Is it Time to Abandon Motherhood? An Interview with Alex Bollen.

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Alex Bollen, a UK-based postnatal practitioner, has recently published her first book, Motherdom: Breaking Free from Bad Science and Good Mother Myths, in which she calls for a new paradigm of mothering that creates room for diversity and variation in the meaning and experience of being a mother. Bollen studied history at Oxford and spent years as a researcher for the global marketing research and public opinion firm, Ipsos, before becoming a postnatal practitioner with the National Childbirth Trust. I first learned about Bollen’s work when she reached out to me after reading my book, Back to the Breast: Natural Motherhood and Breastfeeding in America. I not only appreciated Bollen’s historically-informed approach to writing critically about motherhood, I was struck by how she utilized historical and feminist scholarship.

In recent years I’ve become interested in the myriad ways that historical knowledge is created and how it wriggles beyond the bounds of the academy. What happens to history in these spaces beyond the control of scholars when historical knowledge is not simply consumed, but crafted and wielded in the hands and stories of “non-experts”?^[1] It seems that in this moment, when history is as politically contested as ever, communicating with those who choose to engage with our work in aligned and positive ways may be a crucial step towards nurturing a more robust public interest in understanding a diverse and inclusive history.

I recently had the opportunity to talk with Bollen about her book.

Martucci: Let’s get right into the crux of your book’s argument: that “motherhood” as a word and a concept has been so damaged by blame, guilt, and expectation that we need a new word altogether. Could you talk about the importance of changing the language around mothering?

Bollen: My book tells the story of what I call “Good Mother” myths and why they’re so effective. There are two mechanisms. One is the threat that “if you don’t do this,” you’ll harm your children, and the second is a threat from the state that you’ll have your child(ren) taken away. We know that’s a reality for many families, particularly marginalized groups. These “Good Mother” myths have power because they shame people into compliance and also punish people.

Instead I’m proposing “motherdom,” because it has many different layers of meaning. So “-dom” as in “free-dom” or “martyr-dom” means dignity, state or realm. Also, like with “freedom,” it can encompass both an ideal to strive for, as well as where we’re at now. Within the idea of motherdom there is diversity and variety of child rearing approaches. It recognizes there is no “right way” and how each individual mothers is contextual and contingent and shaped by who we are and our relationships, but also our broader socioeconomic and political contexts.

This is something I feel passionately about: we need to have a broad understanding of people’s individual circumstances. Decisions that may seem strange or wrong from the outside, when you take the time to unpack them, almost always have a good reason, even if we personally might not agree with them. It’s a more generous and expansive conception than what we’ve had with motherhood.

Martucci: I could see motherdom being a particularly useful concept, for example, for LGBTQ+ families. Is that something that you were thinking about as you wrote your book?

Bollen: Yeah, it’s certainly something I would like to see happen. There’s just such beauty in different family setups and different ways of child rearing. I strongly believe that we need to celebrate and be happy about that. I mean, that’s being human, doing things differently, that variation in how we each go about things.

Martucci: You write about how you came to this topic through the variety of your own experiences. Could you talk about why you decided that you needed to write this book.

Bollen: There has been a huge amount of writing and scholarship around motherhood, but I’m coming at it from my own unique intersecting angles and experiences. I feel really privileged to have studied history at university – I was at Oxford in the 1990s – and that has stayed with me throughout my adult life. There’s always that sense of awareness that people did things differently in the past, which I know sounds really banal, but it’s a profound truth. Mothering advice is very ahistorical, so drawing on that perspective, for me, was really important.

In terms of my research experience, when I started to look under the bonnet of the “scientific evidence” around motherhood advice, I was genuinely shocked at how flimsy the evidence is. Really, this is a study of only 23 babies, are you kidding me? So that fueled my outrage.

Then, my official qualification as a postnatal practitioner in the UK allows me to facilitate mothers’ groups and provide training on the transition to new motherhood. This has meant that I’ve seen the day-to-day realities of how these “Good Mother” narratives impact people and, frankly, make them miserable. And this is perhaps an obvious point, but I’ve learned it profoundly: how different women can be, how different experiences of mothering can be, how there are so many variables which affect that. I think as long as the woman is okay and the baby is okay, then that’s okay. I could not give two hoots if a woman has her baby sleeping and eating on a schedule or not.

