Abstract
Professions of ignorance, like “I did not know,” or “I should have known better,” recur in women’s recent writing about motherhood, despite decades of high-level analysis of these topics and ubiquity of information online. These statements are conspicuous and surprising, sharply contrasting the expertise of the writers admitting their failures. This paper considers these professions of ignorance as critique of specific contemporary attitudes about natural birth and of long undervaluation of birth and motherhood. Women who discover the human importance of motherhood only by doing it may regret broad, popular ignorance of the physical, social, and cognitive facts of maternity, ignorance exacerbated by its implication that the only audience for these topics is young moms. Recent writing seeks to make this problem legible as writers highlight their own ignorance to offer a corrective, supplying the lack for the knowledge they wish they had had.
Despite decades’ worth of excellent publishing on pregnancy, birth, and parenting, an incongruous feature persists in that genre. More often than might be expected, in fiction as well as in journalism and academic scholarship, women writing about motherhood frame their words with a profession of ignorance. In spite of their own impressive credentials and expertise, writers frequently introduce and punctuate those texts with admissions of failure caused by lack of information or understanding. Such professions are a commonplace in this genre, as anecdotal evidence confirms they still are a commonplace in conversation among new mothers describing the dramatic changes entailed in these life events. Women often discuss their experience of becoming mothers by first talking about what they did not know, were not told, did not understand about the experience. These professions come off as practically obligatory.
The fact that such statements appear at all merits investigation. Claiming ignorance violates the usual conventions that help establish a writer’s authority. After all, writers usually establish their standing to inform readers about a topic by showing how much they know rather than how little. It sometimes can be rhetorically useful to describe a baseline deficit in order to demonstrate how much one learned or how fast. But these professions do not deploy ignorance that way. Instead, ignorance comes bundled with blame directed at and beyond the writer herself.
A few examples illustrate this pattern, predominantly in US publications. New York Times columnist Jessica Grose opens her book, Screaming on the Inside: The Unsustainability of American Motherhood, by admitting her ignorance on a range of items like medications during pregnancy and policies for parental leave. The well-regarded columnist, who specializes in family issues, admits, “I felt deeply stupid when I realized this—of all people, I should have known better” (2-3). Similarly, in Jessamine Chan’s bestselling novel, The School for Good Mothers, the young mom Frida must so thoroughly identify herself with ignorance that she comes ritually to confess, “I am a bad mother, but I am learning to be good” (83). Beyond the particular mistake for which Frida gets punished, slipping away from her young daughter to work for a few hours, Frida is guilty of miscalculation about the whole project of motherhood. She finds herself unprepared for its strenuous demands. Sentencing her to re-education, Frida’s accusers imply that she should have known what motherhood would be like.
The narrator of Szilvia Molnar’s novel, The Nursery, feels upended by her infant’s birth. She contrasts her current status as nursing mother, or “milk bar,” to her pre-maternity self as literary translator, a person whose job it is to understand words and make them understandable. She used to help others to perceive the meaning of things. After the birth of her child, she cannot comprehend her own life. Though she is clearly self-aware and reflective, as a mother she admits, “Most of the time I don’t know what I’m doing” (Molnar 5). From birth on, in pain and confounded by the new expectations presented by care work, the narrator exclaims, “Who brought this state forward and how could I even begin to translate this madness?” (Molnar 29-30). She does not really understand how she got into this condition and doubts that any warning would have been sufficient: “What could have possibly prepared me for this?” (Molnar 30). That outcry echoes the plaint of a new mom’s confession in the New York Times “Modern Love” series, writer Alli Kushner admitting feeling surprised not to love her baby in the that way popular culture made her expect she would. Kushner laments that “absolutely no one prepared me for what came after the congratulatory messages and presents stopped.” In order to come to terms with her new reality she needs to forgive herself, “the woman who wasn’t experiencing what she was ‘supposed’ to” (Kushner).
Mothers always may have been judged for how they care for their children. But these examples evidence something distinct from that perennial judgment. In the cases referenced above, women’s distress comes from the contrast between popular shorthand of motherhood as easy and happy, and the truth about what it actually entails, which they only discover once inside the experience. The writers express frustration that they did not know that information beforehand. The distress of this ignorance is distinct from generalized ambivalence about parenthood, uncertainty about whether to have a child at all, that writers perceive behind declining birth rates (Berg and Wiseman). Instead, the professions of ignorance suggest that somebody had the right information–somebody who watches and judges women–but failed to help mothers by telling them what they need to know in the right time or right way.
