METAMORPHOSIS OF THE MOTHER

...Specialized professionals such as doctors and psychiatrists, and specialized agencies such as schools, clubs, and television share her burden...

...Full private pleasure, acknowledged, developed, and turned public, will be expressed in a welter of symbolized activities as yet unheard of...

...Now the typical American woman has two or three children instead of six or eight...

...The under-thirties see this as the advent of moral freedom, but always behind new moralities lies inexorable economic change...

...Without modern medicine, they had to work full-time to replenish the species...

...Young men wear their hair long, willingly carry babies on their backs, are antiwar and noncompetitive...

...Since rapid occupational change can be achieved only with the help of ideological lubrication, the old ideology and identity are being scrubbed and new ones are being formed...

...They have been taught too long to be fearful of those other components in themselves which lurk below the surface but which society has defined as "masculine...

...the large corporations which need executives who are "people handlers"-conservers of human resources: all these enterprises must inevitably call more and more upon expertise that has already been defined as the woman's way of winning, by patience and finesse rather than by authority, by love and compromise rather than threat and coercion...

...It is hardly coincidental that women are starting to redefine their identity at precisely that moment in history when population must be drastically controlled and the technology for controlling it is available...

...Sexual integration, that which is woman, will be worked out in nonsexual ways as has ,exual penetration, that which is man...

...Sexually active (impulsive) women were a danger to men and children, a luxury society could not afford...

...The parentchild bond of today is the last of the great noncontractual relationships inherited from the past...

...Over time, and to an extent now unimaginable, seduction will be turned by women from a negative dependence or, at best, a passive pleasure into a positive activity...

...Mothers will lose their rigidly defined occupational role...

...It is an old pattern...

...These features were designated, however, as the "natural" assets of women, inherent in their biology, when in fact they are nothing more than the feelings and values suitable for the occupation of mothering...

...Children are the continuity between the past and the future and it has always been the obligation of women everywhere to protect their children...

...No longer is it argued with the old conviction that women "naturally" love children, and are "naturally" sexually passive, or that the motives of women are less complex than those of men...

...In the noncontraceptive past, when women were defined as uninterested in sex (passive), a basic anxiety was kept dormant: the husband's fear that he, the economic provider of his wife's child, might not be its biological father...

...Women will not only be permitted to please themselves sexually, as men always have, but will be permitted to ibstract their sexuality, publicly, rather than Being forced to keep it concrete and private )ut of economic necessity...

...Men who are inclined toward protectiveness, amiability, and passivity feel unmanly and are covertly enraged by the mothers and wives who push them...

...Women are now accusing men of treating them as "sexual objects...

...Trust will replace fear, reward will replace punishment, and seduction will replace coercion as we become more socially and organizationally interdependent...

...As an occupational group mothers are not different from any other...

...Haunted by a future of nonstop baby production accompanied by an unprecedented rate of survival, we face the necessity that this ancient and honorable occupation fall into some disrepute...

...Encouraged finally to the first, women have yet to be introduced to the latter...

...Nor need she worry where her children's next meal is coming from or whether, with another infant on the way, there will be enough to go around...

...It will also be redefined as a freely chosen occupation and as easily done by men as by women...

...Throughout history, 50 percent of the world's population (all the women) have been assigned the primary occupation of bearing and rearing children...

...fundamentally conservative, committed to stability and reconciliation rather than to thrust and experiment, responsible to others rather than responsible to themselves...

...The traditional view of motherhood has begun to collapse...

...The young American middle- and workingclass mother does not know what it means to be exhausted by childbirth, to fight to stay alive after childbirth, and to be obsessed by the fear of childbirth...

...Though it may seem as if this came about as a result of the women's liberation movement, the underlying causes will have been technological and economic...

...The American mother has plently of household appliances, and other minor technological innovations that function as para-mothers...

...The historic fact is, however, that the majority of women in most parts of the world have always had an occupation entirely dependent on their sexual functioning...

...Just as Protestantism provided the ideological base for full participation in the industrial revolution, the women's liberation movement is providing the ideological base for the shift in personal identity that must underlie the occupational shift of great numbers of former mothers into new occupations of postindustrial society...

...Their children are at once their only occupational task and source of occupational legitimacy...

...This will transform the family...

...The fantasies of the young herald the shape of the future...

...Fewer and fewer women will bear children, the decline continuing until that rock-bottom group of women is isolated, those who enjoy mothering and prefer it to other occupations,—perhaps a residue of 30 percent...

...In an effort to maintain their traditionally useful job while its tasks are being stripped away or parceled out, mothers, particularly in the middle classes, are developing an obsession with their children's internal lives...

