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Lucy Jones has struck a chord with the many who have read ‘Matrescence’ (longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction) for articulating what mother-becoming looks and importantly feels like at this moment in time, in WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic) countries. Encountering her own biases and lack of understanding about the emotional, physiological and political aspects of mothering inspired her to write the book, as did coming across anthropologist Dana Raphael’s term, ‘Matrescence’ (Raphael, 1975) shortly after giving birth. This offered her a narrative of her experience which, like adolescence, was developmental; that she was becoming a new version of herself, rather than failing.
The book is a compelling mix of intimate personal narrative and rigorous investigative journalism which unravels motherhood from the ribbons and bows of sentimentality and maternal ‘instinct’. Jones digs into every crevice of motherhood, illuminating the way with perspectives from evolutionary biology, sociology, anthropology, existential philosophy, ecology, neuroscience and psychoanalysis as well as a generous deep dive into her own body and mind. Her mission is to interrogate the mother-myths at the interface where patriarchy meets capitalism, arguing that these deny the importance of nurture and care, and exploit those who perform this labour.
Her chapter on birth is an exposé of the romanticism of the natural birth movement and its reliance on a Darwinian definition of women as ‘perfectly adapted’ for childbirth. She introduces the brilliantly pompously named, mid-century obstetrician, Grantly Dick-Read and his notion that culture and civilisation have conspired to create fear of childbirth in the ‘modern woman’, in contrast to the ‘primitive woman’ who simply ‘births in a thicket’. His prevailing theory (and Jones has scoured the research so we can be confident that it remains such) was that women experienced ‘Fear-Tension-Pain Syndrome’ and that pain i