation, associated with maternity. The panorama of changing discourses and practices offered by social history vividly demonstrates the error of conflating motherhood, mothering, and maternity.

Four main eras are identifiable in the history of mothers' child rearing practices and in dominant ideas about women and their mothering capacities:

1. the early modern period, with its shifting and contradictory narratives and images of mothers and communal child care patterns;
2. the late eighteenth century and the nineteenth century with their elaboration of motherhood as a sacred female calling;
3. the twentieth century from 1918 to about 1970, when birthrates plummeted, psychological constructions of motherhood dominated the helping professions and the mass media, and motherhood as a symbol was central in the formation and reconfiguration of war-torn nations; and
4. the late twentieth century, characterized by a dramatic reconfiguration of the material experience of motherhood.

This entry covers both the discursive aspects of motherhood as eventually constructed by the literate elites as well as the phenomenology of mothering among the peoples of Europe—strands that are deeply intertwined. Meanings of motherhood and motherly roles have been communicated to the inhabitants of Europe in a variety of ways. Communities have informally enforced their own norms through gossip, shaming rituals, or exhortation. Voluntary associations accepting foundlings or offering aid to mothers have played major roles in communicating principles of motherhood. As Jean-Louis Flandrin and Michel Foucault have pointed out, clergymen, especially in the early centuries, have been central in establishing the discussive outlines of motherhood and fatherhood. State legislation on such issues as compulsory education, child custody, child labor, and workplace protection are also powerful statements about parental duties. The mass media, of course, have also played an incalculable role in propagating models of motherhood.

WIFE, MOTHER, WITCH: THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY THROUGH THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

Europe's Catholic heritage offered an ambivalent view of mothers. Celibates were the holy ones, and not until the late Middle Ages were married people considered for sainthood. Christ's mother Mary, whose cult was promoted by the twelfth-century church as a way of stimulating lay piety, was different from all other mothers—not only because of her lifelong virginity but because of the enraptured devotion to a single child with which she was often depicted. Late medieval and humanist writers often preferred Anne, the mother of Mary and the matriarch of a large extended family, as a more familiar model of maternity.

With the Reformation, the saints lost both their shrines and their vivid personal presence. The new moral center of the Christian universe was the family. Though Martin Luther revered maternity and women's nurturing of children, in Protestant countries marriage rather than motherhood dominated female identities. In the public rhetoric of Reformation-era Augsburg, for example, a woman was almost always referred to as a Frau or Weib, almost never as Mutter, which referred to the uterus.

In both Catholic and Protestant countries, families were patriarchal. In law and to a great extent in custom too, children belonged to their fathers, whose duty it was to raise them to be decent, God-fearing, and self-supporting. The Renaissance Florentine system of placing infants with wet nurses was organized through fathers, who often negotiated with the balia or her husband and who decided when the child should be weaned or transferred. In Samuel Richardson's Pamela, Part 2 (1741), Pamela's husband and former master autocratically insists on a wet nurse for their new baby despite Pamela's strong desire to breast-feed, another indication that wetnursing signified paternal power more than maternal indifference. Patriarchy did not always mean a stern and remote father, of course. Dutch fathers were depicted in seventeenth-century paintings playing with or teaching children, even infants.

Being a mother—giving birth or caring for children—was the destiny of European women in the early modern era and fully occupied the adult lives of most of the female population. In early eighteenth-century France approximately five children per family survived, and about two more did not live beyond childhood. For the average European in 1700, life expectancy was only about twenty-five years, and few lived past age forty. A woman marrying in her mid-twenties or a little later would most likely die with young children still in the home.

Not all children's births have been welcomed. Women have always tried to limit births that would cause hardships, and recipes for abortifacients were part of folk knowledge and the more specialized knowledge of healers. In some of the poorest regions of the world even in the twentieth century, to be a mother could involve a form of triage, the selection of some children for neglect or abandonment and nearly certain death. Very poor or unmarried woman were more likely to abandon their newborns. This practice had become so common by the Middle Ages that special homes for foundlings, whose death rates were extraordinarily high, proliferated in major European towns. The number of foundlings increased whenever economic conditions deteriorated.

