The Biblical Orientation of Women and Motherhood | Mary Harrington

I spent a lot of time teaching at the University of Toronto and at Harvard and then more publicly looking at the core stories that motivate Humanity. The core story is a hero myth, and the hero goes off into the adventure of his or her life, confronts the dragon, garners the treasure, and brings it back to the community and distributes it. Okay, but in classic mythology, the heroes are virtually always men. So the women in my classes always had a problem with that. If the hero myth is the central story of humanity, well, what does that mean for women?

Well, in Christianity, Christ is the savior of women and men, and Christ's passion story is an extreme variant of the hero myth. There's a notion at the bottom of our culture that the pathway to redemption for women is the adoption of a heroic mode of being, you know, in the face of life's difficulties and problems. But there's more. The thing about women is that their mythological orientation, I think, is multi-dimensional and complex.

So there are a couple of other mythological variants that stack up beside the hero myth for women. There's "Beauty and the Beast," where a woman finds a man who might otherwise be somewhat monstrous and predatory but maybe is oriented positively in his fundamental nature, and she tames him. That's a story of how women find a man who's sexually attractive and also productive, responsible, and useful. That is the most common female pornographic fantasy by orders of magnitude—the "Beauty and the Beast" variant.

Then there's also the image of women that's put forward, let's say in Christianity, where you don't have an individual woman; you have woman and infant as a unit. Now, I would perhaps hesitate to suggest that part of the reason that you felt isolated when you were pushing your pram around a small English town is because in our society— I saw the same thing with my wife, by the way, when she had little kids—our society does not hold sacred the image of woman and infant as the fundamental unit of female identity.

Now, you know, women's nervous systems too, as far as I can tell, are calibrated not for their own happiness but for the joint success of woman plus infant. Women are more agreeable, which means they're more empathic and more interested in people, and they're higher in negative emotion, which means they're a pretty good alarm system. Now, that increase in negative emotion makes them susceptible to depression and anxiety, and that increase in agreeableness makes them susceptible to exploitation by psychopathic men. But it's very much of benefit to their infants because you have to be agreeable to take care of an infant, and you have to be an alarm system to be sensitive enough to detect all the threats in the environment that might be said to threaten a vulnerable infant.

So, okay, that should move us into the discussion of the third part of your book. It's like this is a way of conceptualizing something approximating female identity that will actually work for females.

Possibly taking a very short detour from the book— I mean, on the question of why I felt isolated pushing a baby around small-town Britain, actually the explanation for that was very simple. Most of my peers had had a year's maternity leave, which, by the way, is pretty good compared to how things are for most American women. In Britain, you have a statutory six months maternity leave; everybody gets that paid maternity leave. Then you can take a further six months unpaid, and most women take the full year, which is a staggering amount of maternity leave compared to the situation in America.

I believe something like one in three mothers is back at work pretty more or less before she's even stopped bleeding after having a baby—which to me is frankly just barbarous. But, leaving that aside, how we got to a point where most women with dependent children work—it's around 75% in the United Kingdom—is a long story in which the feminism of freedom is intricately bound up. As I'm sure you're aware, the reason I felt lonely pushing a baby around a small town was very straightforwardly there was no one to talk to because most women were at work.

And really, that I think was the first article I ever wrote. When I first started to write in public, it was a reflection on the slow draining away and the slow whittling away of civil society which had taken place as a consequence of most women embracing paid work. To be clear, this has a great many positive consequences but also has had this effect that really it’s only retirees and a dwindling proportion of those public-spirited Boomers who are left who are really holding my small town up in terms of having a functioning social fabric, full stop.

You know, I clung to those older women who organized baby groups and what have you. Gradually, I found a social life, and life began to feel more normal again. But, yeah, I mean, they're very, very straightforwardly the reason I felt lonely was because I was wanting to talk to folks, and this is a coordination problem, as I'm sure you can see. If there’s nobody to talk to, the only way for there to be more people to talk to is for there to be more people. Nobody wants to be a stay-at-home mom because there's nobody to talk to, so it's kind of a vicious circle.

But just secondly, definitely, on the question of heroes’ journeys for women, I actually wrote—not in the book, but elsewhere—I wrote a short essay about this a couple of years ago because, in my observation, there is a hero's journey for women. It just doesn't follow the same track as the male one. In fact, it has three parts which correspond to a very ancient archetype for what a woman is—a very ancient female archetype—which is the maiden, the mother, and the matriarch.

The triple goddess is a figure out of some pagan traditions, and these are the three faces of the same goddess, as it were. But they take on different aspects at different parts of a woman's life. Anecdotally, to me, it stacks pretty closely with what a majority of normal women’s lives look like. You know, as the maiden, you're free; you have a sort of warrior aspect, and perhaps that's the point where you're pursuing ambitious professional projects.

The mother is more oriented towards home and the domestic sphere and, you know, probably just bluntly doesn’t care about work as much. I know a great many very high-powered maidens who reached motherhood perhaps in their early 30s and then just found they didn’t care about the deadlines and the spreadsheets anymore. I mean, this anecdotal; I’m sure anecdotally that's pretty common.

But then later on—and this was something that I found very interesting when I did a psychotherapy training in the late '90s and early '00s—was just how many of the trainees on that course were women in their late 50s and 60s. So these were women who, for the most part, already had young adult children. Their kids had gone off to university or were soon to leave for university. They'd pretty much done the motherhood arc; they’d done the mother part of that and were moving into a new phase of life. They were moving into what I think of as the matriarch space.

I think the classic three-part goddess term for this is "Crone," but, I mean, they were some way from cronehood. These were lively, vital, energetic, public-spirited women who had some life experience. They had a lot of connections; they had a rich social life; they’d met lots of people. They were ready to give something back.

In my observation, there are a huge number of women who reach the end of the mother arc—the mother part of that hero's journey—and then embrace some, perhaps, and will then retrain. So they’ll have three careers: they might be very professional in their 20s, be a bit more part-time maybe 30 to 50, and then they’ll retrain and do something like psychotherapy or they'll do ministry or they'll do spiritual counseling, or they'll do some other way to become involved in the community. They'll want to do something public-spirited and give back.

And those women are a hugely rich force for deepening reflection in the culture, for public service, for all manner of incredibly positive—usually quite self-facing, but incredibly positive, constructive, and lifegiving—contribution to the social fabric. And they’re incredibly marginalized; they’re almost completely invisible in terms of the liberal feminist narrative, which really centers the maiden. It wants to foreground the maiden and to tell women that the hero's journey means essentially being the maiden for their entire life. Everything else is just, you know, the mother is pretty much the—at best, if the mother is noticed, it's as a problem to be solved.

The matriarch doesn't really get a look in at all, and if she does, it's only so that she can be denounced for being a turf or, you know, in some other way spat on for being, you know, a dinosaur or obsolete or, you know, old-fashioned or, you know, out of touch or in some other way irrelevant or ridiculous. In fact, these women are the backbone of the social fabric.

I mean, those are the women who are making weak cups of tea for slightly traumatized new mothers like I was in small-town England and telling me I’m doing fine, and really that mattered a lot at the time. You know, those are the women who are running brownies groups for no money every Wednesday because they can and because they want to give back.

Those are the women who are retraining as counselors and helping traumatized people for free. Those are the women who keep things going, and yet somehow the liberal feminist version of the hero's journey just doesn't see them at all. I think I’ve been very keen to make a case for a richer, if you like, a three-part approach to opening a space for thinking about women's heroes' journeys in a more spacious way, which actually just observes what life looks like for mothers and in the arc of what the average woman's life looks like when she becomes a mother.