Thurer, Shari

Motherhood: Ideal in the Stone Age

Myths of Motherhood: How Culture Reinvents the Good Mother finds that the cultural history of mothers from prehistory to the end of the 20th century highlights a decline in their social standing. During the Stone Age, mothers were identified with powerful goddesses, and, in particular, with the Great Mother, the maternal goddess who was the oldest of all gods and was all powerful. Contrary to Western beliefs, Thurer claims that the role of prehistoric mothers was socially more influential than in any other historical era.

While Thurer is aware of the progress made by women across the millennia, she argues that women in the Stone Age were not constricted by the oppressive assumptions about parenting that characterize the following historical periods. There was no demand for women to be exclusively devoted to their children, and according to Thurer, it may have been this lack of personalized maternal attention that led men to replace the Great Mother with a multiplicity of male gods, and eventually with a single one, which paved the way for the establishment of a patriarchal social order.

Thurer argues that motherhood is used today as a way to limit women to a particular social role, one that is not necessarily in their or their children's best interest. On the contrary, a close study of motherhood in the prehistoric period reveals not only that our basic associations of maternity symbols (the cave as a pregnant woman's womb, the mother as pregnant Earth) date back to those years, but also that prehistoric mothers can function as role models for mothers of the 21st century.

Citing her conviction that mothers in the Stone Age were liberated women who had an active and influential role in their society, Thurer challenges the idea that mothers should be naturally subordinated and reduced to self-sacrificing caretaking. Paradoxically, she sustains, what is defined as primitive times were in fact characterized by the necessary and sufficient conditions for parental attachment. Such conditions are not always guaranteed in today's societies, especially in those where there is an extreme inequality between genders. The book argues that child neglect and mistreatment are linked to sexual misogyny and the establishment of the patriarchal order.

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