Wife, housekeeper, and breadwinner were identities that competed with and often overshadowed that of mother. For the poorest women, the preoccupations of income earning and the price of the grains that made up family diets were far more central than the development of each child. Household survival was based on "an economy of makeshifts" (Hufton, 1974, pp. 69–127), such as begging, thieving, charity, or street selling. The collective desperation of poor mothers entered the historical record through the bread riots of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including the October Days in 1789, which constituted a crucial stage in the French Revolution. Mothers' sense of "food entitlement," to use the term of the economist Amartya Sen, brought women into the streets well into the twentieth century, most famously in Saint Petersburg in March 1917 but also in early twentieth-century Italy and in Germany during World War I.

Mothers were extremely important as educators of the children in their care, especially girls. Literate mothers produced literate children. Mothers also taught daughters household skills, such as growing vegetables, keeping hens, feeding pigs, making cheeses, or simply preparing meals. Sewing—fancy or plain depending on the status of the household—constituted another important set of skills mothers imparted to their daughters. The poorest mothers often made their daughters partners in subsistence activities, such as selling milk or vegetables at market or even begging. Mothers sometimes managed to save enough money from their own by-employments of fattening chickens or rabbits or selling honey to help daughters accumulate dowries that would dramatically improve their marriage prospects.

The biological mother and child pair that seems so natural today received relatively little cultural emphasis. Both urban and rural women in the early modern period supervised and befriended many who were not their biological children. Households exchanged children, especially teens, as apprentices and servants. In eighteenth-century Paris, for example, domestic servants, workshop apprentices, and local neighborhood children and young people circulated constantly through both domestic and work spaces. Servants sometimes inherited from their masters as if they were kin. The formal adoption of children, while difficult in this period when blood lineages were essential to definitions of family, did take place, at least in France, under a variety of legal fictions.

For artistocratic and bourgeois women of the seventeeth and eighteenth centuries in many parts of Europe, breast-feeding by the biological mother of an infant was not considered essential. Wetnursing, especially common in France among the well-off and those of moderate means, meant that a woman might spend little time with her biological children during the first few years of their lives. Wetnursing apparently was the norm in eighteenth-century Hamburg, where a surprising five thousand of its ninety thousand inhabitants were wet nurses by profession.

To say that the construction of motherhood is a twentieth-century phenomenon is not to claim that fertility, birth, or children received no cultural emphasis in the early modern period. They were in fact at the center of elaborate systems of folk magic and storytelling. Themes related to motherhood are also prominent in definitions of witchcraft, in many regions a capital crime, for which at least 200,000 were executed between about 1450 and 1725. Men constituted under 20 percent of that number. The witch, as the definition was formulated over many generations in clerical treatises and court transcripts, was a distorted mother. She was betrayed by her "witch's teat," any extra fold of skin upon which the devil could suck. The ingredients of the brew served at witches' weekly sabbats included dead babies, and witches killed or caused to sicken animals and children, especially babies. A witch's daughter or granddaughter might well become a witch. Court records and trial transcripts reveal the jealousies, grudges, and fears generated by issues of fertility and childbearing that often were the motives for denunciations and may have given the crime of witchcraft its vivid inverse relation to motherhood. The accused included a disproportionate number of midwives and lying-in assistants.

Perhaps the inchoate mother of this era is most easily seen in folktales, which portray a wide range of mothers and stepmothers, loving, cruel, witchlike, strong, clever, and stupid. Tellingly, in the nineteenth-century Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, whose versions of these tales became widely read, turned the jealous and vicious biological mother of Snow White into a stepmother. By this time cruelty and envy did not square with notions of selfless motherhood.

THE CULT OF MOTHERHOOD: 1760–1918

The cult of motherhood developed in the context of a new anatomy and physiology. Late eighteenth-century anatomists broke with the "one-sex" view that had dominated the study of anatomy since the Renaissance, in which the female was simply an imperfect or perhaps inverted version of the male. Medical writers began to stress the anatomical differences between women and men and to detail female reproductive anatomy and menstruation, a trend that was accentuated with the early twentieth-century discovery of the endocrine system and hormonal differences between women and men. Physicians and other Enlightenment authors, most famously Jean-Jacques Rousseau inÉmile (1762), claimed breast-feeding and a mother's full-time care of her infants and children was "nature's will," using as models both animal mothers and aboriginal peoples in Africa and South America. Though some of the new arguments outlined the health advantages of mothers' milk and maternal care, the feeding method represented a new, idealized mission for leisured woman free of other demands. Their pleasure and fulfillment was to come through motherhood.

