"Motherhood Is Powerful": Embodied Knowledge

from Evolving Field-Based Experiences

CONSTANCE R. SUTTON
Department of Anthropology
New York University
New York, NY 10003-6790

SUMMARY My experience of learning that "motherhood can be powerful" began with

my first field research in Barbados (1956 and 1957-58) when I was married but childless
and went to the field by myself. The lesson was further elaborated when I gave birth to
my son David in 1963 and later during subsequent research in the Caribbean and with
the Yoruba of Nigeria (1976, 1977,1978-79). 1 went to Nigeria as an older wife and
mother but without my husband and child, except for a one month visit from David.
Finally, my visits to the Greek island ofKalymnos in 1992 and 1993, where David was
then doing his doctoral research with his wife and baby son, dramatically shifted and
further extended my experience of family life as it grew more and more intertwined with
anthropology. Thus my story is about how family life and anthropology reciprocally
informed each other in the unfolding of my life—in the field and at home.

Positioning
Let me start by noting that I never chose motherhood as a topic of research. In
fact, as a young wife and student in the early 1950s I viewed motherhood as
problematic. However, it grew to be the pivotal kin role around which I sub-
sequently wove together my changing family and anthropological experiences.
During the post-World War II period, while the baby boomer generation was
being enthusiastically produced, I was a married graduate anthropology student
in my early twenties actively resisting the heavy social pressure to have children.
At that time the "mommies track" and "career track" ran in opposite directions,
and it was impressed upon me at the University of Chicago where I was studying
that it would be difficult if not impossible to become a full-fledged anthropologist
were I first to become a mother. I also feared that becoming a mother would cause
me to be economically dependent on my husband. It was widely presumed that
mothering children precluded working outside the home unless one was forced
to do so by dire economic circumstances. I loved anthropology, wanted to be an
economically independent married woman, and also knew that I would like to
have children some time in the future.
I was worried about how I would reconcile these conflicting desires. I was
troubled by what appeared to be another obstacle to my becoming a professional
anthropologist: the problem of leaving my spouse—a committed scholar but not
an anthropologist—when I went to do fieldwork for an extended period far from
home. "How," my advisor queried, "can you leave your husband to do field-
work?" (My advisor was part of the all-male faculty of the anthropology depart-
ment at the University of Chicago.) It seemed that to undergo the sacred, desired,
and necessary rite of field research, a woman either had to be married to an
anthropologist and accompany him to the field or be a dedicated spinster.
Fortunately this latter dilemma was resolved after my husband finished his
doctorate and took up research and teaching in New York, for I was then able to
complete my graduate work at Columbia University. There I soon met two

Anthropobgy and Humanism 2M2):139-1^5. Copyright© 1998, American Anthropological Association.

140 Anthropology and Humanism Volume 23, Number 2

practicing women anthropologists, Margaret Mead and Eleanor Leacock, who

urged me to consider doing field research by myself, thus challenging the
assumption that only men leave spouse and offspring in pursuit of training or
employment. The opportunity to take up this challenge came promptly when I
said "yes" to an offer to go to Barbados in 1956 for a summer of supervised field
training; and in 1957 I again said "yes," this time to returning to Barbados for a
year of doctoral research.
Ironically, my field research took me to places where becoming a mother was
regarded as empowering and motherhood was thought to be a major source of
women's power—cultural views in sharp contrast with those back home. Bar-
bados was a place where it was taken for granted that mothers, like fathers, would
leave for shorter or longer periods of time if the opportunity presented itself in
order to pursue training or employment overseas. I became interested in what
made such attitudes and practices possible and how I might benefit from adapt-
ing them to my own family life and future career.
I turn now to that narrative, marking the differently placed, differently timed
experiences through which I acquired an understanding of the multiple mean-
ings of motherhood.