Lucy Jones, in Matrescence: On Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood, appears to be navigating an excess of information, which might be proof of the opposite of ignorance. Nevertheless Jones, a perceptive, articulate expert, attests to her own lack of knowledge, proclaiming that she misunderstood what natural childbirth was, and that she was “confused by the mixed information” she had had about epidurals (57). Only in the process of birthing did she discover that her “knowledge of what birth actually entailed” was insufficient (Jones 81). Her refrain while describing the risks of postpartum injury is “I did not know” (Jones 81). She was “[b]affled” by instruction on breastfeeding because “so little information” about practicalities came in prenatal classes (Jones 103). Addressing postpartum cognitive change, she discloses, “I did not know that my brain would undergo any lasting, let alone significant, structure changes in matrescence” (Jones 115). Jones did not know that there was anything to know about one of the most profound brain transformations in human life.
Jennifer Banks, introducing her 2023 book Natality: Toward a Philosophy of Birth, acknowledges surprise to discover that title term, “natality,” in the writings of philosopher Hannah Arendt. Banks, whose work in publishing had brought her in contact with books on “just about everything” except birth, concedes that “birth has been explored more extensively than I first imagined” (7). Even so, she demands, “Why did no one tell me what this was like? Why did no one prepare me?” (Banks 7).
That question–why did no one tell me?–can combine a confession and a complaint. It simultaneously acknowledges the writer’s ignorance and objects to the circumstances that fostered felt ignorance. That question, why did no one tell me, implies that a batch of information exists, that others have it, and that they should give it to the mother or mother-to-be at the right time. The implication is that somebody had the information that mothers needed but did not disclose it, or at least, did not disclose it when mothers profitably could have received it. The complaint further implies that the information that was available was inaccurate and misled mothers to assume that birth was easy and natural, incidentally diverting women from learning what it really would be like.
Although writers like those quoted above lament being misled this way, this paper interprets professions of ignorance as a compelling critique. And although the first target of that critique tends to be contemporary views of motherhood as easy and natural, the complaint is misdirected if lodged mostly there. Natural-motherhood caricatures cannot absorb the full force of the critique directed against it because other trends shaping motherhood are culpable too. The critique better targets long devaluation of motherhood in medicine and in popular culture.
This paper takes seriously writers’ professions of ignorance and regret. Although their significance does not lie primarily in the statements’ literal sense, I first take these statements at face value, trying to understand why women during pregnancy, birth, and infant care reasonably could feel and say that they were not given the right information—even though information now is so widely available and easily accessible online. More, though, I want to consider how the expressions of ignorance could be read as rhetorically potent if not literal, serving not just as complaint but call to action. A woman’s angry question, “why did no one tell me?” demands a change in common understandings of motherhood. These writers contribute to bringing that change about by asking the question at all, by telling readers what they wish they had known, what they should have been told.
Taking Ignorance at Face Value
Feeling left untold about the hard parts of pregnancy and birth is not an offense most chargeable to natural-birth rhetoric but to historical conditions that natural-birth movements came into being in order to resist or undo. American women’s health movements in the twentieth century sought to give women better understandings of the female body (Kline). Advocates of natural birth and midwifery battled long traditions of biology that deemed women inferior, gave scant actionable information about how reproduction actually worked, and viewed gestation as mostly passive. Broad demographic changes alongside the rise of obstetrics and hospital delivery distanced birth from regular rhythms of the household and of female networks (Leavitt).
Though history of birth and motherhood includes broad variation, generalizations about the United States–with early modern European precedents–support assertions that women in the past did have plausible reason to claim that nobody told them what they needed to know before birth, either because the knowledge was unavailable or because what counted for knowledge was wrong or unhelpful. Reproductive biology recognizable to twenty-first century women only appeared in the twentieth, supplanting persistent notions that from present-day perspectives look inaccurate at best. Explanations rooted in ancient Greek biology explained embryos as arising from seeds, grown through an immaterial force either in the fetus itself or from the child’s father or from God, or all three, while the childbearing woman was thought to be doing relatively little. While these ideas were not held as authoritative deep into the twentieth century, their residuum continued to inform professional and folk expectations. Limited understanding of female physiology left space for popular belief to keep filling, while conventions of modesty, at least for white women, kept private parts out of public conversation. In contrast, practical knowledge about labor and birth stayed within the confines of women’s spaces, even as men who wrote about birth suggested it was obscene to tell the “secrets of women” out broadly (Park).
