It’s a rare book that combines intellect with sensibility, that acknowledges emotion but doesn’t rely on it to make its points. I can’t help admiring Anne Manne for treating motherhood as seriously as it deserves, for delving into every angle—personal and political—with remarkable intelligence and thoroughness. Manne writes about the downside of mothering as well as its joys, its social dimensions as well as its most personal, loving aspects.
If how we shape society through caring for our children is an important subject, arguably the most important, it is also one of the most contentious. Almost everyone’s in favour of motherhood, but who really knows what it means? Certainly not those fortunate enough to have experienced it, for with every new person entering the world it’s a seat-of-the-pants business all the way. Children are different, parents are different, situations vary. But every parent who reads this book will thank Manne for reminding us that being a ‘good-enough’ mother is the best kind to be. We all make mistakes, we all lose it now and then. What matters is the love we give our children, the love that will see them through all the vicissitudes that life has in store for them.
We might not thank Manne so readily for reinforcing the view that only a mother can give this love, or rather, conversely, that without it for lengthy periods of the day a child will be at risk.
I choose my words carefully here. Nowhere in the book does Manne actually say this; in fact, she says the reverse—that the ‘primary carer’ need not be a mother, and that fathers and grandparents and even child-care workers have significant roles to play. She is, in fact, scrupulously fair. Though for infants her preference is for longer parental leave and more generous ‘actively neutral’ allowances, she does support the kind of small-group, parent-controlled care we fought for back in the seventies.
Brave woman that she is, she even revisits the work of John Bowlby, the pioneer of attachment theory and once bête noire to feminists like myself. Yet to me, Manne’s recounting of his story forms one of the book’s most interesting and illuminating chapters. It seems that Bowlby had been misrepresented by both sides—those who in ignorance took hold of his theories to oppose child care and those of us who, knowing they’d been distorted, chose to vilify him nonetheless.
The trouble is that every