Indeed motherhood became, in advice books for women, the central female identity. The touch of the child was supposed to bring out the latent, intensely tender feelings in women. As the nineteenth-century British physician P. H. Chevasse put it: "The love of offspring is one of the strongest instincts implanted in women; there is nothing that will compensate for the want of children. A wife yearns for them; they are as necessary to her happiness as the food she eats and the air she breathes" (Oakley, 1980, p. 9).

In Victorian ideology motherhood was associated with the home, which was distinguished from the public world of politics and industry. The private realm was the special arena of mothers, who presided there as "the bright spirit of the home" or as "our warming sunshine," as middle-class Swedes stated (Frykman, 1987, p. 121). Family events, such as dinners and holiday celebrations, revolved around the presence of the mother, then seen as the only such figure in a child's life. Conceptions of the central place of female nurture in children's spiritual development circulated in thousands of middle-class advice books. Many well-off mothers closely charted their children's motor skills, language, and social development and were deeply involved in their achievements.

In France the cult of motherhood was heavily accented with populationism and, given France's low birthrates, had official government support. The long-lived Bordeaux Society for Maternal Charity offered material aid and close surveillance and was typical of nineteenth-century French voluntary and government organizations formed to promote the new motherhood and to encourage procreation. The upper-class volunteers of the society accepted only women of demonstrated respectability, cleanliness, and thrift but supported them with generous cash payments. Meanwhile French statisticians adopted new ways of charting population size that focused on classifying women in terms of their childbearing potential and counting the babies born to women in their "fertile" years. Although government and private agencies in France offered a number of services to pregnant women and new mothers, they also treated women with small families almost as traitors undermining the nation's vitality.

The new motherhood doctrines were by no means fully instituted in wealthy women's daily lives, though there they had the greatest chance of acceptance. To be sure the practice among the comfortable classes of hiring wet nurses gradually died out everywhere in the nineteenth century, as much the result of the feasibility of bottle-feeding because of antisepsis as of new desires for intimacy with infants. In Paris by the nineteenth century the majority of wet nurse patrons were poor working women. Wealthy women continued as wives and socialites first, mothers second. In the early nineteenth century many mothers in the Nord province in France continued to run family textile businesses and visited their infants and children on Sundays at their wet nurses or boarding schools. Many dissenting voices throughout the nineteenth century challenged the new motherhood paradigm. Feminists harshly criticized their own mothers' lives and motherhood as an institution more generally. To take just one example, Florence Nightingale loathed domestic life and suggested that there should be "crèches for the rich as well as the poor."

For the bulk of the population, the experience of mothering was little changed by the new doctrines. Being a mother meant, as it had in the past, the struggle to feed and dress a large family on an economy of makeshifts. Fatalism about frequent pregnancies predominated, and families were especially large through most of the nineteenth century. Even the best-educated women in most of Europe did not limit their births significantly in the first half of the nineteenth century. Britain between 1800 and 1850 and Russia between 1850 and 1900 averaged completed family sizes of over six children plus stillbirths and child deaths. Maternity constituted a physical feat, as it had in earlier times. Even though life expectancy increased substantially in the richest European countries by the nineteenth century, only a few mothers lived long enough to see all of their children grow up and leave home.

If domesticity and motherhood were the only appropriate callings for women, the vast majority of the female population was stigmatized as unwomanly. As industrial capitalism developed in the early nineteenth century, more mothers and nonmothers became waged workers, though at about only half of men's rate of pay, rather than creating subsistence goods for their own families. In rural Hungary and England women plaited straw in their homes for national markets. In Danish villages women shaped and fired clay pots. Throughout Europe women were farm laborers. They were forced to work for landlords in eastern Europe, where serfdom existed until the middle of the nineteenth century in the Hapsburg lands and until 1861 in Russia. Urban mothers toiled in factories and workshops, worked at home on piece rates, took in lodgers, sweated in industrial-sized laundries, or took in washing at home.