Premodern prenatal counsel given to instruct the mother-to-be was articulated substantially in negative idioms. Women were told that the pregnant woman should not jump, lest she dislodge the baby. She should not tie cords around her belly. She should not think about or look at anything that would impose a mark it. She should not eat anything that would disturb its temper. While this advice may have implied some potential for women to impact positively the fetus in utero, those prospects were overshadowed in comparison to her perceived potential to do harm or to effect nothing (Filippini). Since the woman was presumed to be doing little, she did not need to know much beyond averting harm.
Judging by current standards of knowledge presumed necessary for birthing women, for long stretches of the past women legitimately could claim to feel uninformed as they entered this period. On the other hand, ignorance about what motherhood entails would have been less plausible as a common female complaint in the past. Women ordinarily would have been closer to the experience to observe it, to see labor, delivery, and childrearing in their ambient environments before those things happened them personally. If, formerly, medicine could tell women not much of use about their bodies or birth, observation could tell them reliably that motherhood was not simply sweet, even if natural. Older social patterns would have made this telling unnecessary, since examples of the hardship of birth and raising children would be close at hand. No one would have to tell a young woman that pregnancy felt like sickness or that motherhood could be hard or painful. It would not be necessary for someone to tell those things explicitly because daily life would likelier render those facts familiar. Histories of childbirth in the United States, especially those tracing the careers of midwives, sketch proximity of younger women to those in throes of motherhood. From midwifery on the eighteenth-century Maine frontier (Ulrich) to Depression-era “granny” birth attendants in the segregated South (Holmes and Smith), these histories demonstrate that social childbirth not only contributed something to the laboring woman but offered others some education on how babies were born and what it was like to care for them. While earlier conditions around knowledge about birth could be said to restrict information about the body and how it worked, in practice social childbirth helped preclude the “no one told me” lament by showing, beyond telling, what motherhood actually was like.
Development of prenatal care in the late nineteenth century shifted the balance of what medical personnel thought appropriate to tell pregnant women and what women were expected to know. When science did make available to medicine some consequential information and tools that people would come to rely on during birth, these interventions paradoxically extended the view that women were mostly passive in the process of making and birthing a baby. The relationship of expertise and duty that prenatal care implied was that somebody (somebody medical, in the United States, most often a doctor or nurse) would tell women things, and women would obey in exchange for a healthy, happy period before a birth safely managed by those medical experts. According to this new protocol, the information problem took on a different shape from its conditions in the past. Women now became responsible to rely on doctors to prevent the dangers of birth. Women now were supposed to know some things because someone was supposed to tell them. Knowing–receiving what others told them about the experience–became women’s responsibility at approaching motherhood, even though the real work of birth did not engage the woman’s knowledge. The real work of bringing a baby into the world was done by medical personnel (Howard).
The nineteenth- and twentieth-century dominance of medical management of pregnancy highlights the incongruity of current displeasure with natural-childbirth counsel. Revealingly, much of the “no one told me” rhetoric quoted above faults the kind of natural-childbirth trends that now enjoy social approval. For instance, Lucy Jones lays her unhappy ignorance most immediately at the door of natural-birthing rhetoric. Jones charges that “uncritical embrace” of natural-childbirth language has “led birth discourse too far into the realms of myth and misinformation” (67). Having expected what natural-birth advocates encouraged her to expect, she admits, “I felt dismayed by the expectations I had held” (Jones 77). Kushner similarly envisioned motherhood as radiant because of the natural-birth ideal that came to her mediated through commercial imagery. She expected “the motherhood they promised in the diaper commercials, with soft lighting and loving smiles,” but instead suffered a painful, metamorphic reality that she “never asked for” (Kushner).
