A Counterstory of Mothers in the 1950s-1960s

Marie Porter
School of History, Philosophy, Religion and Classics
The University of Queensland

I think we grew up on Doris Day and too much saccharine from Hollywood and I think you had this idealised, or I did have this idealised view of marriage, and happy families. . . . Yes. Always looking immaculate. House immaculate. Children - always clean, tidy, behaving well, happy. 'Yes, Mummy.' No cross words. Father arriving home on time to a happy household. Unbelievable (Freda). [1]

Mothering in the 1950s is referred to sometimes as the peak of good mothering, and, at other times, as if it was an ordeal for those unfortunate enough to have been mothering then. The assessment depends on the speaker and her/his motives, but the speaker is seldom an informed mother. [2] I have carried out in-depth, unstructured interviews with a group of twenty-four Australian women who became first-time mothers between 1950 and 1965. The emergent categories resulted from a grounded theory analysis of the data. In this paper, I show the expectations put on the interviewees as mothers and contrast these expectations with their stories of the reality of their mothering.

I use Nelson's concept of master narratives to explore the representations of motherhood in the era (Nelson, 2001, pp. 6-7, pp. 106-7). Nelson argues that master narratives are the cultural stories that 'serve as summaries of socially shared understandings' (Nelson, 2001, p. 6). They give us a way to 'make sense of our experience' because they embrace the 'common norms of a society'. Master narratives are oppressive when they tell a group of people 'how' they should live. They influence people in two ways. Firstly, the 'who' stories identify the group chosen to do particular work (Nelson, 2001, p. 137). Secondly, the 'how' stories set out the way that group must do their work if they are to be considered to be 'good' workers. To the extent that master narratives provide prescriptive future paths for the individual, her/his choices are limited and her/his capabilities lessened (Nelson, 2001). Hence master narratives of motherhood intruded on the interviewees' capabilities, because they narrowed choice and formed all young women into future mothers irrespective of individual talents, desires, or contexts.

Nelson argues that it is possible to weave a counterstory from the stories that emerge from a group's own anecdotes, history and narratives (Nelson, 2001, pp. 6-9). ' The counterstory positions itself against a number of master narratives' that misrepresent the group, creating 'an oppressive identity'. To develop a counterstory, the oppressive master narratives are identified and then the counterstory, in its re-telling of the story, reveals the members of the group as 'respectworthy moral agents'. The counterstory can alter the oppressors' perceptions, but can also alter the individual member's perception of her/his self so that the individual members reject the harmful master narratives and see themselves as capable and valuable members of the society (Nelson, 2001, p. 7) .

The master narratives had taught the women their future life paths in the world - marriage and motherhood, in that order. [3] These mothers eventually realised that the master narratives' portrayals of motherhood were unworkable when situated in the reality of mothering. In this paper I present a broad overview of master narratives of motherhood in Australia in the 'long fifties' [4] before I focus on the narrative of mothering that emerged from the analysis of the interviews. This narrative of the reality of mothering forms a counterstory which demonstrates the strength and wisdom developed by the mothers, who were active agents in their own lives. The long mothering journey led to the rejection of an imposed sense of self and culminated in an authentic sense of self.

Master Narratives of Motherhood

Australian master narratives for mothers in the period from the end of the war until the 1970s, and beyond, [5] were influenced by the predominant institutions in the society which put women secondary to men and constrained women's choices. It is not my intention to extrapolate in detail on these forces; other scholars have done this work (Wearing, 1984, Mies, 1986, Pocock, 2003, O'Brien, 1981, Walby, 1990, Rothman, 1994, Figes, 1987, Nelson and Nelson, 1986, Greeley and Durkin, 1984, Hillard, 1991, Jordan, 2000, Ruether, 1974). However, since the ways in which the women were constrained and how they dealt with the constraints in their mothering is at the heart of this paper, I will outline master narratives and institutions that affected mothers and their work.

Master narratives of motherhood represented the mother as a 'stay-at-home' mother who was available to her children twenty-four hours a day, who always attended to them, who was endlessly patient, accommodating, and self-sacrificing (Brown, 1957, Elkin, 1957, pp. 103-5, Harper and Richards, 1979, Lees and Senyard, 1987, Porter, 1994, Richardson, 1993, pp. 38-50, Ryan, 2002, Wearing, 1984, Sheridan, 2002, p. 13) . This mother must be a person who could cope with anything stoically - from years of lost sleep, to continuing to smile and greet her husband enthusiastically, and with her make-up on, when he returned from work. She definitely had to conform to the cultural norms, be fulfilled by motherhood, and have no dreams for herself beyond motherhood. This portrayal of the good mother in the 'long fifties' was common in Western societies, (Forna, 1999, Kitzinger, 1992, Daly and Reddy, 1991).