Barbados: 1956 and 1957-58

My doctoral project in Barbados was concerned with plantation laborers'
changing perspectives and forms of resistance following the rise of trade unions
and mass politics during the 1945-55 decade. I settled myself into the island's
largest sugar community: 600 households closely set on a patchwork of planta-
tion-owned tenantries and freehold land. I was one of the three anthropologists
to first undertake field research on this island.
It did not take long for me to realize that villagers had a distinct and, to me an
attractive, set of cultural assumptions about the roles and attributes of women.
They had no problem with the fact that I had left my husband to work in another
country. Female-initiated migration was something that village women, married
or in consensual unions, with or without children, were practicing widely. Being
childless in my late twenties, though, was considered unusual. At a Sunday
picnic, one man asked how long I had been married, then publicly speculated
about my being an infertile "mule"—viewing me with a combination of pity and
concern. And after I had lived a couple of weeks in the community, both women
and men would come up privately to inquire whether I had found someone yet
to "tek care of" my body during the long period of fieldwork separating me from
my husband. Even though villagers took for granted that I would, and should,
eventually return to my husband, they believed that without proper sexual
attention I was liable to suffer all kinds of bodily aches, headaches, and other
"bad feels."
I was also impressed by the approval shown for the "hard-back woman"—the
woman who, by bearing the pain of childbirth without crying out, would
demonstrate that she possessed the requisite strength and assertiveness to cope
with "whatever the trouble that come." I witnessed a home delivery in which the
mother, squatting, was held between the legs of her friend, as other friends and
neighbors formed a circle and, in chorus, urged her to "push, push, push-sh" the
baby out. After this, my neighbors delighted in relating to me their own birthing
experiences, sometimes assisted by a midwife, sometimes by the man with whom
they were living, sometimes alone. The stories always underscored the woman's
active role in the labor process and her ability to endure pain. One woman
bragged how she simply stood up in the cane field, hands on hips, legs apart, and
Sutton "Motherhood Is Powerful" 141

"push-shed the baby out!" Childbirth was not seen as something happening to
a woman, as in "I'm having a baby"; it was a proactive process, captured in their
phrase, "I makxri a baby."
Childbirth was also a metaphor that people would invoke in talking about their
close ties to maternally linked siblings who had preceded them in birth order.
One's feelings about and obligation to such older brothers and sisters was
expressed by the statement that she or he "made the way for me" through the
mother's birth passage. Likewise, people would explain their feelings of close-
ness to their mothers with the phrase "after all, she the one bore the pain to have
me."
I was surprised to learn that women regarded motherhood as a source of
potential power. 'They [little children] may humbug you in the early, but they
crown you in the late," I would hear them say as they looked at, patted, and
hugged the newborn being paraded around the village. And it became clear to
me that the "rite de passage" into full female adulthood was neither chronologi-
cal age nor legal marriage but the "making" of a child—"she a woman now." But
what surprised me even more was to find that men thought a woman with a child
could act more, not less, independently—"Now that I give she a child, she feel
she don' need me no more." I began to realize that I was living among people
who viewed motherhood as personally empowering and viewed offspring as a
prime social asset. It was my first exposure to a situation in which family practices
and ideology regarded children as "women's wealth," empowering women in
the eyes of villagers and making women less rather than more dependent on men.
I found that this female-centered ma trifocal kin system did not confine women
to domesticity. In fact, most mothers in the community were working mothers,
laboring on the adjacent sugar estates or engaged in a wide range of other
income-producing activities. What made this possible was the large number of
kinswomen, especially grandmothers and older female siblings, who assisted
with child care and household tasks. Thus, mothers seldom had sole responsi-
bility for their children; the task was widely shared. "It takes a village to raise a
child" was well known by Barbadians long before it became a White House
nostrum.
My initial research had a strong and lasting impact on my life.11 had witnessed
real-life possibilities of combining motherhood with professional ambition,
motherhood with feminine sensuality, and motherhood with sisterly solidarity.
I understood that to embody these practices and attitudes connected to being a
mother, I would have to create a strong social network of interconnected sister-
like friends who, to one degree or another, would be mutually involved in the
joint raising of our children and supportive of each others' striving for career and
professional distinction. This, I thought, was worth trying to reproduce, and back
in New York I set about trying to do so.

