Appraising Motherhood

Mom & Me & Mom is the final autobiographical work written by the late Maya Angelou and the last of her seven autobiographical publications. Published a year before her passing in 2014, Angelou details in this final account her relationship with her mother, Vivian Baxter, a woman who abandoned Angelou and her brother as young children and re-entered her life years later. It is an emotionally complex novel, and Angelou lays bare the difficult and evolving feelings she held for Baxter, at first as a woman she resented for having left her to one she came to accept and eventually embrace.

Angelou’s shifting feelings towards Baxter after their reunion are evidenced through a number of events in the novel, and the significance of how Angelou addresses Baxter betrays a growing affection that develops over time. After their reunion, Angelou initially maintains a strictly formal and somewhat detached relationship with Baxter, referring to her as “Lady,” but after having a child of her own and receiving critical nurturing and support from Baxter to get through delivery and back on her feet, Angelou begins to refer to Baxter as “Mother,” a change she makes subconsciously and only comes to realize after she pronounces it for the first time.

In a powerful scene later in the work, Angelou finds herself at a critical juncture in her personal life and career. Working in Stockholm on a film that she had screenwritten, Angelou is under considerable pressure as the first ever black woman to have her film produced by a major company. In the midst of filming, an actor central to the film was upset about his treatment and threatened to return home after learning that another actor on set had received real jewelry from the film company whereas he had only been given regalia made of zirconium. Angelou successfully coaxed the actor into staying, but only through a very difficult exchange in which he insulted her abusively and she ultimately threatened to eliminate his part altogether to induce his acquiescence. The exchange took a toll on Angelou, and she reached out to her mother immediately afterwards with the following ask: “Mom, I need mothering.” Baxter took the next flight to Stockholm and, upon landing, sat with Angelou in the airport saying, inter alia, the following:

Mother is here. I will look after you and I will look after anybody you say needs to be looked after, any way you say. I am here. I brought my whole self to you. I am your mother.

In the novel, this event comes to represent the culmination of Angelou and Baxter’s love. But it also symbolizes something broader — the warmth, devotion, and love that motherhood distinctively provides. Motherhood is an institution of life that is without comparison. The body of the mother is the unique location of life giving, and it is in the womb that we are all conceived and develop for a period of months that imposes a difficult tax on mothers, one that Allah describes as an endurance of individual weakness and toil, wahn ‘ala wahn. Throughout pregnancy and birth, through childhood and into adulthood, the sacrifice and care of mothers are essential to a child’s growth and development, and when times are especially grueling, wearisome, and trying, we are, like Angelou, in need of “mothering” to help us push through.

Societies far and wide have memorialized motherhood and instantiated cultural norms to ensure forms of filial piety that recognize the distinctive contribution of mothers to society in general, and to the life of the household in particular. In early imperial China, for instance, funerary inscriptions dating back to the second century AD recurrently depict the theme of emotional connection between mother and child, with many emphasising in vivid terms the sense of loss and grief experienced by mothers who had lost their children. Other tales and ancient Chinese folklore speak of the self-sacrifice of mothers, further elaborating on the same theme of mutual love between mother and child. Similar attitudes towards the importance of motherhood are found in ancient Nordic societies, ancient Persian societies, various African traditions, and basically all civilizations and peoples that have occupied the earth since time immemorial with rare exception.

It is therefore a rather precarious and unprecedented position that we find ourselves in today with respect to motherhood and its accelerating erosion, particularly in the West. Although modern society has not completely abandoned the notion of motherhood, it is increasingly giving way to those who have determined to wage war against it and treat motherhood as an institutional antagonist responsible for the sustained oppression of women. This process has slowly evolved over the past few decades, though its source is rooted in the norms derived from an ethical logic that has come to underpin the modern world, a logic that marginalizes motherhood and accords it an especially insignificant position in relation to the ostensibly more meaningful contributions of those whose lives are tethered to wage labor.

This logic is, at its very core, the ethos of the neoliberal state, one in which the value of a human being is drawn from capital contributions and direct economic activity. Accordingly, those pursuing power obtain status by influencing others and commoditizing their influence or, alternatively, by achieving corporate or career “successes” which then grant them a sufficient income to be regarded as bona fide members of the elite. It is no surprise in such a setting that our president is himself a billionaire and the richest executive in recent history (by a large margin), nor is it a surprise that our legislature is comprised of people whose net worth assures their place in the upper echelons of the economic and social elite. In more local settings, suburban masjid boards are often comprised exclusively of high-worth community members, with prominent doctors typically having a disproportionate say in community and religious affairs.