The master narratives of the 'good' mother were supported by societal institutions.

Johnson, writing on the education system, convincingly argues that young women were encouraged by ideological practices and discourse to develop a 'femininity-under-control' (Johnson, 1993, Roper, 1975). Girls were encouraged to 'choose' careers as housewives and mothers, and exercise their agency in this area (Roper, 1975). Regret at lost educational opportunities was evident in the interviews. For example, Ena had a talent for design and wanted to train as an architect. In her words:

Women in those days were nurses or they were teachers and . . . If you didn't do those things, well, you might have been a shop assistant or - something like that, or you did housework for some other lady, but you didn't really go out and become pharmacists or architects or - judges.

The media - magazines, films, books, radio, music and, for some women in the latter part of the period, television, played its part in making sure girls knew what their future in life should be. [6] Magazines emphasised young women's need to be conscious of their appearance and the need to please (Johnson, 1993). The young woman would be a suitable 'princess' when her 'prince' appeared to carry her off to her fairytale future as a mother. The reality of mothering was hidden by master narratives of romantic love.

Barbara spoke about how media influenced her ideas of motherhood:

Well, mother was always sort of nicely dressed and sweetly speaking and never seemed to be angry or anything like that. The house was always nice. Everybody was wonderful to each other.

Freda, whose words are used as an epigraph for this paper, was similarly influenced. in her pre-marital ideas on marriage and motherhood. The discourse of marriage and motherhood ignored much of the reality, and all the negative aspects.

Obedience was a pervasive discourse in the interviewees' lives. Bronwyn's description of how obedience was expected of her demonstrates how widespread this notion was in her life:

We were just brought up to accept. 'You must be in subjection to the powers that be!' I had preached at me. Like that one?

Helen told how she did not even recognise her conformity to the prescriptive ideas of the socio-cultural order. To her 'the way it was' was the natural path for women. Below she describes her idea of her future:

Oh yes. I was always going to be a mother. - I think in our day, really, you sort of - The thing was you - left school. You went to work. You got married. You had children. Your husband went to work and earned the money and you mothered the children. That - was the way I had been brought up - in a way and thought that was the way things were . . . in the world in those days. And I thought everybody did it that way . . . I didn't look for anything else. I didn't think there was anything else.

Just as girls suffered from gendered master narratives in education, likewise they were affected in the home [7] . Most girls were expected to help their mothers - an expectation not put on their brothers. Laura spoke about her experience as the girl in a family of boys:

I was the girl - in the - family, and my mother was sick and my expectation was that I would . . . help with the washing, the ironing, the cleaning of the house and the cooking, because I happened to be the - girl within - the family. . . . which took up a lot of time in my life as a child.

Another institutional support for the master narratives was that paid work was deemed to be in an interlude between leaving school and marriage (Matthews, 1984, p. 171). [8] This practice was legitimized by the assumption that all women would marry and be at-home wives and mothers. As O'Donnell and Hall note, it was enshrined in law, in many instances, that women resign on marriage (1988, p. 34). Thus the accepted discourse that educating girls was a waste of time and money because they would marry and stay at home where their real career lay was supported in both formal and informal ways (Porter, 1983, p. 250, Johnson, 1989).

The women's voices reveal their formation as future mothers. They agreed that they looked forward to marriage and maternity, although several interviewees were sexually ignorant of their own and male biology. Some did not know how pregnancy was achieved, while many had only hazy ideas of pregnancy and birth. Kara was still perplexed when she was birthing her first child as she indicates in these words, ' At the moment of birth, I didn't understand where the baby was coming out. That's true.'

This juxtaposition of romantic love and ignorance were central elements of the master narratives of motherhood resulting in strong contradictions between master narratives and lived experiences. It would be reasonable to expect that young women who were destined to be mothers would be given knowledge of the functioning of their bodies. The young women were usually only told, in an imprecise way, what not to do in any relationships with the opposite sex (Johnson, 1993, pp. 84-6, Auchmuty, 1979, Quartly, 1997, Sheridan, 2002, p. 34). The only young women who had any real knowledge of mothering were those who had practical experiences in their own families.