In much of rural Europe women were still agricultural workers under the discipline of a father, a husband, a father-in-law, or in feudal regions a landlord. Under these conditions women's maternal functions were considered secondary. In late nineteenth-century Russia, for example, breast-feeding was the rule, but as new mothers quickly returned to the fields, babies were fed several solid meals each day. Often pacifiers of cloth filled with grain and bacon rind, often prechewed by an adult and obviously quite deadly, were given to babies. Folk sayings such as "It's better to lose an egg than a chicken" minimized the loss that an infant death represented and also stressed the importance of the mother as a worker.

In urban working-class households, motherhood, whether accompanied by waged work or not, involved hard physical work and careful budgeting rather than finely tuned child nurture. What would have been called "mother love" by Victorian middle-class observers was, as understood by poor mothers and children, embodied in the mother's physical exertions, such as frantic bargaining for discount food, after-hours factory piecework done at home, late-night hours spent sewing or ironing children's clothing, and bedside vigils with sick babies. Indeed mothers' incessant work is central in French and German nineteenth-century working-class autobiographies. The daughter of a Paris lace maker wrote that it was her mother "who with her needle and agile fingers built a wall against misery" (Maynes, 1995, p. 79).

Children in these urban settings were expected to repay their mothers' efforts back in cash or in kind. They minded younger siblings, did household chores, helped with mothers' home manufacturing, or freed their mothers from the costs of their keep by taking jobs as servants or factory hands. In late nineteenth-century London they ran household errands and often were sent to fetch things that required a long wait in line, such as the penny-a-quart soup served by a local mission, where one autobiographer often waited in the 1890s with his empty jug. As their children grew though their teens and earned higher wages, mothers claimed a diminishing share of this cash, though sons kept more pocket money than did daughters.

These patterns of mother-child reciprocity became strained, especially in the early twentieth century. Compulsory education, introduced in some of the German states as early as the eighteenth century, represents one of the tensions. In northern and western European countries the years of required schooling expanded in the late nineteenth century or the early twentieth century. The French system, which from 1833 had educated only boys, included girls after 1881. In Britain after 1881 all children between five and ten were expected at school, and the years of compulsory schooling gradually increased thereafter. Mothers' rights to children's services were thus defied by national education systems. Educators, for their part, sometimes attacked maternal claims on the time and loyalty of their children.

The new classification of women as mothers is evident in a variety of nineteenth-century institutions and was sometimes beneficial to women, sometimes not. Unions fought to keep women workers out of their shops in the name of their motherhood capacity, legislators enacted special conditions for hiring women workers, and pregnant or lactating women had claims on particular state or municipal services in many countries. A German law of 1878, for example, mandated unpaid maternity leave for factory workers for three weeks after a birth. Otto von Bismarck's health insurance scheme of 1883 included short-term maternity benefits, though the payment was at the discretion of the funding agency.

For many suffragists and feminists, motherhood provided the basis for claims to citizenship and voting rights. The former seamstress Jeanne Deroin, a utopian socialist and feminist inspired by Olympe de Gouges, argued in 1848 for women's right to work and for full political participation by stressing their importance to fulfilling a mother's "duty." Deroin said, "It is especially the holy function of motherhood, said to be incompatible with the exercise of the rights of the citizen, that imposes on the woman the duty to watch over the future of her children and gives her the right to intervene, not only in all acts of civil life, but also in all acts of political life" (Scott, 1996, p. 70). Deroin was imprisoned in 1850 for her political activism.

The infant welfare movement of the early twentieth century, an international campaign for infant and child health led by medical and social work professionals, added new meanings to motherhood. For the first time it was not only a special kind of female nurture but a highly complex and technical calling. The campaign introduced new knowledge about nutrition, vitamins, for example, and the measure of food energy in calories; bacteriology; statistics on infant death rates; and new data on child development. Professional journals and popularly written pamphlets offered mothers practices, such as antisepsis in the home, that could improve the health and survival of their children. Anna Fischer-Dueckelmann's The Housewife as Doctor, first published in German in 1910, included detailed information on the home, health, pregnancy, and birth. Eight full pages were devoted to the chemical composition of dust. Infant welfare activists were successful in getting European legislators of this era to pass such measures as licensing childbirth personnel, tighter supervision of foster parents, and free or subsidized medical care for working-class mothers and infants.

