The Hidden Work of the Mother
October 1, 2024
Mother Feeding Child, Mary Cassatt
FROM “Forced Labor: What’s Wrong with Balancing Work and Family” by Brian C. Robertson (Spence Publishing, 2002):
“The satisfactions of motherhood have little to do with ego-gratification or the pleasure derived from seeing the immediate results of one’s toil; they are, rather, the satisfactions of complete self-giving to a totally dependent creature. A society that measures success exclusively in terms of material or professional attainment is unlikely to accord much status to the hidden work of the mother in the home. More likely to value the mother’s unique contributions is a culture whose ideal is self-giving, be it the sometimes monotonous, consistent toil of the breadwinner borne for the sake of the family or the same toil borne at home for the same reason. It is not mere coincidence that a society in which the predominant view of work was Catherine Beecher’s “self-sacrificing labor of the stronger and wiser members [of the family] to raise the weaker and more ignorant to equal advantages” venerated the mother at home, while a society that views work as a means of self-aggrandizement holds her in contempt.
“A good mother must have total devotion to her work, but not because of the prospect of payback in the form of immediate results or pecuniary reward. The accomplishments of a day’s work of mothering are impossible to quantify and will only manifest themselves, possibly, in the distant future. The truth that civilization itself depends on such intangibles only underscores the fact that the goals involved in the work of parenting are much more remote and less susceptible to analysis based on results than are the market-oriented goals of professional or wage work. The product of a mother’s work is not a project or a paper, but a person, with his or her own personality, temperament, and free will. Good parenting requires a type of patience and long-suffering perseverance that can be especially difficult for someone who has become accustomed to the quick, tangible ways of measuring success afforded by the marketplace. When one’s task is the formation of character and intellect, success only becomes apparent years down the line, if then. Opposing influences (such as mass media and a child’s peers) can, and often do, work against parental influence, and parents can often have the feeling of “going it alone” or, worse, that all their work has been in vain. With the unprecedented power of the media and popular culture, parents may be more tempted than ever to despair of the possibility of control over the product of their work—their children.
