Whether or not to become a mother is one of the biggest decisions of any woman’s life and one that is often outside her control. Collecting and drawing on a range of female experience, two academics have produced deeply felt personal accounts of motherhood and childlessness respectively, but both have crossed cultures and continents, trawled archives and excavated oral histories to create a chorus of voices that helps them contextualise and make sense of their individual story.
Lorna Gibb’s Childless Voices is painful to read on many levels. Her starting point is her own experience – sadly, all too common – of severe endometriosis that went undiagnosed for two decades; despite such intense pain that she frequently passed out, one male doctor told her dismissively: “Some women just have bad periods.” By the time her condition was properly identified, the damage was too great for her to conceive naturally and Britain’s unjust postcode lottery for NHS treatment meant that she and her husband would not qualify for free IVF (though in the next borough they would have been eligible for two cycles). By her 40s, Gibb had become practised at fending off thoughtless comments about not being a mother, but she writes: “I grew to realise that, even in our progressive, western society, childnessness still carries a stigma.”
Her response is to look outwards, to read and travel and collect stories of other women (and sometimes men) in different cultures, where infertility is “a shame so great that it means exile, suicide, even belief in their own damnation…Their daily reality was beyond my comprehension, but I could at least empathise with their state.” Gibb’s empathy is the motor that drives her research and she is gracious in her acknowledgment that she is fortunate, in relative terms, though at times she allows herself to express a restrained anger at the failures of the medical profession and the casual assumptions of strangers, including the BBC presenter Victoria Derbyshire’s warning that viewers might be upset by a news story about the death of three-year-old Syrian refugee Alan Kurdi “if you are a parent”.
The stories Gibb relates are often heartbreaking and, in some cases, horrific. The women in Ghana exiled to “witch camps”, where they work as free labour for the local chief. The many stories of women in rural India who are abused, beaten or ostracised for failing to bear children and sometimes driven to suicide. The Indian couple who murdered a neighbour’s child in a human sacrifice after they were assured by a tantric that this would bless them with a baby. The women who crawl on their knees to shrines in Greece or Bethlehem, desperate to believe there is still hope and their British counterparts who lose their homes after incurring crippling debt for yet another failed cycle of IVF.
The book is organised in chapters tackling the different reasons for childlessness. Some are involuntary (medical infertility, bereavement, not finding the right partner), some political (racially enforced sterilisation, FGM, China’s one-child policy). Not all are negative; Gibb balances her study with chapters entitled “Those Who Adapt” and “Those Who Choose”, accounts of people who have found alternative definitions of family and community outside biological reproduction.
In any case, family has not always meant the same thing through the generations, as historian Sarah Knott demonstrates in Mother. When Knott became pregnant with her first child, she sought to make sense of her experience by seeking out the forgotten histories of motherhood from different communities as far back as the 16th century. She confines her research to the UK and the US, but the latter in particular yields plenty of variety as she brings in the histories of native women, settlers and those living through slavery and its aftermath. This kind of narrative is necessarily self-selecting. The majority of women in past centuries who left behind written accounts of motherhood in letters and diaries were, by definition, literate and leisured; only relatively recently have historians and sociologists taken an interest in collecting oral histories from working-class or indigenous women.
“It is much harder to bring mothering alive for, say, enslaved women, or for native peoples, or for the working classes of my own past,” Knott acknowledges. But she persists, discovering instead “a hundredweight of fragments” from which she can extrapolate.
“The telling of anecdotes, it is seeming to me, is a peculiarly powerful means of moving between history with a capital H… and the mundane stuff of living with an infant.” The fragmentary nature of these anecdotes becomes an essential element of the book’s fabric; Knott wants in part to capture the distracted, interrupted nature of new motherhood and often describes going about her research while trying to get her son to sleep or feed. This memoir aspect is less engaging than the historical stories, perhaps – paradoxically – because we are so spoilt for contemporary first-person accounts of motherhood. But it provides a useful framework, as Knott bases her chapters around the chronological stages of her baby’s growth, drawing in other women’s accounts to document broader changes in social history.
One of the many revelations of the #MeToo movement was the extent to which women can draw strength and sustenance from hearing and sharing stories of experiences long buried in silence. Both these books are fascinating anthologies that remind us how much there is to learn from a plurality of voices, and the value of discovering common ground in one another’s stories.
• Mother: An Uncoventional History by Sarah Knott is published by Viking (£14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
• Childless Voices by Lorna Gibb is published by Granta (£14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