The turn of the century's increased public attention to motherhood and infant care heartened those feminists who had long been concerned with the needs of working mothers but with little legislative success. French feminists openly played on population fears to improve the situations of mothers and of women in general. Maria Martin said in 1896, "If you want children, learn to honour the mothers" (Cova, 1991, p. 120). Feminists of varying positions combined suffrage agitation with proposals for government support for working mothers, mothers' child custody rights, and support from fathers of illegitimate children. Others developed this preoccupation with mothers' importance in a more radical direction. For instance, the Norwegian feminist Katti Anker Moeller argued in the first decades of the twentieth century that mothers should not be dependent on husbands but, single or married, should be paid by governments to raise their children independently. Furthermore, she thought without reproductive choice for women, motherhood would simply be "slavery." Women should be able to choose or reject childbearing with available contraception and abortion. Moeller's international contacts with feminists of similar views, Helene Stoecker, head of the German Mutterschutz movement in particular, suggest the vitality of "maternalist" feminism in this important era in the social history of motherhood.

MID-TWENTIETH-CENTURY MOTHERHOOD: FROM RECIPROCITY TO MATERNAL LIABILITY

For the majority in western Europe, the sheer physical work of mothers—childbearing, child care, and probably also housework—began to decrease in the interwar period. Most obviously, child care declined along with birthrates in most of Europe, including Poland, Yugoslavia, Norway, Britain, France, Switzerland, Germany, and Austria. Only Ireland maintained its prewar birthrates through the 1920s. In the interwar years workers' birthrates began to approximate those of artisans and the professional and middle classes, which had begun, in general, to decline in the second half of the nineteenth century. Caring for two or three children was surely less taxing than caring for five or six. The expansion of social infrastructures also helped to ease the mother's burden, especially with municipally supplied clean and plentiful water, indoor plumbing, electric lighting, gas stoves, and in the l930s antibiotics to treat children's illnesses, such as pneumonia, rheumatic fever, and bacterial infections.

The expansion of a mass consumer culture in the 1920s brought new kinds of proscriptions for mothers, however. New behaviorist ideas about the importance of "training" children, transmitted through advice literature and medical personnel, paralleled the movement to rationalize industrial production. The experts of the interwar period, including the Australian doctor Truby King and Americans L. Emmett Holt and John Watson, advocated efficient child rearing methods, such as rigid "habit training" and avoiding germ transmitters like kissing and cuddling. The U.S. home economics movement positioned mothers mainly as efficient homemakers and consumers of household cleaning supplies, packaged foods, and small appliances like toasters, radios, and irons. Scholars have explored some of the paradoxes of an American-born trend when electrification and income levels in Europe were considerably lower than those in most of the United States. Even in Berlin fewer than half of the homes had electricity in 1928. The campaign to modernize the home in Weimar Germany did little more than accentuate the domestic sexual division of labor, conflating motherhood and housekeeping.

Developments in psychology were crucial to twentieth-century motherhood. Particularly after World War II, psychoanalytic thought was popularized through many service professions, including social work, psychology, and psychiatry. In mid-twentieth-century Britain, as Denise Riley noted, psychology was a major "historical actor" in the postwar re-creation of gender and motherhood. Initially Sigmund Freud had remarkably little to say about mothers and certainly did not blame them for the problems of his analysands. However, in his writings of the 1930s, the decade of his death, Freud reassessed his thinking on gender. The girl's discovery of her "castration," her readiness to blame this on her mother, her wish for a baby as a substitute for the "lost" penis were the ingredients of a psychoanalytic position that postulated motherhood as a basic need of all women. D. W. Winnicott, on the other hand, put mothers and their mothering at the center of his writings beginning in the 1930s. He viewed infant development as a social as opposed to an instinctual process, but this "society" included only the mother and child. The emphasis, in all the schools derived from Freud, on invisible and unconscious forces irrevocably shaping children's personalities together with the Winnicott-inspired concentration on mother-infant interactions made a close social scrutiny of women's child care inevitable. Motherhood had become associated with continuous contact between mother and child, and other potential caretakers, such as fathers, siblings, grandparents, or neighbors, were viewed as secondary figures in a child's emotional world. Mothers' obligations to their children were expanding markedly, while those of the child were dropping away.

