‘Constructing Motherhood: the persuasion of normal development’.

This chapter draws on research interviews with forty mothers of infants to illustrate the influence of certain ideas from the psychology of child development (located historically), not only on current orthodoxies on what women ‘should’ do (the discursive aspect) but on women’s own aspirations and desires (the subjectivity aspect). [In this respect it is psychosocial ‘avant la lettre’.] Urwin draws critically on the post-structuralist accounts, especially of ‘normalisation’, as in Foucault and Donzelot, illustrating the effects of normalizing apparatuses such as the routine practices of infant testing and check-ups and the ‘cult of child psychology, to identify how they may function in the construction of mothering more generally. Urwin shows both how the normative account of development and the power relations which these practices imply may operate to define what development should be and also the mother’s role in promoting it. She stresses that explaining why women collude in these processes must take account of subjectivity. She notes that substantial shifts had taken place compared with what mothers knew or remembered of their own parents’ practices and beliefs. Cathy Urwin concludes that ‘the power of the normalising apparatus is achieved not through a simple coercion but through more subtle ways in which is pulls on desires and fantasies which women already hold’ (p. 197).