At Home: 1959-75
Three important happenings affected my family/anthropology experiences
after I returned home from Barbados. First, the divide between "in thefield"and
"at home" became blurred. Upon returning to New York, I soon became incor-
porated into the social life of Brooklyn Barbadians and the larger West Indian
community. Then, with the change in U.S. immigration laws in 1965, a significant
proportion of the village in which I had done my research migrated to New York.
And so began the immersion of our family life in the growing Caribbeanization
of New York city life.
142 Anthropology and Humanism Volume 23, Number 2

Second, in 19611 was appointed to a full-time position at New York University.

Increasing enrollments in my classes from Barbados and the entire Caribbean
region permitted the weaving of more threads between field and family. The
tightening fabric prompted me to track the bidirectional sociocultural fields
created by these migrating people; thus I turned in the early 1970s to the study
of Caribbean transnational migrations.
Soon after the launching of my teaching career in anthropology, the third
important happening took place. In 19621 became pregnant, and I gave birth to
baby David on April Fool's Day, 1963, confident now that I could—though not
without effort—achieve a combination of motherhood and a career of teaching
anthropology without either suffering from neglect. My efforts to make the
combination work were aided by the full support I received both from my
husband Sam and from female colleagues who were mothers, as well as from my
Afro-Caribbean/African American sisters/friends who were also struggling to
negotiate the mother/career combination. I was lucky that my husband genu-
inely enjoyed caring for David as well as playing with him—much as one sees
young fathers do today. He was committed to my being both a parent and a
working anthropologist.
Thus, six months after David's birth, I returned to full-time teaching at New
York University, with student live-in assistance for occasional evening baby-sit-
ting and part-time day-care help. The sisters /friends mentioned above gener-
ously and warmly constituted themselves as extended family. A secondhand oak
dinner table in our large kitchen became at dinner time the gathering place for a
constant stream of visiting family friends and students. It was around this table
that young David came to know a large group of caring adults who became his
adopted "aunties" and "uncles" and who served on occasion as surrogate
parents. There David heard discussions, debates, and arguments about the
Vietnam War, the black power movement, race and racism, the women's move-
ments, religion, science and anthropology, children and equality, equality and
fairness, and so forth. It was in this context that he learned in his own way to
participate in these exchanges and that he absorbed his father's jokes and art of
telling stories (which he tells today while his own son Sam listens and himself
begins to repeat them).
If fieldwork was a humanizing experience, parenting David was even more
so. I loved it, and I loved teaching anthropology at the same time. I wanted to
change the world so that neither women nor men would have to feel the need to
choose between parenting offspring or having a career, and I encouraged my
women graduate students to go for both. I became active in faculty committees,
pushing for administrative changes that would give greater recognition and
support to both female and male faculty who needed and wanted to care for their
very young children and for elderly parents. Making the institutionally based
culture of work outside the home more flexible and sensitive to the needs of
family life became one form of my proactive "politics of motherhood," a politics
that grew out of my first field experience.
When we went back to Barbados, the villagers, celebrating that I was not a
"mule" after all, made a big to-do over my husband Sam and young David.
Women embraced Sam, startling him when referring to him as "our husband"
(because I was their "sister"). David was paraded about the village, as it was
customary to do for a newborn child. Older village children gathered around
him, and they baked him breadfruit over a coal pot, a food David continues to
love. David's growing awareness of cultural differences was part of his intellec-
tual and emotional development.
Sutton "Motherhood Is Powerful" 143

By the early 1970s I began to think about undertaking a second field trip, this
time among the Yoruba of Nigeria to study gender. Initially I thought the family
would all go together. But once again I had to consider going by myself. This
time my concern was not just my husband (earlier in our relationship we had
weathered my going away to do field research) but David. David was entering
his teens, which I knew was not a good time to leave home. So I checked to make
sure I could count on back-home support from my constructed "villagelike" kin
group and from my son and husband, and after receiving the funding to do the
research I had proposed, I decided—not without conflict and some trepida-
tion—to go alone. It was one of the most difficult professional decisions I have made.