The convergence of the various master narratives and the practices and discourses embedded in them were there at the beginning of the motherhood journeys. Gilbert and Taylor argue that no subject is perfectly formed by the context and its ideologies. There are always areas of oppositions, resistances and silences which create some diversity in identity formation (1991). This diversity emerged in the interviewees' stories, and points to the development of individual agency that served to confirm or to challenge the master narratives.

The aspect of motherhood that emerged from the women's stories was their agency in the work they did for their children. They spoke about their many tasks, their aims, their nurturing, the support they received, their joys, sorrows, and satisfactions, their management skills, how they changed from young innocent women to capable mothers. They spoke about the power they had to be active agents, what empowered them and what constrained their agency. This I have conceptualised as 'motherwork'.

I use 'motherwork' as an alternative word for mothering because it signifies that mothering is work (O'Reilly, 2004, pp. 27-30). Although feminists have written about mothering as work and highlighted how mothering requires and develops skills, it is not recognised as work in any way that counts in the Western social/economic system (Cowan, 1983, DeVault, 1991, Home, 2004, Maher, 2004, Oakley, 1976, Olson, 1981, Pocock, 2003, Gieve, 1987). [9]

Motherwork, as it is used in this paper, refers to all the unpaid work done by the mothers in the years they were actively mothering. Mothers talked about studying nutrition so the children would be healthy. They viewed sewing and cleaning in the same manner. They shopped, baked, sewed, comforted, nursed, played, listened, advised, explained, planned, refereed, budgeted, volunteered for children's clubs, supported, and did any other work that they considered necessary for the good of their children. [10] In doing their motherwork with its varied components, the mothers developed diverse and valuable skills, not the least of which was the ability to handle responsibility, to self motivate, to plan and work autonomously.

The women's recollections cover many years of motherwork - work that took place in a relationship between each mother and each of her children. Within this relationship both mother and child were transformed - the child into an independent adult and the mother into a discursively aware, capable woman.

These women began their motherhood drawing on their everyday knowledge and seeking support and/or knowledge when they needed it. Through the relationships with their children and by/through their own agency, they became skilled agentic motherworkers who took responsibility for their work, and responded to problems and limitations. Through their own efforts they became aware, self-motivating, responsible, independent agents; through their own transformation, they developed a counterstory that was revealed not only in their telling of their stories but in the discursive/reflexive practices they recounted.

The mothers I interviewed spoke openly and honestly in articulating the stories of their motherwork. Their stories demonstrated their movement from trying to be the 'ideal' mother depicted in master narratives to becoming an 'authentic' mother. A n interesting counterstory has emerged, the key elements of which can be listed as follows:

1. The romanticised portrayals of marriage and motherhood were false. Prince Charming was not available, and the women worked looking after their children. Accompanying the romantic images was ig nora nce of the reality of marriage and the sheer physicality of becoming a mother, leaving the young women vulnerable.

2. The mothers did not know how to do their motherwork instinctively. They needed support. The new mother's own mother, other family members, or the Clinic were the main sources of support. Motherwork was not easy.

3. Motherwork was important and required learning many new skills. The women spoke about their motherwork as an active state - the acquisition of agentic skills. They understood the low social value put on mothers and their work, but still valued their own work highly.

4. Mothers and their motherwork were affected by the context in which the motherwork and the mother-child relationship were embedded.

The romanticised portrayal of marriage to the Prince Charming of the fairytales, who would sweep the young woman off her feet to love and care for her, was far from reality (Aitkin, 2005, p.127). One mother's husband was her torturer rather than her Prince, beating her regularly. All the financial accounts and possessions were in his name and he taunted her about her and her children's dependence - a practice that sapped her confidence:

I think if you get told often enough, you can go but you will go with nothing. 'Take the kids, or take the brats and go.' That you'll go with nothing. 'The house is mine. Car's mine. The bank account's mine.' You start to believe it after a while that there is no one who can help you.

Although this example is extreme rather than representative, the reality of marriage and early motherhood overrode romanticised ideas for all of the women.

The lack of knowledge of marital intimacy and the processes of becoming a mother resulted in many upsetting experiences for the women. Hannah recalled her innocence:

I didn't even have any - any knowledge of sex, when I got married. (Both laugh.) That came as a bit of a shock to start with.

The ordeals some of the women went through in pregnancy and childbirth were horrific. Julie's shock, innocence, fear, isolation, obedience, and objectification by the hospital staff are all clearly present in her words:

When the time came to go to hospital, that was frightening. I didn't know what was happening. Didn't have a clue . . . they just stuck me in . . . this old operating theatre on my own. Had this huge dome in the ceiling. . . . I just spent all day just staring up at this ceiling. . . . My husband. They wouldn't let him in. My mother tried to get in and they wouldn't let her in which -. I just felt so alone. . . . I went into labour and I was terrified . . . it was - shocking. I didn't know - It was as if it was all going on outside of my body. It wasn't - Even though you're going through the pain, it was like it was happening to someone else.

