Motherhood: Diverse Strokes For Different Folks

By gloria hanson

This collection of short stories explaining themes connected to motherhood is neither a rose-colored look or a view through a glass darkly.  The eleven stories highlight the complexity of motherhood through the lens of narratives. The ficticious characters come alive in a moment of time to illustrate the diversity of motherhood journeys.

• Language: English
• Publisher: gloria hanson
• Release date: May 14, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201401313

gloria hanson

Gloria Hanson has been writing poetry and essays since she was in grade school. As a bookworm and curious teenager, she would indulge in flights of fancy during those long after-school hours without television or computer. Following a career in biology and a long job as wife and mother, she returned to graduate school. During her professional life she devoted herself to writing articles in her field of clinical social work. With the departure of children for their own lives, Gloria returned to her early love affair with writing. Now the passion consumes most of her days, resulting in the publication of eight books.

Book preview

Motherhood: A College Class

Good morning, class. My name is Ester Kolb. I am not a mother and don’t plan to be one, but I am going to teach this one-semester class on motherhood where we will focus on maternity during the ages and in different societies. You have copies of the course outline and a list of references, and I expect you will read before each class so that we can have discussions.

We will begin with Motherhood in the United States and then learn about customs and ideas of other countries. What is said here, stays here; and I expect you to turn off your phones, thereby giving us privacy from peering social media. Our confidentiality is of the utmost importance because some of these topics will elicit strong opinions and reactions. If you do not agree with these conditions, I suggest you drop the course and replace it with a more benign class.

Ester looked around the table seating the twelve eager students and recorded their reactions–their wide eyes or lowered heads averting her gaze. They looked shocked at her provocative introduction. She realized that she had their attention and predicted that the size of the class would diminish, leaving only the thick-skinned, tough few.

As expected, eight of the original twelve showed up on the second day of class–three males and five females or so they reported. She looked around the table, looking for any gadget or phone on bulging shirts or blouses and then reminded the students of the rules. One male and two females took out their phones and placed them on the table. Ester uttered a brusque, Thank you and began to address the class.

"Coming from England to ensure religious freedom, the early immigrants landed in areas populated by numerous Native American tribes who had lived off the land and built societies while respecting the earth. Jamestown, Virginia and Plymouth, Massachusetts became the early settlements in the 1600s, and the newcomers soon learned to interact with Native Americans.

Research shows that young girls from the ages of thirteen onward became mothers who nursed their babies until they turned two to three. Their birthing locations were separate places where community female members would help with childbirth, providing the anguished woman with concoctions to speed delivery or ease the pain. In some tribes, women stood, knelt or sat alone to deliver the child who would fall on to a bed of leaves under the mother. Their usual quick recovery led to regular duties as leaders in food distribution and agriculture. Some women became healers since they had learned about the botanicals from their own mothers and grandmothers."

Once the child was born, the mother had the benefit of their community in their upbringing since the young women were pressed to return to the fields and foraging while the older group remained to cook and look over the tribal brood. The older children were also employed as extra field hands while accompanying the mother. This was a low complexity society with defined roles for men and women that varied with the tribe and geographic location.

What is the meaning of a low complexity society? one bright-eyed eager beaver asked.

Have you ever heard of Joseph Tainter and his seminal work The Collapse of Complex Societies? Ester paused, noting that no one nodded affirmatively, He studied societal collapse and wrote about the fragility of civilizations, describing possible factors leading to the disintegration of empires and displacement of the populace. This archaeologist postulated that societies become more complex with specialized roles and institutional structures to solve problems. This was very different than the somewhat egalitarian kinship-based communities we are studying today."

As a society grew more heterogeneous, it became more class-structured and complex, more unequal and difficult to manage. When natural disasters or epidemics pushed the society to the limit, its members faced diminishing returns, leading to an inevitable collapse. The indigenous people of early America had not grown more complicated and unified. The small tribal societies remained apart unless there was a need for some cooperation.

The early settler mothers brought their children into the world with the help of family and midwives who learned on the job or from their mothers. Other than a little alcohol, women had no options for pain relief. Doctors were few, and they guessed at what was best for the woman based on what they heard from their predecessors. Child and maternal deaths were a common occurrence–some caused by doctors who didn’t wash their hands."

How do mothers fit into this kind of paradigm? eager beaver Allison asked. Did their role as mothers stabilize their communities? I guess they didn’t move around much looking for adventure. They kept the ‘home fires burning’ and the population balanced.

Is this view of women’s role among the early settlers and indigenous population a male view? It gave rise to a patriarchal societal description in our history books where women and, especially mothers, were marginalized, the blue-eyed, blond Nancy sitting in the corner asked.

Certainly, this trend of seeing mothers as stabilizers and caretakers, regardless of class, would continue into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Let’s look at the trendline.

Ester continued, But then in 1847, chloroform and ether were used by mostly male physicians to alleviate the pain, allowing childbirth to be less reliant on community, more private.

This was in the white community, right? Black folks did not have those options, Cecily, the only African American asked.

Yes, and they still had to contend with the slave policy of ‘partus requitor ventrum’ where children were born to and took the status of the mothers whether the father was Black or White. This holdover from slave days, in addition to socioeconomic class, limited the opportunities to take advantage of medical advances. Ester resumed, For middle-class and upper-class white women, motherhood came to align with republican values, meaning that they helped promote patriotism, tenets of the state and readiness to sacrifice. Sons could lead the nation and fight in wars while women would rule the domestic sphere.

Yes, and I read that fate and God theoretically determined the role of mothers in the eighteenth century; but socioeconomic conditions determined how many children you would have–seven or eight among slaves and the working class while the white, upper class and middle class would have fewer children,

Daniel, the Benedictine High School Catholic added, The wealthy women could use abstinence, especially if they closed their eyes to their husbands’ mistresses or dalliances, abortifacient herbs like rue, rosemary or even Seneca snake root–or in later years, rubber goods.

"My grandmother told my mother that most of her friends used cotton roots to limit pregnancy, and that abortifacient herbs from their African ancestors were common. Even infanticide was used, especially when women slaves were seen as vehicles to increase production. In some cases, I was told, slaves would have white men’s babies so they wouldn’t be sold.

Cecily, you have brought up an important point about this time in history, the value of oral tradition to pass on knowledge from one generation to another. There was no telephone, library of available books for most Americans.

The eighteen-hundreds witnessed so many progressive views of motherhood, Ester continued, Women from every class began to move towards child rearing issues since they were having fewer children and were being educated. Women writers began to study the issue of motherhood, away from the feminine ideal of subservient wife and nurturing, self-effacing woman.

Just as is the case today, there are so many different and conflicting views of motherhood, Emily began to describe the different types she had read about in feminist literature. For example, some scholars describe a ‘monstrous motherhood’ whose members killed their babies, the wicked stepmother, the spectral mother who became absent or died leaving her child with an intense longing. These were in stark contrast to the Republican motherhood’s ideal to uphold morality, give dignity to women’s work and raise good civic-minded children.

"Let’s