When motherhood is spoken about in this context, it is spoken of with more than a little sentimentality and a large measure of pity. Mothers are regarded as living lives of infinite suffering and sacrifice, people whose dreams were abandoned in order to enable the lives of their husbands to continue unimpeded while shouldering the task of shepherding their children into adulthood largely unassisted. Their unique capacity to gestate has exacerbated the framing of motherhood as a social and personal encumbrance unjustly imposed upon women, who sacrifice their economic agency only to be rendered little more than serfs confined to the estates of their male overlords. On the rare occasion in which they find themselves in a position to seek gainful employment, it is taken for granted that they, and they alone, will nevertheless maintain the home and all that attends family life (including, importantly, child and elder care), while those they serve gallivant scot-free, entirely unburdened by family obligations. The household duties of mothers inhibit their economic prospects, confining them to precious few positions on the job market that grant household flexibility, though even such highly flexible work arrangements are not maintainable without a great deal of anxiety and priority juggling.

When viewed in this way, those seeking to apply value to motherhood are left few options other than to redeem it through a quantitative analysis that commodifies the various tasks mothers do in order to apportion them value in terms comprehensible to the neoliberal order. Thus, daycare, cooking, and cleaning are priced out at comparable hourly wages and multiplied by the seemingly endless hours mothers find themselves on duty to show that motherhood, if duly compensated, would find itself in the upper-tier of available market occupations. However, even these analyses come with more than a few misgivings, as the parallel occupations used to form cost judgments are firmly situated in what is regarded as “low skill” labor, and the suggested salaries invariably rely on a labor commitment that, if demanded in capital markets, would immediately spur class action lawsuits related to worker abuse. Mothers are therefore seen as important members of society, but ones whose contributions can be safely supplanted by daycare providers, fast-food and food delivery services, and janitorial services.

For women who have graduated from college, such a “career path” can appear humiliating and unseemly and is, unsurprisingly, highly undesirable for a great many women who have to reconcile themselves to “throwing away” their degree in order to perform tasks that can be equally fulfilled by unskilled workers earning low hourly wages. Moreover, women who assume the task of motherhood full time are essentially seen as volunteers, laboring in an exclusively unwaged capacity, thus deprecating even further what nominal status they might possess in social settings where conversations begin with “What do you do for a living?” The undesirability of motherhood is made worse when women are repeatedly encouraged to pursue their economic dreams and are presented with heroines who jealously guarded their “economic agency” and, for that reason, have managed to make impressive financial gains. Few if any mothers earn Nobel prizes or public accolades of any sort, while women in STEM, female CEOs, and female doctors are regularly featured in major publications and paraded in front of young girls as sources of inspiration. Mothers are thus stuck pursuing labor that is, when weighed against wage labor, fundamentally inferior to what is on offer in the market and are viewed lamentably as either oppressed and suffering or psychologically manipulated into a sort of “Stockholm syndrome” by coming to find pleasure in a vocation of self-enslavement.

Mother’s Day functions within this context as a penance paid by those who willfully acknowledge their mistreatment of mothers, a mistreatment that was necessary to enable the pursuit of their economic and social interests at the expense of their mothers. Hallmark and related companies appeal to this injustice, with reminders of all that sons and daughters owe their mothers for having tirelessly and seemingly endlessly sacrificed (“Surely you can afford a few presents, no?”). In recent years, Mother’s Day has gained an online presence with much social media activity expressing the same measure of guilt for all that mothers have to do, performed as yet another act of virtue signaling for all and sundry (save the mothers themselves, who are rarely on the medium in question and are largely disinterested in being serenaded on platforms like Facebook).

When situated in this way, the injustice of motherhood comes to be seen not only as a singular grievance among other grievances, but the single greatest grievance that women endure. On this reading, motherhood is the primary means by which women are devalued and incapacitated economically. It is the means by which countless women historically and today have been confined socially and hampered with domestic responsibilities. It is an instrument of female control, wielded by men to reduce women to little more than indentured servants with no social cachet. It is a form of subordination that can only be overcome when abandoned and opposed outright.

