Where Would We Be Without Them? Motherhood and Self-Definition in New Zealand

Abstract

The aim of this thesis is to describe the ways in which women perceive and experience motherhood, and to clarify the different and often confusing patterns of thinking about mothers and mothering. Because motherhood has for so long been seen as an essential part of being a woman, the way in which women think about and experience mothering can be expected to reveal the ways in which they think about themselves as people, and their relationships with their children will likewise reflect beliefs about the social definition of the individual. These themes were pursued in two areas. First, through extended interviews with a selection of mothers from a wide variety of backgrounds, and second, by means of an analysis of the ideologies implicit in the literature and teaching of the five major early childhood organisations in New Zealand. Research was also carried out on the attitudes towards mothers of staff in hospital children's wards, which revealed the ways the different approaches find expression in a given situation. Analysis of the ideologies of the early childhood organisations revealed three distinct patterns or paradigms defining the relationship of mother's and their children, which appear to have gradually succeeded one another over the past eighty years. According to the earliest pattern, motherhood is seen in terms of a need for both mothers and children to control their individual impulses in response to certain generally held, standards of behaviour, Motherhood was defined in terms of "duty" and children were trained to good "habits". The second pattern, which challenged the first from about 1940, is based on the perception of the child as a developing psychological being, and presents mothering as the task of creating the optimum emotional and physical environment in which the child nay develop unharmed. This pattern continues to dominate the organisations, but from about 1970 a third pattern has been emerging, based on the belief that mothers as well as children have a right to self-development and that the interests of mothers and their children do not necessarily coincide. Among the mothers interviewed, and among the health professionals in the children's wards, examples of all these patterns of thinking were found. The way they were expressed in the lives of mothers was less clear and explicit than it was in the group ideologies, and in some cases mothers changed from one pattern of thinking to another, or accepted ideas based on more than one pattern, but the basic structures were still discernible. It appeared, however, that the actual expression of the "older" pattern has changed in the direction of the "newer" patterns, in that the training which mothers offer their children today tends to be more flexible to personal difference than the training practised by their own mothers. Through this examination of mothering in terms of discrete and shifting patterns, the reasons behind contradictory attitudes to mothering are clarified, and the processes of self-definition of women in a changing culture are explored.