Julie described her first experience of birthing as 'something out of Florence Nightingale'. In reality she birthed her first child in a well-known hospital in Sydney in 1960. Unfortunately, many interviewees would agree with Julie. Such descriptions of birthing were in the majority.

The mothers, aware in subsequent births, took control of the process as much as possible. Freda, who stated that her first birth was the loneliest time of her life, acted decisively with her following births:

And - by the second time I knew that - that the bearing down meant that this baby was coming very quickly and - a nurse put her hand on my pelvis to try to stop the process and I said - I was forceful enough to say, 'Take your hand away and deliver this baby please.'. . . And with - Karla, . . . I was actually - directing the traffic. That's right. Yes. Confident enough to say, 'Forget about ringing the doctor. You're not going to have time. Just deliver this baby, please.'

Birthing was followed by the mother's return home with responsibility for this little person. The mothers had to change from obedient women to competent mothers. This initial stage of motherwork was a time of high vulnerability. While the mothers usually lacked knowledge and experience, none of them lacked initiative or the ability to work. Dot expressed the feelings of the majority of interviewees:

I was scared. There was no two ways about it. Not knowing. . . . I was scared stiff . . . I was in this house with this little baby, and I thought, 'My God, what am I going to do with her?'

The mothers soon learned that motherwork was not easy. It was time-consuming and required the women to develop new skills, understanding, patience, and knowledge rapidly. The ability to nurture , which instinct was supposed to provide, had to be learned. Diane's description of her consternation on discovering her baby was an individual with his own mind is both representative and amusing in hindsight:

But, you know, these little (laughing) beings, have got a mind of their own. . . . They don't do what you want them to do. Even from - when you come home from hospital and you think, 'Well, you've been fed kid, go to sleep.' And no, (laughing), 'I've got this pain. You've got to do something about it.' 'Well, why don't you burp?' (Both laugh.) But - and that's the shock because . . . You think you know it all. . . . I don't think there's a person alive that hasn't looked at somebody and thought, 'Oh, if that was my kid.' And then you think, 'It is my kid. I wish I could give it away.'

Mothers spoke of how significant events in motherwork, such as a life-threatening illness, or a serious accident, required them to develop new skills. For example, Kara explained her transformation and development of agentic skills as a result of her daughter's illness:

The other defining moment - was when I had my second child, who was a girl. And I desperately wanted a girl. . . . And then 8 weeks later she was struck with acute viral meningitis. She was paralysed, unconscious, stiff like they go with their heads onto their backbone. . . . And the doctor told me that she would die. And to prepare myself. . . . And her next few weeks were just dreadful torture. And he said, 'If she does survive, she'll be subnormal.' . . . And I recognised how much the children meant to me. And I felt that was the moment that I became - a woman - and not a girl. . . . I was always a happy, . . . blonde, blue eyed, cooy little thing. - A . . . sort of girl. . . And from that time I was really quite a serious person. . . . I changed from that moment. I just realised what the family was all about. Till then I was just playing at house, really.

Kara faced an extreme event that required her to grow emotionally, in order to endure the life or death situation. Developing new skills to overcome the disabilities became a persistent process in Kara's motherwork for the following four years.

Daily, weekly, monthly, or over the life development of each child, the mothers worked, observed, thought, discussed with peers, judged, and adapted when necessary. Ena's words highlight the extent of the responsibility they bore:

Everything about the children's welfare, I would say, I felt responsible for - feeding them properly, for clothing them properly, for seeing they were properly educated, for seeing that they were protected, for seeing that they were picked up from school, for seeing that they didn't get sick, for seeing that they got all their - injections and that they got to the dentist and - Yeah, responsible for everything about them, I guess.

The women were, and are, aware that their motherwork was, and is, taken for granted, devalued, and their skills unrecognized. These remarks were made by Laura, but represent the mothers' views in general:

- Society doesn't give credit for the skills that that mother has . . . You've - learnt all these skills . . . you have to go out into the workforce and if you've been a mother who has made your life to be with your children . . . You're unemployable because you haven't got any skills that society is saying we can use. And I think that's sad.

The lack of recognition of the agentic skills, the knowledge, and the wisdom that mothers developed in their motherwork, was/is a source of annoyance to many interviewees. Frances, the mother of nine, noted that when she thought she may return to paid work, she found she was treated as if she were a late teenager with no experience. She said that the counselors 'just sort of nullify[ied] the last 25 years.'

