Post-Natal Depression

Psychology, Science and the Transition to Motherhood

Paula Nicolson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134713615
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Post-Natal Depression challenges the expectation that it is normal to be a 'happy mother'. It provides a radical critique of the traditional medical and social science explanations of 'post natal depression' by supplying a systematic feminist psychological analysis of women's experiences following childbirth. Paula Nicolson argues that, far from it being an abnormal, undesirable, pathological condition, it is a normal, healthy response to a series of losses.
Post Natal Depression makes an important contribution to the psychology of women and feminist research and will be of interst to psychologists, social scientists, nurses and doctors.

1
WOMEN’S EXPERIENCE OF MOTHERHOOD

I still can’t think of myself as a mother, even when she’s there. I can’t think of her as mine—my daughter…but I do think of her as mine, but not of myself as a mother. Do you know what I mean? It’s quite difficult to believe… I think it takes a while to sink in.

(Jane)¹

I still can’t seem to feel as a mummy with a capital ‘M’. I just can’t seem to get into that. Sometimes I lie in bed and think about it and think ‘God I’m her mum’. But I don’t feel anyone but Penelope. But I know she’s my daughter and I find that frightening and exciting.

(Penelope)

Introduction

The words above, spoken one month after their daughters’ births, demonstrate the contradictory ways in which individual women experience having their own baby, caring for that baby and understand the social meaning of mothers and mothering.

This chapter examines what it is like to be a mother—particularly since motherhood remains central to women’s lives despite social and economic change. It explores why women become mothers and focuses upon the contrasts between scientific beliefs about the motherhood role, the maternal instinct and the experience of caring for children.

The experience of motherhood

How beautiful and important it is for a woman to have a child. When you get married in Africa it’s also emphasised that it is for children. It’s not like a duty—it’s part and parcel of being married.

(Matilda)

The attention that a baby requires and the resulting fatigue are not always to the parents’ liking. And in many cases parents do not pass the ‘sacrifice test’.

(Badinter, 1981:39)

Patterns of fertility and the decision to become a mother have a complicated connection with women’s lives overall. Better educated, middle-class women appear to have ensured greater control over when, if and how many children they have than have those women from less privileged backgrounds. Further, control over fertility means more scope for education and employment for women, which in turn provides opportunities for independence and autonomy. Statistics make it clear that more women in the 1990s were divorcing, separating, marrying later or not marrying at all, more frequently than was the case in the 1970s and 1980s, and these data are clearly connected to the fact that women’s lives are no longer solely prescribed by their role as mother in the traditional family (see Gittins, 1993).

However, what women do and social beliefs about what women should do are sometimes at odds with each other. Motherhood and womanhood stand in a complex and contradictory relationship, despite the fact that this relationship appears to be changing. While motherhood is still central to women’s identity, recent demographic changes appear to suggest that motherhood alone no longer dictates the pattern of women’s lives, and may not be such a popular choice for women as it once was (Church and Sommerfield, 1995). Under patriarchy, however, motherhood has a mythological, mysterious and powerful status. Only women are granted this status, and it is one to which all women have been expected to aspire. The reality of mothers’ lives, however, often fails to match these aspirations. Motherhood is a challenge; although potentially enjoyable, it is also hard work and routinely stressful (Richardson, 1993). It affects relationships with men and other women, and changes occupational, domestic and sexual arrangements.

When people come round, I can’t have a proper conversation. I used to notice it before I had him when other people could not give me attention. I’m doing the same things to my friends now! It’s a bit irritating.

(Jerri)

Everything seems to revolve around him [the baby]. When Tom comes in I’m exhausted. We both look after him for a few hours and I go to bed and Tom stays up with him. I’m up first thing with him.

(Jerri)

Becoming a mother often means economic dependence on another person or the state, and frequently reduces women’s income. As Sylvia observes:

I now have to ask him for money. I don’t like doing that… I feel funny asking because I’ve not been in that position before. I had a house and a business and my own money. If I had money I’d spend it. If I didn’t, I didn’t. Even with the baby I feel guilty. I’ve said, ‘We’ll really have to buy a drop-sided cot and they’re about fifty pounds dear’. I don’t know why I feel I’m not contributing to the finances at the moment. I’m bringing up a baby—but it makes me feel guilty.

(Sylvia)

Being a mother influences social and personal identity, and has implications for women’s health because of exhaustion and stress (Doyal, 1995). So, for example:

Everything gets out of proportion at the end of the day. I get a bit hysterical sometimes. It seems very rushed. I have to think about the meal and I have to wash up straight away.

(Hilary)

I’d have a day of baby and a day of cats running under my feet and then I’d discover the mess on the carpet and it was too much to cope with.

(Isobel)

…his crying for hours on end…nothing could console him. We were both getting fractious about it as we were both missing an awful lot of sleep.

(Isobel)

Feminist analyses of the conditions surrounding motherhood have identified its socially prescribed situation as an accompaniment to marriage, heterosexuality, monogamy and economic viability (Gittins, 1993). But is motherhood still perceived as the key means of women’s oppression in patriarchal societies, as many have argued (Bleier, 1984)? Do young working-class women still see it as a means of liberation from the prospect of dreary paid employment (Griffin, 1989)? Motherhood is more than anything a complex social role with ambiguous and potentially contradictory consequences for women.

