The mother myth

Here she comes again. Back at the top of the news, draped in the robes of the righteous, embraced by those who sanctify all things traditional: the ‘full-time mother’. As usual, she is the undeserved victim of something or other; in this instance, it’s the incoherent shake-up of the child benefit system, leading to headlines declaring that ‘full-time mothers are being penalised’, followed by an implacable wistfulness that war is once again waged against the finer values of a finer past, when women dedicated their whole lives to their children.

The trouble with this lament, much as I hate to spoil the Hovis commercial, is that they did nothing of the kind; nostalgia is a notoriously unreliable witness and in this matter she surpasses herself. There never was such a thing as a full-time mother; she is a recently constructed, absurdly quixotic myth. The full-time mother has never existed for the simple reason that, exempting only the fleeting years of infancy, mothering is not and has never been a full-time job.

Students of social history, together with older persons of fair memory, know this. Long ago, the rich farmed out the job altogether and the poor fitted childcare around the labour in factory or field, frequently conscripting older siblings to mop the bottoms and staunch the runny noses. More recently — here I hark to my own childhood of the Fifties and Sixties — my mother, like most, did not work outside the home. But a full-time mother? She should have been so lucky.

Women like her, in the days for which we affect nostalgia, might properly have been called full-time housekeepers; it was more than anybody’s idea of a full-time job and I tip my hat to those who completed what was routinely expected of them. Washing took an entire day; the house steamed and stank and although our middle-class income allowed — eventually — for a hideous top-loading washing machine, there were still the mangle and the clothes pegs to navigate.