ABSTRACT
Between 1975 and 2005, the Spanish society was exposed to a decisive transformation of motherhood characterised by the trend to have “less children with more technology”. This is demonstrated by the strong decline on average birth rate (50 %), as well as a expanding technological interventionism – mainly by the medical system – in activities related with the attention to pregnancy, delivery, birth and children care, and early socialization.
As several random samples indicate, Spanish women today use to delay or avoid pregnancy and motherhood, although in many cases they want to have more kids than they actually have. Any sociological explication of the meaning of these realities, hardly analysed at this moment, requires listening to the women when they express, in very different ways, to what extent motherhood reduces their life quality as citizens: to what extent more of the first means less of the second.
Based on a critical feminist epistemology, a few new concepts and a methodology of participating social investigation, the author analyses the transformation of motherhood with a four-level model - personal, social, cultural and scientific-: 1) the social processes of personal transformation that women are exposed to when they become mothers (avoided); 2) the transformation of motherhood as a social fact, both in a quantitative and qualitative sense (critical); 3) the cultural transformation of Spanish society (matricidial); and 4), the transformation of sociology itself as a social science in order to establish another organic solidarity (necessary).
The analysis is focussed with the help of what is called the “seven broken heart-reasons” (‘co-razones’) of modern mothers in today Spanish society, a concept that refers to the complex constellation of a serious problems that affect those women that decide to become mothers from their gender consciousness process: 1) the fear to become mother; 2) the lack of confidence toward corporal wisdom; 3) the solitude, loneliness and stress, 4) the surrender to the experts system; 5) the lack of related adequate social spaces, 6) the perverted fission of vital priorities, and 7) the social reproduction of pathological filial relationships.
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