MOTHERS, WIVES AND SISTERS

In Sex and Destiny (1984) Germaine Greer claims that Anglo-Saxon societies are peculiarly child-rejecting, contrasting this with the easy presence of children in the social gatherings of Mediterranean societies. Furthermore, motherhood may be a more isolating phenomenon in the anglophone west, where women are expected to be not just the primary carer but the sole carer. Shopping hours, media representations, health, child welfare and education systems impose primary responsibility for childcare on migrant mothers who are used to support from fathers, the school, relatives, neighbours, workplace creches. Even where childcare facilities are available, they are culturally inappropriate 6r offered only as a relief for mothers in paid work (Ganguly 1994). Following the post-Second World War work of writers like Bowlby on maternal deprivation, mothers were told that their failure to be fully available for their children created juvenile delinquency. Thus from the 1950s, even into the 1970s, mothers who returned to work felt guilty. These factors may explain white western feminism's once vociferous rejection of the prison of motherhood. Additionally, it is likely that more western feminists wrote as daughters in the 1970s, some becoming mothers by the 1990s (see Ross 1995:397–8). We will return to the recent celebration of motherhood by maternal feminists.