Assignment 04
The concept of motherhood is explored is several of the works we have examined thus far. In many instances leading up to the liberation of women, maternity was approached much differently in comparison to the way it is treasured now. In Silvia Federici’s work, she describes the way in which women were valued for their reproductive capacity and the lack of a true maternal experience.
In Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation Federici discusses the way in which women’s motherhood was exploited and used to serve a seemingly “greater” purpose. Women were not able to be sexual beings in the way that men were. A women could not engage in sexual acts on her own accord without being shamed for it. For the majority of our history, sex without the sole purpose of procreation was simply taboo. It was not until population growth became a more urgent concern that a woman’s celibacy was discouraged. Women were subjected to harsher scrutiny to ensure that they were obeying these new social constructs. The use of birth control and other methods of contraception became prohibited and the women who were found to have used them were chastised. Abortion, too, was severely penalized and considered a “devilish” act.
It is in Morgan’s Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery that we are introduced to a slightly different perspective. Motherhood was not held to this same value in various indigenous cultures around the world. Some of the women of these cultures avoided motherhood and exhibited much less concerned for their children. In some cases, newborns were even buried almost immediately following their birth, as accounted by Andrew Battle in Strange Adventures. In addition, Morgan also discusses some of the differences in birth aftercare between European and other cultures. Colored women did not appear to experience pain during or after childbirth, and did not require the intensive care for themselves or their children that European women did. Colored women did not require any recovery time after childbirth and did not hesitate to return to work. On the other hand, European women were fearful of their due date and claimed to experience an immense amount of pain when attempting to deliver their children.
Both Federici’s and Morgan’s show that there were clear misconceptions in terms of what attitudes/qualities a mother should bear or what it was like to truly experience motherhood.
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