Of late, I've been musing a little on who rules Ireland. When I first came to the country, 20 years ago, I was told it was run by priests and mammies. Ireland likes coalitions, and this was a coalition to put the fear of God into ordinary mortals. Forget about comely maidens dancing at the crossroads; think about the procession from Sunday Mass to Sunday dinner, and you get a key fact about political and social power in mid-20th century Ireland.
Well, time has moved on. We know what has happened to the priests, but what about the Irish Mammy? Has she gone forever - and, if she has, how does the rising generation of Irish women feel about it? I always remember an Irish friend of mine, three months pregnant, launching into an extended joke against the Irish Mammy, then suddenly falling silent, a look of horror on her face, as she realised she was going to have stop making these jokes since very soon she would be an Irish Mammy herself. In her expression I read self-doubt and fear as a huge, historical burden was about to fall on her shoulders. Would she be able to live up to being an Irish Mammy?
Weak and feeble
Englishwomen have never had this problem. The Angel in the House, identified by Virginia Woolf, seems a weak and feeble specimen compared with the Irish Mammy. The Angel in the House sits meekly in draughts and eats the parts of the chicken no one else wants. She does not rule the home. Everyone knows an Englishman's home is his castle: according to Jean Rhys this accounts for the "beaten and cringing" look Englishwomen often possess. Check out the round-shouldered prance adopted by the actress playing Bridget Jones. Very English.
African-American women, like Irish women, have faced high expectations centred on the mothering role. Writers such as Alice Walker and Maya Angelou speak movingly of the inheritance of strength passed down to them from their foremothers.
In her essay In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens, Alice Walker recounts the life of her mother, who raised eight children, made all their clothes, laboured in the fields beside her husband picking cotton, battled with her white landlord to keep her children in school, and yet still found time to keep her creativity alive in the quilts she sewed and the gardens she planted. She referred to childbirth as "that little pain". Quite an example to live up to.
Nursing strangers
The African-American tradition of praise for the mother goes back to the time of slavery. In her study Specifying: Black Women Writing the American Experience, the US academic Susan Willis says: "For black women, history is a bridge defined along motherlines. It begins with a woman's particular genealogy and fans out to include all the female cultural heroes." These cultural heroes include the black slave mother who kept alive not only her own family but the white babies she was forced to nurse.
"The black American female has nursed a nation of strangers - literally," says Maya Angelou. "And has remained compassionate." And Angelou points out that, when slavery ended, it was often women who became the breadwinners in African-American families as their men were kept out of the workplace by their white rivals.
But if the black woman looks back to her strong maternal heritage for affirmation of her identity, there is nevertheless a price to pay. The role model of the black woman as a strong, nurturing mother whose sacrifices have ensured the survival of the race under a slave system which did everything it could to separate families, at times weighs heavily on her daughters. Both Alice Walker and Toni Morrison have written novels in which young black women reject the maternal role for themselves - not, however , without feeling guilty about their failure to live up to their culture's expectations of them as women. There are negative as well as positive aspects to the ideology of strong motherhood. "I don't want to make somebody else. I want to make myself," says Sula, the eponymous heroine of Toni Morrison's novel.
So what has happened to the Irish Mammy? Is she still around in the women who decide to devote themselves full-time to the mothering task? Has she gone into offices and factories to put to use all those skills she learned bringing up children? Or is the Irish Mammy now a grandmother minding the next generation so that her daughters can go out to work? Wherever she has gone, her power has become diluted in recent years. Women no longer identify themselves solely with the mothering task. They may be mothers in one part of their lives, but they are, or have been, or will be in the future, other things as well.
Roots of misogyny
The demise of the Irish Mammy gives Irish women the freedom to choose their paths in life while also allowing men to get a look-in on the parenting front. This can only be healthy for society. The roots of misogyny have been traced in the writings of analysts such as Dorothy Dinnerstein to the role of the all-powerful mother in infancy.
All the same, when one child wanders away while I'm in the middle of lecturing him on the virtues of a tidy bedroom; and the other growls at me when I politely suggest he turns off the television and starts his homework; and when the man about the house insists I've loaded the dishwasher all wrong, I can't help feeling a sneaking longing for those days when the Irish Mammy ruled supreme. The days when males in the house who stepped out of line had swift and terrible retribution visited upon them, pronounced from the kitchen table, and reinforced from the pulpit. Hmmm.