082

  • La Bouillie (The Baby Gruel)

  • 1861
  • Jean-François Millet (French 1814-1875)
  • Etching
  • 16.1 x 13.3 cm., 6-3/8 x 5-1/4" image
  • Catherine Carter Goebel, Paul A. Anderson Chair in the Arts Purchase, Paul A. Anderson Art History Collection, Augustana College 2008.11

Essay by Sharon Varallo, Professor of Communication Studies and Violet M. Jaeke Chair of Family Life

How do we represent mothers and children, in art, in politics, in everyday conversation? Who can be called a good mother, and why? This wonderful nineteenth-century print can begin such conversations about social relationships. Millet is known as a Realist, preferring practical scenes of the everyday lived experience. Later artists would take a turn toward more Impressionistic, sometimes idealized maternal scenes. Viewing representations of mothers and children in art can help us begin to uncover hidden messages about good motherhood-messages and rules that change over time, but that always are considered important to the functioning society.

In public discourse, mothers both matter and don't. Motherhood may be portrayed as the single most important role in any society and simultaneously devalued in public and private discourse about success. Motherhood is intensely political, with all of a culture's most cherished values bound up in how we define families. Current conversations about good motherhood include heated debates pitting working mothers against stay-at-home mothers, with stereotypically narrow views of care and love within each category. Having only one represented view of honorable motherhood can hurt all mothers, and in so doing, hurt children and families as well. In spite of the easy narratives of a simpler past, we always have had multiple ways of mothering our children, of caring for them, of defining family and motherwork. And yet the battle for representing good motherhood is fierce.

At a time when most scholarly analyses place the United States dead last among industrialized nations in terms of support for working families (without the guarantee of even unpaid leave, demand for affordable daycare far outpacing the supply, and contestation about the merits of universal healthcare that would cover stay-at-home parents and children), this lovely little print based on a pencil drawing could and should spark firestorms of debate about what we think of and how we value family and caring practices. Do we value those who care for our sick and nurture our children? Are they even visible at all?

Millet has given us a window into one story of motherhood, of childhood, of care and of work. To be true to Millet, perhaps our job now is to ask the tough questions about our own cultural stories of motherhood and care, and, to act upon those questionings with our own best gifts and skills.