TODAY’S working mother model is deeply embedded in human nature. Our hunter-gatherer maternal ancestors may not have had briefcases or paychecks, but they also left their infants and young children in the care of others. Human child-rearing has always been cooperative. The woman who remains home with her children is doing something unnatural.

These are the key ideas in a new book, Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, according to Melvin Konner’s recent review in The New York Review of Books. Konner, the Harvard-educated pop anthropologist, writes:

[T]he working mother has always been a central part of the human scene, and the classic stay-at-home mom of 1950s television may have been limited to Western cultures in that era. Women gathered, gardened, farmed, fished, built huts, made clothing and other necessities, even hunted in some cultures, in addition to caring for children and performing other domestic duties. Mothers often could not discharge these duties without help. Our species is not unique in caring for offspring cooperatively, but our great ape cousins don’t do it, and we take it to extraordinary levels.

Konner’s review contains other staples of feminist anthrolopology. Men weren’t necessarily the earliest inventors. Women made sticks and infant slings but they were destroyed and these tools cannot be studied. Also, men were not dominant in hunter-gatherer societies. Decisions were made by “consensus,” but it was the views of women that were the most important.

The real focus of Konner’s piece, however, is the point that full-time motherhood is not natural. The recent phenomenon of latchkey children confirms this because it has not produced any damaging effects:

The study of [mother-child] attachment coincided with second-wave feminism, the large-scale reentry of women into the labor force of industrial countries, and the rise of day care as a practical solution for working women with ambition or with no other choice. Some psychologists in this period vigorously defended not only highly intensive mothering but the traditional nuclear family as well. The predicted dire consequences of our recent departures from those traditions have not so far materialized.

That final line is worth repeating:

The predicted dire consequences of our recent departures from those traditions have not so far materialized.

Illegitimacy, divorce, disastrously low fertility, juvenile crime, teen depression, sexual abuse of children, childhood obesity, behavioral problems in schools, widespread incivility – none of the enormous increases in these social pathologies warrant Konner’s concern. The suicide rate for girls from age 10 to 14 rose 27 percent between 1979 and 1988, years after the number of working mothers skyrocketed. It increased 71 percent for boys. This apparently does not qualify as a dire consequence. But then what would? If increased homicide, suicide and the failure to reproduce don’t qualify, what could?

It is extremely important, indeed crucial, that liberals destroy the ideal of traditional motherhood and depict it as historic fantasy. (This is a pet project of men’s rights activists as well.) The so-called “mommy wars” absorb the attention of high-powered academics such as Konner and Hrdy for a very good reason. They studiously argue this point that women “always worked” in the hope of confusing their audience into thinking that women always willingly left the physical presence of their children.  The current ideal of motherhood as beautiful hobby requires immense intellectual resources to maintain.All social ideals require immense intellectual resources to maintain. And the orthodoxy exemplified by Konner’s review remains essentially unchallenged.

But it depends on mythology. Never before the modern era did women in large numbers leave the physical company of their children and receive praise and encouragement for doing so. Previously, children were not raised by strangers or in institutions except in circumstances considered unfortunate. Our current model is an unprecedented experiment.

It is also true and obvious that children have been cared for cooperatively as well as by mothers. But this cooperative child care occurred in familial and tribal settings. The phenomenon of women raising their children alone without a network of other women raising their children is highly unnatural. But it is the glorification of the absentee mother that has caused the strange, solitary status of the full-time mother today. That glorification requires the rewriting of history – and prehistory.

                                                         — Comments —

Alan M. writes:

As I was reading this article, I was brought back to some of my earliest memories with my parents in the late 60s. We were living in Europe then and the Soviet threat loomed large. I remember hearing from my parents how children in the Communist countries were raised by the state and women worked from very early after childbirth. I mostly remember my emotional reaction which was one of horror and disgust that such a system could ever do that to children. As a 4- or 5-year old, I could not imagine how evil they would be to take me away from home and my mother for the entire day.

Now, here we are 40 years later, and most of our society shuttles off kids willingly to day care for the freedom of our women so they can work and express themselves.

This makes me think back to the stories about the goals for Communism in the West having been largely accomplished.

Lydia Sherman writes:

I was having a discussion with a friend from a former Communist country, and mentioned that the original feminist movement, from what I’ve read, and seen in photographs, was a protest against the “demon alcohol” which caused women and children to end up in poverty. It sought to prevent men from spending their paycheck in the tavern on the way home from work, and create dry county laws in as many states as possible. Her response was:

“You know, the original feminist movement was exactly the same as now but to get popular support they persuaded women they just wanted to keep men from getting drunk: its an old Marxist tactic.”

My opinion is that a feminist movement or liberation movement was never, ever needed. Women can have the kind of freedom they want, and indeed, the Bible teaches women to acquire dignity through marriage, home and family, and through the character qualities of goodness and gentleness. Women have more power in the world through the teaching of children and the guiding of the home.

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