These laments target natural-birth advocacy as the seeming source of maternity misinformation. It is not the most deserving target. The natural-birth language shaping popular views of motherhood may have come down compromised through rhetorical distortions entailed in reasonable polemics against obstetric overreach. Given the character of the late-twentieth-century obstetric protocols that birth reformers sought to correct, overstatements on the natural character of birth may have been nearly inevitable, even necessary. De-emphasizing danger and pain in birth was a substantial part of women’s health reform in the late twentieth century, especially in the United States. As Barbara Katz Rothman acknowledges in her advocacy of midwifery, deeming pregnancy healthy and normal is “of course politically necessary” if trust were to shift to women as competent to make decisions about their care and to midwives as competent to attend birth (48-49). If obstetrics and hospital delivery protocols had to overstate risk to justify interventions, midwifery and natural-birth advocates were pressed in consequence to do the opposite, to emphasize the healthy normalcy of women’s reproductive labor. The unhappy surprise that motherhood can be hard may be a kind of unintended consequence of some real goods won by earlier women’s health movements. Still, assurances about the happy, natural normalcy of women’s reproductive processes merit less umbrage than medical practices that treated the female body like a faulty machine.
Taking Ignorance as Critique
Women’s health movements promoted broader knowledge that was too long withheld, on grounds that understanding how the body worked fueled empowerment. At present, such knowledge is much easier to access than in the past. Not only do doctors know more prenatal physiology and have more that they can tell patients, but women also have information about their own bodies and plenty of ways to find it out. Given current resources, it is relatively easy to learn just about anything one wants to know about pregnancy, birth, or motherhood. Claims of ignorance therefore may sound discordant. If much information circulates, why would mothers ever complain of not having been told something? Does the complaint suggest difficulty accessing information or failure of rhetorical occasion to tell it?
The problem now around birth and motherhood is not absence of information or restricted access. Problems arise instead from distorted popular understanding around maternity and the canalizing of accurate information to special-interest “mommy-lit” audiences presumed the only suitable consumers of this material. Lots of information might come to mothers or mothers-to-be when they seek it out, but this audience likely only would approach such content once life circumstances provoked their special interest. Only when reporter Amanda Hess learns about the genetic condition her fetus might carry, for example, does she comb the internet for information, once she has been forced to recognize her ignorance. The information she finds was always available but until that moment was held at arms’ length, as something unnecessary for ordinary people to know. Her search for information specific to her child maps the contours of her ignorance. She sputters with frustration over search terms related to fetal development, “what-the-fuck-was-an-AFP, what-the-fuck-was-nuchal,” the tabs open on her computer screen taunting with evidence of all she could have known but had not known, simultaneously instructing and discouraging (Hess 71).
Accurate information about motherhood exists but it reaches too small an audience and often seems to reach it too late. Meanwhile, absent a common sense of why pregnancy, birth, and motherhood matter and what they actually are like, popular views default to a palatable placeholder narrative. The premise of Chan’s novel, a woman punished for the misdeed of leaving her young child unattended when feeling drowned by caregiving she did not anticipate as so hard, shows how our era’s new tools of surveillance exacerbate consequences of the natural-motherhood caricature. Like Hess’s engagement with apps, baby-monitors, and smart-technology bassinets, the sequence of information access turns punitive. No one tells mothers what they need to know until after mothers have mis-stepped. Instead of giving women the information they will need in motherhood, institutions in this kind of dystopian scenario gather information about women in order to fault or punish them.
Conclusion
The profession of ignorance,“no one told me,” may simultaneously try to name one’s own failure and also cast blame at somebody else, someone who failed to tell. Before considering whomever else may be at fault, it is worth wondering whether the impulse to blame is warranted. Writers’ felt failure to understand does not necessarily require somebody else’s failure to inform. In fact, women often get told a lot before they become mothers. Prenatal classes and birth attendants may provide all kinds of useful instruction. Plenty of people tell expectant mothers plenty of information that, at the time, may seem remote and irrelevant until later. In these situations, it may be the case that no one is to blame, neither the woman nor her prospective instructors. Instead of projecting guilt outward, women might evaluate the felt ignorance as testimony that some knowledge comes gradually through practice rather than in advance.
