FROM THE ARCHIVES:Noel Browne argued in two articles in 1971 that one of his professions, psychiatry, should help the other, politics, to provide policies which would improve society and the lives of individuals. His final point dealt with motherhood. – JOE JOYCE
ONE OF the great fallacies about women is the belief in a universal mothering instinct. This is not reality. There are women who want and could care for a child and there are those who should never become mothers. The right to be a mother or not should be one of the incontestable natural rights of an individual, such as the right to marry and the right to have a therapeutic abortion.
It is only recently, because of the fact that conception can be safely prevented, that the revolutionary change in the status of womanhood could happen.
One can only be astonished at the naivete of the “Women’s Liberation” leadership, who appear to feel that if they could change the working mother’s role at the kitchen sink for that of the working mother’s repetitious labour at the factory bench, presently being carried out by man, she would in some way have enhanced her position in society. Neither men nor women should have to do this kind of work, either in the home or factory.
But we do have to reckon with the revolutionary fact that a woman may now marry and never conceive a child. She can choose to continue her career outside the home, whether, as in most cases, in the dehumanising work available to the mass of the working class, or exceptionally in work that is worthwhile to society. A completely new assessment of the role of motherhood is imperative.
Up to now, the role of caring for the most delicate mechanism in the world – the human personality – has been entrusted to psychologically and psychiatrically illiterate parents in their tens of thousands. Enough work has been completed, enough is now known about the psycho-dynamics of personality formation to establish the frightening complexity of the whole process. We must be left in no doubt but that it is one of such delicacy that it can only be carried out by relatively mature personalities.
In the face of the mass of emotional unhappiness, distress and disturbed behaviour in the world, it would seem there are relatively few mothers who should ever have become mothers.
It is known that, even with all the talents of the exceptional few, motherhood is necessarily a full-time occupation. It is known that emotional stress during the first nine or 10 years of life can determine and influence for life the individual’s prospect of happiness.
We cannot deny women their new freedom of choice as to what they will do with their married lives. But could we not at least advise the housewife that if she wishes to work outside the home then she must avoid conception? We should seek to reinstate motherhood as a valuable, rewarding and necessarily, full-time career for which only a minority of women are adequately equipped.
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