The twentieth century's many episodes of deadly violence on European soil, two world wars, at least three episodes of genocide, and many fascist or totalitarian regimes with their huge casualties, brought a distinct kind of suffering to mothers perhaps unprecedented in its severity. The Turks' forced marches of Armenians in 1915 killed hundreds of thousands of women and children. Famines generated by World War I and its aftermath killed many more among the Central Powers and in the Soviet Union. The World War II bombings of civilians and the Nazi genocide did not guarantee respect or protection to mothers. Indeed mothers with infants and small children were usually executed first in concentration camps. In the Bosnian Civil War of the early 1990s, Serbian soldiers systematically raped Muslim female civilians, intending to force them to bear their captors' offspring.

Being a woman at home in wartime meant both material hardships and perpetual fears for the safety of husband or son. The soldiers' death tolls of the two world wars, between 9 and 10 million in World War I and about 22 million in World War II, left millions of widows with young children and populations with long-lasting sex-ratio imbalances. World War I killed nearly a quarter of the Serbian male population aged fifteen to forty-nine. In 1950 women headed a third of German families, and the Soviet Union in 1959 had seven women to every four men in the age group thirty-five to fifty. In the two decades after World War II the revival of early marriage, high birthrates, and intense female domesticity constituted in part an effort to reestablish some form of normality.

Twentieth-century states sometimes enforced "normal" motherhood with a vengeance. Benito Mussolini, ruling over an overpopulated country whose emigration route to the United States had just been cut off, nonetheless promoted "births, many births" (De Grazia, 1992, p. 41) as a way to restore the conventional gender relations that had been shattered in the aftermath of World War I. Mussolini defined all women in terms of motherhood, implementing new penalties for abortion, the repression of birth control, the exclusion of women from many professions, and discrimination against girls in secondary and higher education.

Similarly motherhood figured prominently in the reconstitution of West Germany after l945. With so many soldiers dead or still prisoners of war, the new state was a "country of women." High proportions of women lived alone or with their children, and the illegitimacy rate was over 16 percent in 1946. Even in 1950 the country counted 130 women to every 100 men aged 25 to 40. The few women who were feminists before 1933 and survived the Nazi years hoped that Germany's new constitutional order would include more egalitarian family law and welfare measures to benefit married and single mothers. But West Germany was constructed as a patriarchal state, a link in cold war Europe's anticommunist chain. The conventional two-parent family with a Hausfrau mother became the symbol of the "free" Germany.

Post World War II state welfare programs expanded in much of Europe. Though based on a variety of views of women's capacities, these programs included family allowances, maternity leaves, medical care, and in some countries state-run child care and after-school centers for all children of working or non-working mothers. Sweden provided a salary and housing allowance to women whose partners did not offer child support. Although postwar government policy in France continued to be based on efforts to encourage population, the socialists and communists who helped formulate the French policies in 1945 also strongly supported women's and mothers' rights to work and to equality in the workplace.

THE RECONFIGURATION OF MOTHERHOOD: THE 1970s, 1980s, AND 1990s

By the last decades of the twentieth century, motherhood had been transformed yet again. A majority of mothers, even those with young children, had broken with Winnicott's dicta and were now in the labor force. Taboos on births outside of marriage had waned, and with highly reliable birth control methods and legal abortion in the great majority of European countries, the one-child family became the new norm in many regions.

One departure from the European past was the proportion of mothers not married to their children's fathers, though in many cases the parents were cohabiting. In western Europe as a whole and worldwide, about a third of households were headed by women. The proportion of births to single women in Britain, for example, shot up dramatically in the 1980s, reaching about one-third of all births in the early 1990s, the highest in its history to that date. In Denmark and Norway the proportions approached 50 percent in the mid 1990s.

The completed fertility rates of European women in the late twentieth century were at a historical low. In the late 1990s the Italian rate was under 1.2 children per woman. An Italian sociologist commented, "The ethic of sacrifice for a family" has dissipated (Spector, 1998, p. 6). The highest European Union rates were those of Ireland and Norway at slightly under two children. Spain and Italy had the lowest. European Muslim countries had higher fertility rates, 2.5 in Albania and 2.7 in Azerbaijan, than their Christian neighbors, but these were considerably lower than in the Muslim parts of Africa. European conditions, attitudes, freedoms, and services quickly transformed the birthrates of North African immigrants to France, which declined steeply during the 1980s, and of West Indian, Indian, and Chinese immigrants to Britain.

