Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- New Introduction
- Preface to the Original Edition
- 1 Childbirth and the ‘Position’ of Women
- 2 In the Beginning
- 3 Remember, Pregnancy is a State of Health
- 4 Journey into the Unknown
- 5 The Agony and the Ecstasy
- 6 Mother and Baby
- 7 Learning the Language of the Child
- 8 Menus
- 9 Domestic Politics
- 10 Into a Routine
- 11 Lessons Learnt
- 12 Mothers and Medical People
- Endnote – Being Researched
- Notes and References
- Appendix List of Characters
4 - Journey into the Unknown
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 April 2022
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- New Introduction
- Preface to the Original Edition
- 1 Childbirth and the ‘Position’ of Women
- 2 In the Beginning
- 3 Remember, Pregnancy is a State of Health
- 4 Journey into the Unknown
- 5 The Agony and the Ecstasy
- 6 Mother and Baby
- 7 Learning the Language of the Child
- 8 Menus
- 9 Domestic Politics
- 10 Into a Routine
- 11 Lessons Learnt
- 12 Mothers and Medical People
- Endnote – Being Researched
- Notes and References
- Appendix List of Characters
Summary
PATIENT: Is it too early to ask you if I’ll have an easy birth or a difficult one?
DOCTOR: You’ll have an easy one – everyone has an easy one these days, we make sure they do.
I don't think you can visualise it or imagine it because … it's never happened before, and you can hear about it and read about it, but I don't think you can actually know what it's like until it happens. [Pregnant woman]
Having a first baby is a journey into the unknown in more senses than one. Apart from the birth, which is the central drama in the transition to motherhood, three changes have to be accomplished more or less simultaneously: giving up paid work; taking up a totally new occupation – that of mother; becoming a housewife. For a minority of women the break in paid-work career will be short, and the necessary adjustment to domesticity only temporary. But most women stay at home for several years. Some may not ‘work’ again for a long time.
Unlike other changes of occupation, this transformation of secretary or shop assistant into mother and housewife entails more than small changes in routine: different hours, different work place, different work-mates, more or less money. The language of capitalism – work (paid) versus housework (unpaid) – masks the actual labour of housework and child care. Cultural images of womanhood have the same effect, inflating the grimy floor and the soiled nappy to the status of personal obligations: an extension of feminine hygiene. But while domesticity may be a theme running through women's lives from birth to death, suddenly having no other occupation to call one's own may seriously injure a woman's self-concept, ideas she has cherished for a long while about herself as a person. The housewife-mother's working conditions may pose extra threats to contentment: isolation, monotony, fragmentation, twenty-four-hour-a-day responsibility, lack of money and, for some, poor housing as well. Such occupational hazards of being female may of course have no impact on some women; but in the mind, in anticipation, they hover as grey possibilities on the horizon.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- From Here to Maternity (Reissue)Becoming a Mother, pp. 51 - 75Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2018