...Faced with 474 an outdated occupational group we secretly collude with the emergence of the women's liberation movement, knowing that occupational shifts involve painful transformations in personal identity...

...As de Tocqueville said: "Patiently endured so long as it seemed beyond redress, a grievance comes to appear intolerable once the possibility of removing it crosses men's minds...

...Instead of patience, nurturance, endurance, tenderness—the traditional virtues of women in all historical periods —we now have contraception and penicillin...

...Only recently have the potential hazards of this role taken on an emergency aspect...

...childbirth and child-rearing are not battlegrounds of survival...

...As long as women continue to remain economically dependent on their husbands and continue to have as their major economic commitments the rearing of children, they will continue to have these familiar occupational traits...

...Portnoy's Complaint was a commercial success because Americans recognized the form, if not the specific ethnicity, of mothering as a now abusive occupation...

...In both cases narrow sexual definitions have caused serious internal laceration...

...These "female" traits have been the traits requisite for childrearing...

...Women will continue for some time so to define themselves, no matter what the cost, believing these traits to be rooted in their biology...

...Beyond that, it is expressed in the desire to synthesize in an internal explosion of feeling...

...The job title was mother, just as other occupations were titled engineer, physician, or farmer...

...They bind their children to themselves, usually by means of guilt, for to give them up, even when they are grown, means occupational retirement...

...For centuries such assumptions have been made and lived by, not because they were true, but because they kept the woman at her job by the implicit threat that society would (and should) wreak its awful sanctions upon her if she were to act "unnaturally...

...Coercion and fear of punishment, the man's way of control, becomes increasingly useless as we shift from the dominance of physical power to the dominance of mental power...

...Women failed to emerge earlier from their old occupational role not because they were prevented from doing so by men, but because we lacked the right technologies to support such an emergence...

...Sex ual pleasure in women is expressed only at first in the desire to incorporate and embrace...

...The result of this will be a new texture and richness in the character of both men and women as one more consequence of technological change...

...Ideological change always occurs in response to technological change and permits largescale voluntary occupational change...

...Women's "basic nature" will undergo a metamorphosis...

...Emancipated from their biological and social bondage to this one occupation, women inevitably must be liberated to enjoy the fruits of other occupations—whether they want to be or not...

...Blame may be emotionally satisfying, but it is irrelevant and mistaken...

...FOR HUNDREDS OF YEARS, women were urged to "be themselves"—that is, to provide continuity, to promote understanding, to value the past, to conserve customs and ideals, to be responsible to those around them rather than to be, like men, responsible only to themselves and their principles...

...Yet, some aspects of the new ideology and new identity are being built on the foundations of the old...

...Through) ut history, men have specialized in exploraion, investigation, depth, analysis, and finally mplementation: making things "work...

...Expert at socialization and enticement, by training if not biology, women are fanning out into the service industries, which just happen to need the skills of managing human feelings by persuasion...

...Women, economically dependent on men and physically weak yet charged with being the protectors of children, have been able to gain their way only by influence, persuasion, and the guilt aroused by their powerlessness...

...Just as the executive who has specialized managerial skills can operate in a wide range of organizations, so women are transferring their home-grown skills to other contexts...

...In some parts of the world, it is equally routine for her to die in childbirth—a sexual death...

...Ultimately, the shift now taking place will be equal in scale to that of the 19th century, when the peasants of Europe were transformed into factory workers during the industrial revolution...

...Women have had to become placatory, yielding, and enticing...

...As they search for activities useful in traditional terms, mothers feel as hysterically pushed to the wall as their children...

...Great numbers of young people feel mothered to death, subject to a level of maternal investment that makes them scream for freedom...

...Rock heroes like Mick Jagger, Janis Joplin, and Robert Plant present themselves as androgynous—simultaneously man and woman—and this fantasied, public fusion excites youth with wild possibilities they cannot name...

...Behind our new moralities is our embrace of a new historical era, postindustrialism...

...Children are tied to their parents in precisely the same way as the serf was tied to his master—as a form of "inherited" property, involving specific obligations and privileges...

...Through the widespread exploitation of two new technological advancements, birth control pills and the IUD, and modern medical care which has dramatically increased life expectancy, a change is being forced in the occupational identity of women...

...As new technologies penetrate people's daily lives, satisfying unfulfilled needs, new human wants and expectations erupt and are expressed as new ideologies...

...p NOTEBOOK...

...Men and women will then be free for the first time to combine their highly specialized sexual energies in abstract ways, coupling in the world of work, as they have in more restricted ways and more privately in the past, and uniting the strengths of masculine-like investigation and feminine-like integration to meet the challenges of a revolutionized society...