For a number of feminists, this form of structural oppression informs their theory of motherhood and female liberation more broadly. Radical feminist Shulamith Firestone (d. 2012), for instance, argued in her Dialectic of Sex that pregnancy was “barbaric,” transforming the womb into a site of violence against the female body. Accordingly, Firestone sought to liberate women from what she regarded as “the tyranny of reproduction.” Prominent feminist Simone de Beauvoir (d. 1986) shared Firestone’s disregard for reproduction, advocating for a “violent resistance” to the enslavement entailed by reproduction. Esteemed radical feminist Silvia Fedirici writes in keeping with these objections. In her 2012 work Revolution at Point Zero, Fedirici offers a Marxist critique of motherhood as an institutional byproduct of capitalism required to contain the cost of labor. She writes:

The difference with housework lies in the fact that not only has it been imposed on women, but it has been transformed into a natural attribute of our female physique and personality, an internal need, an aspiration, supposedly coming from the depth of our female character. Housework was transformed into a natural attribute, rather than being recognized as work, because it was destined to be unwaged. Capital had to convince us that it is a natural, unavoidable, and even fulfilling activity to make us accept working without a wage.

Federici argues that an alternative capital arrangement anchored in Marxist principles can serve to abolish this misconception and remediate the systemic patriarchy and capital oppression that women languish under as unpaid laborers (i.e., as mothers). In an earlier chapter of Revolution entitled “Wages Against Housework,” Fedirici begins by stating:

They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work.

They call it frigidity. We call it absenteeism.

Every miscarriage is a work accident.

Homosexuality and heterosexuality are both working conditions . . . but homosexuality is workers’ control of production, not the end of work.

More smiles? More money. Nothing will be so powerful in destroying the healing virtues of a smile.

Neuroses, suicides, desexualization: occupational diseases of the housewife.

In order to liberate women from the shackles of traditional motherhood, much feminist scholarship has challenged the notion of “social motherhood” as the de facto responsibility of the biological mother. In its stead, they have proffered an alternative of “motherhood” as fundamentally de-gendered (see, for instance, Adrienne Rich’s influential work Of Woman Born), with traditional motherhood understood as a constructed patriarchal institution guilty of conflating what occurs by way of biological reproduction with the social role performatively assumed by the reproductive female. The upending of social norms and eliminating of certain “motherly ideals” is critical to refashioning motherhood as a social responsibility that can be shared, outsourced, or assigned to biological fathers who can — interchangeably, on this reading — socially perform the role of the mother, thus enabling women to escape social subordination and participate in the wage market as equals.

In more recent years, gender studies and feminist literature has transitioned to focus more on positive articulations of gender theory (see, for instance, performativity and constructionist literature) as well as female liberation within that context. The necessity to encourage female liberation has engendered scholarship centered on agency and individual autonomy, with reproduction and family broached on increasingly rare occasion, most often to reinforce the importance of reproductive rights for women who desire abortion on account of inconvenience, undesirability, or, less commonly, medical necessity. A recent study examining the output of contemporary gender theory publications found that the topic of reproduction and motherhood has come up in fewer than 3% of papers, journal articles, and textbooks on modern gender theory.

The consequence of the neoliberal framework from which newfangled theories of gender and sexuality gain life is a growing abandonment of motherhood as well as a growth in women who prize above all else their economic agency. Currently, fertility rates are dropping considerably throughout the West, with rates in the US recently hitting a 32-year low. Abortion and reproductive rights have been the Leitmotif of feminist and women’s rights activism for years, today culminating in anywhere between 500,000 and a million abortions annually in the US, with the entire Democratic candidate field, as well, supporting abortion on-demand up to the moment of delivery without concern for justification or the question of life. Although initial abortion debates focused on medical complications and tragic situations such as rape, the current discourse is focused almost entirely on personal choice, body ownership, and an open acknowledgment of the various ways that motherhood obstructs women’s upward mobility.

