With perspectives like this one from Dalla Costa and James, the maternal instinct, which today is understood in practical terms as the sort of passionate and exaggerated self-sacrifice--in the name of Motherly Love--to all the demands of child-rearing and domestic labor, is much easier to reject as a social construct, one just waiting to be exploited in the late 18th century by Rousseau and his mommy-complex.
But if it's simple to snub the concept in theory, it becomes much harder to do in practice. Or, at least, I imagine it will be once I give birth. My fear is not that the baby will be some sort of parasite, sucking away at my time and soul till I'm left with little of my former self. Rather, I'm scared the loss of self will come entirely from within: What if I start taking so much pleasure in caring for another that it becomes a convenient excuse to drop out of life? Let go of ambitions, interests, and the social obligations through which these are enacted? Willfully disappear behind diapers and nursing to avoid that other niggling duty of modern existence known as self-realization?
Though the potential for a biological component of the maternal instinct is derided by Badinter in The Conflict as downright offensive to the human race, pregnancy alone has been proof enough that there's reason to fear the physiological.
Instead of becoming the moody nightmare I always imagined I'd be as a pregnant person, I've been almost creepily blissed out for most of the past nine months--much jollier, less impatient, more gregarious than I am in real life. Part of this is obviously social--people smile at pregnant ladies just for being pregnant--but mainly it's hormonal. What if through some sick biological coup the sort of Goddess Feminism I've always sneered at will be my new ideological fate?
Over the past few months I've spent far too much time staring in wonder at the basketball that is my stomach. I'm terrified that the next step, once I have my kid, will be to adopt some sort of worldview centered on the holiness of reproduction: through no effort other than having given birth, I'll start to profess to loving all creatures--or worse, all humans--great and small, good and vile. I'll start thinking of everyone as the child of some mother, somewhere. In Badinter's eyes, the sanctification of the maternal role, and the self-sacrifice it stealthily demands, is externally imposed, but what if it also comes from within?
When I call this kind of mother a happy mommy-slave I mean it literally--as an unwaged laborer. If we consider sacrifice in its least spiritual, most empirical form, it is, quite simply, work. So how much work--how much labor --is natural to the maternal role and how much is socially imposed?
The media surrounding the Mommy Wars have only danced around the economic issues that are involved, and usually just to point out that the ideological choices of motherhood--home versus workplace, breast versus bottle, cloth versus disposable--are the privilege of the elite. Which is to say that ideology itself is only for rich people, with everyone else just worried about getting by. The exclusion of the question of labor from the debate surrounding motherhood has helped turn feminism in America into a matter of freedom of consumption, as frivolous as any other luxury market where individuality and personhood are expressed through purchasing power. We might as well be talking about what kind of handbag to buy.
This hasn't always been the case. The economics of women's work--reproductive and domestic, two kinds of labor existing outside of the modern workplace--once occupied a much greater place in feminist discourse. Central to James and Dalla Costa's work, for example, is their rejection of the capitalist distinction between productive and unproductive labor as falling easily down gender lines. They successfully debunk the notion that man's work in the factory is productive in that it contributes to capital, while woman's work is merely re-productive, both in that it is procreative and that it re-creates, every day, through domestic labor, the series of tasks necessary to win the fight against atrophy and decline--cooking, cleaning, the works--without actually contributing to the production of capital.
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