opinions: we all have them, just as we all have navels

I'm writing a lot about Charlotte Perkins Gilman these days.  She's the author most known for writing The Yellow Wallpaper, but I'm writing about her short fiction, much of which is concerned to challenge the conventional idea that motherhood is natural and a practice that cannot be improved upon through the genius of modern social science.  In her fiction and non-fiction alike, she's quick to point out how contradictory it is that people champion motherhood as completely natural on the one hand, but worry incredibly about doing it wrong on the other.  If it were  natural, she reasons, there wouldn't be room to screw it up.  Therefore, we either have to stop worrying about child rearing or else be more methodical and rational about it. 

I feel bad for new moms, because motherhood is one of those subjects everyone thinks they're entitled to have an opinion about.  This sense of entitlement to an opinion ends up extending to the mom herself, who becomes a depersonalized case about which everyone feels free to conjecture.  What's especially violative about this is how the pregnant woman's body becomes a subject for discussion, and all the various details of gestation, lactation, dilation that have to do with private parts become public where babies are concerned.  Everyone has an opinion, and everyone seems entitled to supervise. 

I'd like to know more about why this is.  Maybe it's because motherhood is a place where highly charged personal and highly charged social issues meet.  To raise a child is to stake out allegiance to a number of different social positions, some intersecting and converging, others conflicting:  class, race, religion, region, ethnicity, region, nationality, family, ancestry, history.  At stake in motherhood is how and whether each of these is going to be reproduced, and it's understandable, if not fair to mothers, that people have opinions.  But people who have opinions about motherhood ought to be self-conscious about their personal stakes in their own opinions, which require scrunity and introspection of their often sub-conscious origins.  Motherhood turns an individual mom into a vector for everyone to have opinions about, and this isn't at all fair.  So everyone should shut the f--- up about motherhood.

What all this goes to show is how right Gilman was to distinguish motherhood from reproduction, or bare nature; after all, reproduction is "natural," but motherhood is a vexed issue around which "culture" and the social most actively swirl.  Motherhood is above all a cultural expression par excellence.

Tammi and I are fans of the crime show "Bones," and if you watched recently, you'll know in the last episode Angela gave birth, and Bones is pregnant by Booth.  If you saw the birth scene, you'll remember that during labor Angela was skyping into the lab through a computer placed at the foot of the hospital bed.  It's not clear that the lab could see her lady parts, but the implication was that there's nothing private about delivery, that, in fact, it's a moment when the normally concealed lady parts come into view (literally and metaphorically) for anyone concerned.  Can't find a clip on YouTube, but maybe I'll post one later.