Despite the prominence of motherhood as a social institution, and the almost universal expectation that women will become mothers, the everyday reality of mothering is frequently invisible. For women caught up in the myths that accompany motherhood, failure to achieve that imaginary status is frequently a shock (Parker, 1995). Women who do not have children are also caught in these contradictions and constraints. Women who are not mothers are seen as failed and unfeminine women, and achievements and pleasures gained outside motherhood are condemned within patriarchy as substitutes for normal femininity (Woollett, 1991). For women caught up in the myths that accompany motherhood, failure to achieve that imaginary status is frequently a ‘shock’ (Parker, 1995).

What is motherhood?

I’ve been forced to realise that having a baby wasn’t quite so unique, and because it was the central point of my life for so long, I’ve now been forced to realise that other people have done it…. I don’t know whether it’s taken a whole dimension out of my life or added one!

(Sharon)

Perceptions of mothers as powerful and influential and the romanticisation and idealisation of the mothering role (Apter, 1993) need to be qualified in the context of women’s everyday experiences. Motherhood as an institution includes certain responsibilities and duties, but women’s power is limited. Women’s power in both the public and private/domestic spheres is subject to the rule of men both as individuals and as represented by patriarchy. Psychologists have traditionally claimed priority for mothers’ power over children, through emphasising the importance of mother—child relationships (Apter, 1993) and through the debate on mothers’ responsibilities to their children (Tizard, 1991). However, legal and traditional power over women and children is held by men (Segal, 1990).

Matriarchy (defined as a society with matriarchal government and descent reckoned through female lineage) is not recognised in most societies and is certainly not a significant means of social organisation. Claims from community and anthropological studies that matriarchies prevail in certain traditional subcultures, for example among black urban American groups (Kitzinger, 1978) or among traditional white working-class communities in British cities (Young and Wilmott, 1966), cannot be upheld in terms of true power in contemporary western society. Ruth Bleier (1984), reviewing anthropological studies of a large number of cultures, argued that women’s roles are always of a lower status to those of men, and this continues to be upheld through the enactment of gendered roles (Connell, 1993). In some small, non-industrial societies where men have primary responsibility for aspects of child-care, mothering is taken very seriously and given high status, which is not the case when women do it.

Most mothers in industrial and non-industrial, urban and rural, societies are oppressed. They may have particular responsibilities, but not the accompanying rights to choose how they mother or whether to mother at all. The popular perceptions of maternal influence and power are mythological and the origins of this myth lie within patriarchy. Its repercussions have had a powerful psychological effect on relationships between mothers and daughters, and affect expectations of mothering from generation to generation.

It is through the everyday experience of the mother-daughter relationship that the contradictions in the myth become clear: ‘Belief in the all powerful mother spawns a recurrent tendency to blame the mother on the one hand, and a fantasy of maternal perfectibility on the other’ (Chodorow and Contratto, 1982:55). The romanticised and idealised woman, full of love, forgiveness and selflessness, does not and cannot exist, so that all mothers are destined to disappoint their children and themselves.

Mother-blaming occurs on a number of levels, from individual attributions to mothers as the cause of psychological insecurities to the portrayal of the cold, rejecting, neurotic or inadequate mother in popular culture (Sayers, 1988; Parker, 1995). The patriarchal myth of maternal power renders women culpable, and thus in reality deprives them of effective social influence. Women are consequently perceived as imperfect in their central role, while men as fathers can maintain their own mythological status and claim the admiration of their sons and daughters.

Science and motherhood

How is it, then, that mothers are ‘blamed’ and seen as both powerful and destructive? These contradictory images of motherhood are constructed and exploited within patriarchy through the medium of scientific knowledge. They operate to ensure that many aspects of motherhood are rendered invisible, and that women as mothers are denied the power to change this situation within existing social structures. The mechanisms through which the status of motherhood is controlled are both social and psychological. Motherhood is often idealised and some argue that men experience ‘womb envy’, that is, they envy women’s ability to become pregnant and give birth (Erikson, 1975). The image of the idealised mother, however, exists in stark contrast to men’s apparent unwillingness to become involved in the aspects of infant care that are available to them (Nicolson, 1990) and with the daily lives of the women attempting to mother (Parker, 1995).

The role of ‘mother’ has not evolved in a ‘natural’ way, nor is it outside culture and free from ideology. It has been socially constructed within patriarchy...

Table of contents

• WOMEN AND PSYCHOLOGY
• CONTENTS
• TABLES
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• 1 WOMEN’S EXPERIENCE OF MOTHERHOOD
• 2 COMPETING EXPLANATIONS OF POST-NATAL DEPRESSION
• 3 THE CONTEXT OF POST-NATAL DEPRESSION
• 4 POST-NATAL CARE AND ‘MATERNITY BLUES’
• 5 REFLEXIVITY, INTERVENTION AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF POST-NATAL DEPRESSION
• 6 LOSS, HAPPINESS AND POST-NATAL DEPRESSION
• 7 KNOWLEDGE, MYTH AND THE MEANING OF POST-NATAL DEPRESSION
• APPENDIX I Profiles of the participants
• APPENDIX II Methods
• APPENDIX III Interview guide
• APPENDIX IV Postal questionnaire (sent six months after delivery)
• REFERENCES
• AUTHOR INDEX
• SUBJECT INDEX