Perhaps even more concerning as of late have been developments within the Muslim community, now appearing in traditionalist corners, which have imported these assumptions and furthered them to encourage the refashioning of family life to increase women’s career aspirations and minimize the life of motherhood relative to said career goals. In a viral Facebook post shared over 1600 times last year, a sister asked: “Which female companion do you know that was explicitly and only known for her complete dedication to motherhood and absolutely nothing else?” It should be noted that although the original viral post has been modified recently to temper some of the more provocative takes, it nonetheless makes clear that although motherhood is valued in Islam, it is nonetheless “painful to be so constantly shamed, judged, questioned and overlooked while you sacrifice and overlook all of your own needs to sustain others.” In the “feminist manifesto” Lean In of Rabata, an organization focused on pedagogy for Muslim women, the theme of female agency appears repeatedly, reminding women that “this is your life, your faith, your family, your country, your job — you are the only one who will be asked.” In addition, a remark directed to men instructs them to support their wives’ economic aspirations irrespective of what they are, and that expecting a commitment from their wives to the household departs from the example of the Prophet (ﷺ). These are but a few examples, though many could be furnished similarly advocating for contemporary neoliberal gender norms to be institutionalized as proper articulations of the prophetic Sunna and the Muslim family.

The trouble in all of this, however, begins with the operative logic of neoliberalism. The stubborn resistance of motherhood to commodification is not a weakness of motherhood but an emblem of its strength. Motherhood is a form of life that resists reduction to dollars and cents, because motherhood is specifically not conventional wage labor. It is a labor that transcends economic activity, placing us in an aneconomic realm of nurturing care, mercy, and love. How can one quantify in dollars the value of motherly love? The mere question trivializes what motherhood gives to the household and to society at large. The loving sacrifices that mothers make for their children are not burdens imposed upon them but instead the giving of themselves selflessly for another, an act that is sacred and far more consequential and meritorious in the sight of God than the many gainful forms of vocational activity.

The Sunna itself is replete with the mention of motherhood and its significance. It is reported that the Prophet (ﷺ) passed a woman breastfeeding children and, upon witnessing her love, told the companions that “Allah is more merciful to His slaves than this woman is to her son.” In another report, the Prophet (ﷺ) stated that the womb (al-rahim) is derived from the name of God, the Merciful (al-Rahman). The Prophet (ﷺ) praised motherhood on more than one occasion and in one report stated that he shortened the prayer when babies cried in order to alleviate the distress of the mothers. Allah granted the wives of the Prophet (ﷺ) the honorific title “mothers” (ummahat) of the believers — not “soldiers,” “merchants,” or “queens” of the believers. In the Quran, Allah tells us of the mother of the Prophet Moses (as) who cast Moses into a river to avert his killing by Pharaoh’s henchmen, only to be reunited with him later as he refused to be suckled by other than her. In describing the return of baby Moses to his mother, Allah says, “We restored him to his mother in this way, to bring joy to her eye and so that she would not grieve . . .”

So deep is the relationship between mothers and their children that loving sacrifices on the part of mothers are routinely found not only among humans but among animal life as well. In an incident reported by al-Bukhari in his Adab al-mufrad, the Prophet (ﷺ) came across a mother bird frantically searching for her eggs near the head of the Prophet (ﷺ). The Prophet (ﷺ) turned to the Companions in his presence and asked if any of them had taken the bird’s eggs, whereupon one Companion stood up and said he had. The Prophet (ﷺ) then instructed the man to return the eggs to the bird “as a mercy to her” (rahmatan laha). From bears to elephants and from birds to lions, mothers in nature display considerable care and sacrifice repeatedly to ensure that their offspring are safe and fed. Documentaries and videos taken by onlookers have captured many such instances of courage displayed by mothers confronting predators, sacrificing their own lives for their children and nurturing their children after birth in rather onerous and demanding ways. Appreciating and recognizing the instinctive care and concern of mothers as elemental to all living creatures gives us some perspective on the social significance of motherhood and the damage done by dishonoring it.

Women who enter into motherhood enter into a domain of life that transcends the market. It is a realm of sociality and human existence in which our imaginaries manifest deeply held sentiment, form durable and lifelong bonds, and cultivate the caring needed for human society to flourish. A society that fails to so much as value motherhood or comprehend its distinctive and pivotal contribution to humanity can hardly be expected to honor it properly. And as motherhood goes, so too will the richness of the world, the loving character of human relations, and the solidarity of the family. In its stead will emerge broken societies, broken communities, and broken people. May Allah protect us and our families from such a prospect, and may He make us from those who cherish motherhood and honor our own. Ameen.