...Good mothering will be redefined positively, as skill in assisting the child in determining and refining his interior assets, rather than negatively, as protecting him from physical and psychic harm...

...With children, both sexes act almost precisely the same...

...The traditional mother's concerns and skills, which once served a crucial economic function, are now being converted into painful liabilities...

...Young women abjure skirts, act with cool deliberation, are often defiant and independent, and spend little time making marriage traps for men, physical or psychological...

...American women are suddenly shocked to discover that they feel as much exploited as NOTEBOOK protected...

...But when the active, impulsive, synthesizing component in women's sexuality is openly encouraged and women are free to create sexual meaning positively rather than merely passively, they will extend and abstract their natural "technological" talents, based on the full use of their biological equipment, into the real world, revolutionizing work and making it "feel good...

...The pleasureintensive industries—television, publishing, entertainment, advertising, the arts, the social ization industries—schools, colleges, and organizations dealing with marginal groups (the elderly, the poor, the mentally ill) whose clients, like children, need to have their comNOTEBOOK petencies developed...

...Men and women will be unisex in that they each will incorporate traits previously defined as appropriate to the other sex, not only because it will permit each of them to more fully "be themselves," but because complex organizational interdependency, the emphasis on services, economic independence, and industrial involvement in which they both will be involved, will demand it...

...That great class of people, mothers, will be a mere specialty group by the year 2000, and women will be a postindustrial elite...

...He could be sure that she would not pursue her sexual interests because she was defined as having none...

...AS WOMEN RELINQUISH the occupational char acter traits associated with motherhood and economic dependency, new character traits will emerge, associated with uniquely female biological energies that are presently still dor mant...

...Now, with planned contraception, and the physical survival of children assured, women's sexual energies are beginning to be allowed some rein...

...This has been absolutely necessary for maintaining an adequate adult population...

...At the same time that it reassured men of their biological paternity, the forced passivity also reinforced women's occupational commitment as mothers, for it drew on sexual energy to serve nurturing...

...If she is up at night, it is rarely because they are ill...

...Men, of course, are equally caught in specific definitions of sexual character, permitted to have, like women, only half the virtues of their full humanity...

...Like these, the occupation of mother was invested with a special vocabulary, life-style, and particular skills—in fact, an occupational mystique...

...The art of yielding enticement at which females have been permitted to excel will in the future be employed more fully to balance and mediate the coercive strategies and tactics by which men have dominated the world...

...Men with their economic independence (read, power) have been able to rely on force or the threat of it...

...Succeeding waves of technologies liberated first the middle classes, then the working classes, and now the young and the female sex from the Hobbesian natural world in which the strong dominated the weak...

...Tender care has turned into excessive scrutiny...

...The young, unconsciously anticipating this future, have already begun to redefine sexual character and parenthood...

...Sexual passivity, once the mark of the lady, is becoming the mark of the docile and the fearful...

...Customary technical skills continue to be applied—an occupation in search of an object...

...Women are forced to use the NOTEBOOK back stairs to power, gaining their ends by undermining men or by seeking vicarious gratification through their sons, while stigmatizing themselves for being less than feminine...

...Women became—were forced to become—society's shock absorbers and conciliators...

...They have been conditioned to distrust in themselves that which is charming, tender, and compromising...

...Under natural conditions, a woman bears a child every 18 months...

...If she survives childbirth— a major occupational hazard—her life is totally devoted to nurturing and protecting the products of her body...

...But many women's feelings about the past, now released, are those of rage...

...Half-willingly and half-reluctantly, today's mother stands by, ambivalently watching her occupation being relentlessly pared down from a vital 24-hour-a-day trade to a marginal three-hour-a-day job, almost as easily done by someone else...

...The myth of women's sexual passivity has been a crucial ideological support of the mother's role, for this myth advises that a woman has no sexual or agressive needs, only nurturing ones, thereby establishing the preeminence of her children's needs over her own...

...The emphasis of the economy, as concern over scarcity of goods recedes, will be increasingly on services...

...The woman's way, seduction and synthesis, will emerge as a critical human asset in the effective implementation of postindustrial society...

...using seductive tricks to accomplish their goals...

...476 As children become more rare and are increasingly recognized as a national resource, they will become too valuable to be owned by their biological parents, or solely guided by them...

...The mind/machines that provide information and services will soon transcend in power and productivity the commodityproducing muscle/machines of the industrial revolution...

...Without contraception, they had no choice...

...But every occupational group fights for its life in the face of technological obsolescence...