So it’s the personal, the political, and the historical, those are my three angles which I’ve tried to pull together in this book.

Martucci: Your book highlights how cultural and scientific attitudes towards mothers have historically undermined society’s trust in mothers to make good decisions. You specifically talk about how the idea of “natural motherhood” can be harmful, can you say a bit more about this?

Bollen: One of the things which I found really interesting about your book, Back to the Breast: Natural Motherhood and Breastfeeding in America, was how you looked at the interplay between the scientific discourse and the natural discourse. And one of the points which you made, which I quoted in my book, Motherdom: Breaking Free from Bad Science and Good Mother Myths, is that what is natural varies over time, that this is a very malleable concept.

Going back to my work with individual mothers, this idea that things should come naturally can cause so much distress. It’s this sense of, “Well, I’m unnatural. I am not loving every moment. I don’t want to breastfeed or breastfeeding hasn’t worked out. I had a cesarean. None of these things are natural. I’ve failed. I’m unnatural.” So yeah, it’s very problematic.

In terms of where we are now, parents have so much information, but I still have women say to me, “I thought that breastfeeding was going to be natural, and it isn’t.” They’re so powerful, these ideas, and very pernicious.

Martucci: Beyond “natural motherhood,” are there any other particularly harmful pieces of rhetoric or scientific studies that have caused problems for the mothers whom you’ve worked with?

Bollen: I would say this narrative around “you need to build your baby’s brain, you need to optimize your child, the sooner you start the better, and the more the better.” It started in the 1990s with a Carnegie Corporation report which had a short section on brain development and was followed by the founding of the Harvard Center for the Developing Child.^[2] It’s so damaging because it means that whatever a mother does, it’s never enough, you can always be doing more. The anxiety I see around child development was one of the things which powered me in writing this book. I write about speaking with a new mother and as she talked to me, she was absentmindedly playing with her baby’s hand. She’s anxious and saying things like, “Oh, I’m wondering what toys does she need and how do I stimulate her?” And I just said, “You are stimulating your baby right now. You are holding them, you’re touching their hand.” But that day-to-day stuff is discounted. The idea that you have to be consciously stimulating all the time and you have to buy these particular toys and go to these classes, all that pressure can be really damaging and very undermining.

Martucci: Could you talk a little about how you think about your relationship and orientation to historical scholarship?

Bollen: Can I just say how much I love this question? There’s the making of history and then there’s the dissemination of history, and I think they are both interesting and important topics. I’m passionately committed to historical knowledge and sharing and disseminating it. I’m really glad that with my book I can play a small part in doing that because there’s so much fantastic scholarship. Being able to share that with a broader audience, it is a great privilege and I think it’s really important.

When I became a mother, I remembered some of the things I’d read at university. So Jane Lewis, who’s written some brilliant books about motherhood in England in the 19th and 20th centuries, her work helped me make sense of my own experiences in a profound way.^[3] History just provides so many examples that how we do things now isn’t how things have always been done because being a mother is so culturally, socially, and economically constructed–its meaning is fluid, and a term like motherdom helps create space for that variability.

Notes

1. For two other outstanding examples of historical writing from outside the boundaries of traditional academic history, see: Sarah DiGregorio, Taking Care: The Story of Nursing and Its Power to Change Our World, (Harper Collins, 2023) and Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present, (Doubleday Press, 2006). ↑
2. Carnegie Corporation of New York, Starting Points: Meeting the Needs of Our Youngest Children (1994). ↑
3. Jane Lewis, The Politics of Motherhood: Child and Maternal Welfare in England, 1900 – 1939 (McGill – Queen’s Press, 1980); Jane Lewis, Women in England, 1870 – 1950: Sexual Divisions and Social Change (Wheatsheaf Books, 1984). ↑

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Featured image caption: Photo courtesy William Fortunato on Pexels.