Other thoughts:

So apparently the latest Star Wars film features a brief kiss between two women. The film’s director JJ Abrams said it was important for him that the LGBTQ community be represented in the film. Although gay and lesbian characters are common in movies, this is the first Star Wars film to feature a scene depicting same-sex romantic affection. However, it seems not everyone is happy. A number of LGBT advocates have responded to the kiss by protesting what they deem to be a “throwaway scene.” These people wanted a more fully formed gay/lesbian/trans character and a romance that could not so easily be glossed over by the audience.

Late last year the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) released their annual “Where We Are on TV” report. According to the report, “Of the 879 series regular characters expected to appear on broadcast primetime scripted programming in the coming year, 90 (10.2 percent) were counted as LGBTQ. This is the highest percentage of LGBTQ regular characters GLAAD has counted on primetime scripted broadcast programming, and up from the previous year’s 8.8 percent. Last year, GLAAD called on the broadcast networks to ensure that 10 percent of primetime broadcast scripted series regulars were LGBTQ by 2020. In just one year, the networks met and exceeded this call.”

Having accomplished this goal of 10% representation, GLAAD has now set a new goal: “GLAAD is calling on the industry to make sure that 20 percent of series regular characters on primetime scripted broadcast series are LGBTQ by 2025. Further, we would challenge all platforms — broadcast, cable, and streaming — that within the next two years, at least half of LGBTQ characters on each platform are also people of color.”

The zeitgeist is showing no signs of letting up.

In 2006, economist Bryan Caplan published a provocative piece entitled “The Economics of Szasz: Preferences, Constraints and Mental Illnesses.” In it, Caplan argued against mental illness as a coherent category by employing the principles of economic theory to prove its alleged arbitrariness. The thrust of Caplan’s argument was that much of what we have come to construe as a “mental illness” is nothing other than preferences of various grades. On this, Caplan writes:

…a large fraction of what is called mental illness is nothing other than unusual preferences — fully compatible with basic consumer theory. Alcoholism is the most transparent example: in economic terms, it amounts to an unusually strong preference for alcohol over other goods. But the same holds in numerous other cases. To take a more recent addition to the list of mental disorders, it is natural to conceptualize Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) as an exceptionally high disutility of labor, combined with a strong taste for variety.

Caplan supports his argument further by drawing on the writings of Thomas Szasz, one of psychiatry’s most vocal internal critics. Szasz was an early pioneer of the idea that “mental illness” is merely a matter of subjective personal judgment and not something that can be examined by discrete scientific methods such that diagnoses and treatment in any prescriptive process becomes possible. Moreover, adjustments to social mores and the attendant modifications to psychotherapeutic diagnostics and mental illness classification such as in the case of Homosexuality in the 1970s and Gender Dysphoria more recently support what Szasz regarded as “stigmatizing labels” masquerading as “medical diagnoses.”

Fast forward to 2015 and the talented writer-psychiatrist-blogger pen named Scott Alexander wrote a rebuttal of Caplan’s piece. Unlike most of Alexander’s pieces, it is not very lengthy, but some of the core arguments include highlighting the fuzzy logic between the medical diagnoses Caplan regards as a “budget constraint” (i.e., something that is discrete, materially identifiable, diagnosable, etc.) and the mental illnesses he views as “preferences.” In a number of cases, the proximal causes and underlying symptoms between the two are rather close, and the procedures used to assess, diagnose, and prescribe are not a far departure — except that one is supposed to be taken as apodictic and the other irredeemably infirm.

Alexander further problematizes the entire dichotomy of budget vs. preference constraints as being adequate paradigms for measuring the field of psychotherapy. In fact, he goes even farther, stating that the preference/budget distinction is a “bad way of dealing with anything more complicated than which brand of shampoo to buy.”

Fast forward again to 2020, and Caplan has now published a rebuttal to Alexander’s rebuttal entitled “Scott Alexander on Mental Illness: A Belated Reply.” Breaking the year-long refutation cycle, Alexander has more recently authored his own rebuttal of this rebuttal.

For those interested in this space, I would suggest taking the time to read it. There are more than a few interesting discussions that occur, and unlike most debates, each side makes concessions along the way while admitting readily the weaknesses in their own arguments along with the generally legitimate critiques of the profession and how mental illnesses have been and continue to be handled.

Allah Knows Best.