Despite the strong realization that motherwork was and is devalued in society, the interviewees 'know' that society is wrong. All the interviewees valued their work; indeed, twenty-two interviewees spoke about mothering as extremely important, and for some, it was the most important aspect of life. Such comments as Cath's, 'I think it's 100% over everything. Mothering' join with Dot's measure of the importance of mothering, 'Mothers make the world go round, I'm telling you' and Ingrid's assessment 'Most important job! Most important . . . '

The context in which the mother was embedded was important because it was the chief source of constraint and empowerment. The mothers adapted as creatively as possible to situations that were detrimental to their children or themselves. Those mothers who were pressured because of a large family usually followed a routine:

It was just routine - like of a morning, the kids made their beds, even if they didn't make them properly, they made their beds and - got dressed and had breakfast before - they went to school. (Kate).

Even those mothers whose contexts were too oppressive to be overcome did not allow themselves to act like victims. For example, Ida resisted the beatings she endured from her drunken husband in several ways. To hide was one of the ways:

So, my daughter had a bedroom, the second biggest bedroom and her wardrobe was on a corner not flush to the wall, and many, many's the night I've slept behind that wardrobe with a pillow, just sort of sitting upright all night and I'd have to get up and go to work next morning

Strong evidence for the existence of the counterstory has emerged from the interviewees' own stories. Despite recognizing that motherwork was/is ignored as work, these mothers acknowledged it and its transformative nature. They spoke about the knowledge they had gained, their increasing capability to be flexible, to listen and watch with a heightened awareness of both the spoken and the unspoken body language of the 'other' individual.

The mothers' accounts of their work and ideas contradict any belief that mothering was, or is, an instinct; that mothers did not work; that they were unskilled and unqualified for any paid work. The counterstory is that these women were self-motivated, independent, and capable workers who were practiced in self-evaluation, flexibility, mediation, rapid responses, and the ability to understand and work within difficult situations and with people who could be unreasonable. The strength of the interviewees' self-confidence can be seen in their questioning and discarding the harmful master narratives in favour of their own stories.

These women, undoubtedly, were oppressed as a social group and oppressed to different degrees as individuals, but none of them acted as victims. What the mothers did, how and what they achieved, highlights their strength and determination and gives prominence to the agency they did have. T he women responded to oppression by exercising power, even though that power may have been limited. There are abundant examples of mothers who have responded as active agents in spite of the limitations that resulted from the power exercised over them (Yun, 2005, Newman, 2005, Thacker, 2005, Short, 2005) .

This study attests to the importance for women to undertake research for and about mothers; the need to record women's views of history and, where master narratives that purport to tell the stories of our lives are erroneous, to tell a counterstory based in the reality we experience. There are capacities and opportunities for power in motherwork. These may be unacknowledged, but they cannot be denied. I conclude with Gabriella's words:

But we should be speaking out more and we should be listened to - we obviously have been a little bit complacent about it all and that's why we're in the situation we're in where we're not - given this - given the - What's the word I'm looking for?

Recognition ?

Recognition of motherhood.

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[1] All names have been changed to protect the interviewees' identities.

[2] Those who laud mothering in the 1950s are frequently politicians, or older people. The critics are usually the 1970s feminists who validly focused on the oppression of women in the era. The accounts of mothering experiences in the era are personal autobiographies.

[3] Unmarried mothers were treated as 'bad' women who obviously were sexually active outside of marriage. They had disgraced themselves and their families. These mothers were strongly advised to give their babies up for adoption.

[4] Hillard 1997, refers to the fifties as the 'long fifties' a period that began with the end of the Second World War and ended around 1965.

[5] The depiction of 'the ideal mother' of the 1950s/60s was still evident in representations of Australian motherhood that emerged from research in the 1970s. See Harper and Richards, 1979, Wearing, 1984.

[6] Television was introduced into Australia in 1956, but was not widely available for some years after that date.

[7] Oeser and Emery, 1954, found that girls were more involved with household duties than boys..Eighteen years later the Patterson Report, 1972, noted that mothers saw their daughters as future mothers Patterson, G. (1972) Sydney.

[8] The young woman was paid, by law, as an inferior worker - a percentage the male wage - even if she did the same work as a young man.

[9] See also 'Mothering and Work/Mothering as Work,' Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering, 6/2, Fall/Winter, 2004.

[10] This list of tasks is not exhaustive.