Mothers' work outside the home lost much of its stigma in the late twentieth century. Indeed among the best-educated mothers, over 90 percent of those with postgraduate degrees had jobs in virtually every country in the European Union according to 1995 figures. Although mothers' job holding varied from country to country, rates were high, partly reflecting the fact that most of the jobs generated in late twentieth-century decades were "female" ones. Among the women between twenty and fifty-nine years old with at least one child under the age of eleven, proportions in the labor force ranged from a high of 89 percent in Denmark to a low of 67 percent in the western states of Germany in 1992. Labor force rates were about as high among mothers of children under seven years of age.

Not surprisingly, motherhood as a doctrine faced lively challenges in this period, beginning in the 1970s with the objections of Ann Oakley, Adrienne Rich, Jessie Bernard, and Christine Delphy. Motherhood's overwhelming demands were among the elements critiqued. As Rich wrote in Of Woman Born (1976), "The institution of motherhood finds all mothers more or less guilty of having failed their children." At about the same time the wages for housework movement, with Italian roots, attacked the association of mother with socially dependent homemaker. Activists argued that housework and child care, productive activities beneficial to society as a whole, ought to be waged by governments or husbands, a position that had not been enunciated since the 1900s. In her 1947 Housewife, a sociological study of mothers' attitudes, Oakley continued this line of argument: that love of children was by no means equivalent to enjoying housework. The two needed to be separated. In the 1970s and 1980s, the growing acceptance of fathers as capable of child care, supported by parental leave in several states, further shifted what it meant to be a mother. In the 1990s the acceleration of genetic research also challenged the older concept of motherhood. Researchers in many scientific disciplines found that personality traits of all kinds have genetic bases and may have little to do with the quality of a person's mothering. Finally, the reproductive technologies available to at least some European women, separating conception, pregnancy, and birth, shook the biological foundations of motherhood.

Twentieth-century feminists attempted to move motherhood from the realm of the private and culturally invisible into the center of culture and politics. Feminist environmentalists defined the Earth as a mother and viewed women as more respectful of nature because of their experiences of pregnancy and childbirth. Other feminist activists, with a revived sense of mothers' social importance, attacked welfare-state bureaucracies for failing to provide housing and quality medical services for mothers and children. They demanded public support for those, mainly women, caring for dependents of all needs.

It would be wrong, of course, to see the patterns of the late twentieth century as the end of motherhood discourses or of female mothering. In general child care continued to be socially coded as female. In two-parent, two-earner families, including those in Denmark and Sweden, where fathers were most involved with their families, the preponderance of both child care and housework is done by women. Single parents are overwhelmingly women. Raising children alone, while relatively free of the disgrace of "bastardy," often means poverty. Welfare benefits declined in the European Union during the 1980s and had never, in most countries, offered parity for those not fully in the workforce. As a result, from about a fifth to a quarter of female-headed households in Europe were poor. Proportions were higher in Ireland and lower in Sweden. Poverty rates for such households appeared somewhat larger for some groups of immigrants and ethnic minorities.

Elisabeth Badinter, in her social history of motherhood, Mother Love: Myth and Reality (1981), implied that the regime most "natural" to women was the era of casual care and benign neglect destroyed by Rousseau's writings on motherhood and childhood in the 1760s. It is tempting to suggest that the contemporary European regime comes closer to meeting women's fundamental needs as mothers. After all, it includes the ability to limit conceptions, end pregnancies, and maintain small families and offers opportunities for economic independence and job holding while raising children. History, however, is not the place to look for hypothesized natural human tendencies. Instead history offers a range of material possibilities that enables us to interpret our own lives with clarity and wisdom.

See alsoThe Population of Europe: Early Modern Demographic Patterns; The Population of Europe: The Demographic Transition and After (volume 2);Women and Femininity; Gender and Education; Childbirth, Midwives, Wetnursing (in this volume); and other articles in this section.

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