Ignorance notwithstanding, one might also object that blame is mistaken because it is not possible to tell truly about birth or motherhood. It could be argued that knowing what it is like to give birth or tend a young child is like falling in love or dying, a kind of knowledge inaccessible until one is inside the situation. Short of that, even the clearest information might be known only in a vague or detached way. This knowledge may also be of the kind impossible to communicate even to another in similar circumstances.
The caveats may hold in limited ways. Still, manners presume that we can know a good deal about situations not familiar to us and acknowledge a situation is worth knowing about, even when it is not happening to us personally. Illuminating contrast can be made with manners governing response to other challenging circumstances potentially outside one’s own experience but obligating apt concern. These manners function well enough in many other situations. Consider the offense of such an approach in other situations, of saying, for example, “Sorry, I didn’t realize exams mattered at all for university admission.” Or, “Sorry, moving house, I assume that is not very much trouble?” Or, “Sorry, what happened to your hair? Does it have anything to do with the chemotherapy?” It would be awkward, to say the least, to approach such situations with blithe presumptions of ease or business-as-usual that meet women newly initiated into birth and motherhood.
The evident need to voice one’s ignorance on motherhood-related topics should be read as critique of the ways these topics are handled in popular discourse. What the writers may be marking is not the fact of their ignorance but social arrangements that maintain ignorance as a public norm. Writers’ idiom of dissent proceeds from life events requiring them to secede from that norm. As I have argued, enduring misogyny and misreading of the female body bear more responsibility for misconstruing motherhood than does natural-birth advocacy, even if natural-birth advocacy now looks like the public face of cultural positivity about motherhood.
Expressions of ignorance are significant whether or not the ignorance is actual or excusable. The expressions issue blame through their claim not only that did a writer not know something, but that she should have known exactly because this kind of thing should be common knowledge. In writing demonstrated through the quotations above, blame rarely targets a particular other–female relative, friend, doctor, midwife, nurse–instead seeming to regret the public conditions that would require anyone would have to tell any particular woman this in order for it to be known. Therefore, we could read “no one told me” to be arguing that no one should have had to tell me, that the conditions around natality and maternity should have been obvious to me all along, and also to you.
The figures of speech, how did I not know, why did no one tell me, are powerful because they create the rhetorical occasion to remedy the problem they identify. The phrase implies its own corrective. No one told me, so I am telling you. Professions of ignorance could be read as saying something like this. Because no one told me how astonishing it is that the human body changes this way, making space for a fetus and retrofitting one’s organs to support the new, growing body–I am telling you. Or, because nobody told me that childbearing is physically and psychologically hard, I am telling you–so that women might not feel isolated or deviant, so that we all admit that the body and brain change in profound ways in service of a new human, and so that other people around new mothers stand ready to help. Or, because nobody told me that caring for young children involves paying attention to the embodied fact of human existence and that exercise opens the mind, I am telling you–so that we appreciate our own beginning, appreciate the way you, and I, and everybody else came to be, and so we respect those trained by caregiving experience to see particular connections between one person’s embodiment and another’s. That I did not know what I should have known about motherhood could diagnose dominant narratives that underestimate it, caricature it, lie about it, or make it boring, that manage to conceal the monumental in plain sight. Just because I had to wait for a designated teacher to let me in on the secret, these writers imply (even as they admit that the teacher never arrived in time), does not mean you should have to wait for this urgent, life-giving knowledge. Let me tell you, to save you the trouble, so you might save those who need help the trouble of having to justify it first.
Writers describing a reality that they would have liked to have known about beforehand are trying to make that reality more generally available so that others do not have to be notified individually in order to perceive these phenomena as worthy of claims on their attention. Women writing on these topics are not best read as mostly addressing other mothers or mothers-to-be. These professions of ignorance may serve as a tool to a reach around or beyond that primary audience, women already thinking about motherhood, to another audience, to tell more of us something that we all should know, to tell all of us something that should be so well known as not to need to be told individually to a person when a positive pregnancy test inspires her to download a baby app. Saying “no one told me” is not best read a wish to go back in time so that somebody would tell, but as a claim made on the future. Those who had to learn by doing can persuade readers that a human event of this magnitude should become the kind of thing other people know about. Women writing well about these topics testify that natality and maternity entail the kind of knowledge that humans cannot afford to have come as a surprise, or too late, or never learn at all.
Works Cited
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