Australian Mothering: Historical and Sociological Perspectives

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Australian Mothering: Historical and Sociological Perspectives, 2019

Theoretical overview of motherhood studies in Australia with discussion of relationship between Australia and international scholarship.

Australian Mothering in Historical and Contemporary Perspective Symposium

Far from being a matter of individual choice, motherhood and mothering are shaped by larger systemic, social and historic forces. In this paper I suggest that Child and family health nurses (CaFHNs) can more effectively support women and their families through a recognition and acknowledgement of these forces. The contemporary liberal feminist focus on birth as a space of self-actualisation and empowerment within the context of an individualized, heteronormative, nuclear family, masks the ways in which maternity has been and continues to be a site of scrutiny and regulation. Institutions and nurses that work within them have been complicit in supporting some groups of people to reproduce (pronatalism) while discouraging or coercing others from doing so (antinatalism). Child and family health nurses (CaFHNs) have a pivotal role to play in the wellbeing of families and communities, but they are also implicated in the state’s management of populations. In this article I propose that moving nursing practice away from the individual to instead consider the historical, social and systemic can support CaFHNs to provide more responsive and reflexive care for women and their families. In turn such a manoevre can provide CaFHNs with the tools to better critique their complicity with institutional imperatives and ‘victim blaming’.

The Royal Commission into Human Relationships was an initiative of the Whitlam government, instigated in 1974 to investigate ‘the family, social, educational, legal and sexual aspects of male and female relationships’, with particular attention to the concept of ‘responsible parenthood’. The commission heard evidence from thousands of Australians on a broad range of topics, and given the Royal Commission’s origins in the 1973 Federal Parliamentary debate over abortion, it is perhaps unsurprising that motherhood featured so prominently in submissions presented to the Commission. In this article I argue that mothers’ submissions to the Royal Commission on Human Relationships reveal the ways that social and cultural meanings of motherhood were being contested in 1970s Australia. Rather than making claims for rights in the established language of maternal citizenship, many women deployed their private experiences of mothering to argue that the state should facilitate their access to both paid employment and time away from mothering. These mothers argued for equal citizenship rights, challenging the reproductive compact that had long been central to maternal citizenship. The submissions reveal the ways that mothers (and their critics) drew upon both new and old meanings of motherhood to articulate new cultural and political possibilities for motherhood and citizenship in 1970s Australia.

2015

Mothers of today have available to them an unprecedented quantity and variety of information concerning the process of conceiving, bearing, birthing and raising a child. Yet it is only a little more than half a century ago that mothers were firmly convinced of the authority of maternal instinct. From experiential knowledge shared verbally amongst female relatives and friends, to a profusion of 'expert' information accessible virtually and instantaneously, the ways women learn about mothering have shifted dramatically over the past 70 years. Drawing upon oral history interviews and historical child-rearing material, this article will illuminate shifts in the source, content and transmission of advice to Australian mothers since 1945.

حسن ميّ النوراني - في الله والنبي والوجود

كتبت موضوعات الكتاب بين عامي 1996-2015

2016