Abstract
The Mother Within: Intergenerational Influences Upon Australian Matrescence Since 1945*
Highlights
Female descendants within biological families are connected on multiple levels
When a woman becomes a mother for the first time, she undergoes a psychological transformation that American psychiatrist and psychoanalytic theorist Daniel Stern calls ‘the birth of the mother’
Since the mid twentieth century, psychoanalytic and sociological studies in industrialized societies have charted the inner transformation of the woman entering maternality and analyzed the ways in which new mothers actively ‘make sense of motherhood’[5] with reference to the cultural scripts available to them
Summary
Relatively few historians have benefited from the anthropological concept of ‘matrescence’ — the rite de passage of becoming a mother — nor examined how this emotional transformation and cultural milestone has changed over time.[6] This paper draws upon research into the changing Australian experience of matrescence since 1945, which includes the co-creation of over sixty oral history interviews with a diverse group of narrators: heterosexual and lesbian mothers; adoptive, birth-giving and stepmothers; working-class and middle-class mothers; migrant and Australianborn mothers; urban, suburban and regional mothers; partnered and single mothers; and mothers of one, six and even eleven children These women came to motherhood in a settler-colonial society with a history of violent indigenous dispossession by the British, a liberal democratic political tradition and a well-developed welfare state with publicly funded antenatal maternity care and postnatal infant welfare (later maternal child health) care. I will separately examine emotional continuities and historical changes influencing the mother–daughter relationship, before untangling how these factors are interwoven within the matrilineal narratives of one family
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