Nigeria and the Yoruba: 1976,1977, and 1978-79

Even in the late 1970s, Nigeria was not an easy country in which to do
fieldwork. However, it was still enjoying the effects of its oil boom, and people
were looking forward to political elections in which an elected government was
to replace the military government in power at the time. I spent a total of 22
months in the field between 1976 and 1979 without my husband or son present,
except for David's brief visit in 1979.
I chose to study the Yoruba because in precolonial times the women held top
political positions, possessed important spiritual powers, and had a high degree
of economic independence. Seeing that the colonial period was relatively short,
I assumed that traces of that past would still be present—and they were. I found
Yoruba women continuing their long tradition of entrepreneurship, exercising
control over their own business activities and the incomes they gained, which,
though typically lower than that of men, were in many cases quite substantial. I
had originally assumed that Yoruba women's social and remaining political
power would come from their pursuit of wealth, their control over their earnings,
their ability to invest in projects that produce further gain, their associational
activities, their right to dissolve their marital relations by "packing their load and
moving on," and their right to establish their own compounds. But over time it
became clear that I had not considered what Yoruba men and women themselves
thought to be their major source of wealth and power. In this wealth-seeking,
wealth-accumulating society, I slowly discovered, first, that Yoruba men and
woman consider children their most important form of wealth. Second, a
woman's ability to produce this form of wealth, that is, her procreative power,
was regarded as a critical immanent power that women—referred to frequently
as "our mothers"—possessed. Third, human continuity was the reigning princi-
ple in both Yoruba cosmology and their related view of sociopolitical reproduc-
tion.
The value Yoruba placed on having children, which underwrote women's
power as mothers, became evident when my son came to visit me. Everyone I
had come to know, friend and foe alike, was particularly solicitous and friendly
to him, much more than they had been to me or were to adults in general.
When I took David to visit the oba (head) of a town where I had spent
considerable time, he was given, much to his surprise, a gift of money by the
chief. Our hosts poured palm wine on the ground—a ritual for the earth goddess
to register David's presence so that she would recognize him and his children
upon their return to Yorubaland. Such attentions clarified and underscored for
me the point that the weight given to children, on which a mother's ascribed
powers pivot, is central to defining Yoruba continuity.
At naming ceremonies, children were given names signifying that they were
an incarnation of an earlier ancestor—someone reborn from the past. "We believe
144 Anthropology and Humanism Volume 23, Number 2

in reincarnation," I was told. My son, by his very presence, provided the key for
me to put this concept together with what I saw, learned, and personally
experienced during his visit. He provided the context for my encounter with the
Yoruba emphasis not just on children but on human continuity. I was now able
to understand how that continuity was inscribed in the culturally constructed
meanings of life, death, and rebirth of genealogically connected humans. New-
born children represented reborn ancestors, recent and distant. They in turn give
birth to the future, and after their death again become ancestors waiting to be
reborn. This was the missing key in my earlier understanding of the power
attributed to mothers in Barbados. When human continuity—not the continuity
of states, nations, and non-kin corporations—is the defining issue for the conti-
nuity of a social unit, publicly recognized power will be lodged in women as
mothers.
That understanding took on many meanings in my own life that followed. It
began with a weekly exchange of letters between David and myself during this
field trip, letters that included discussions of matters in which he was interested
and my responses to the questions he raised. As I look back, I see that these letters
laid the ground for our future exchanges on anthropology and for future trans-
mutations of the principle of human kin-based continuity which began to inform
both our lives.

At Home: 1980-92
The decade following my return to the United States was marked by a number
of life-changing events—great losses, new forms of creating family, and new
extensions of motherhood, as I became a grandmother and continued to have
responsive graduate students to nurture intellectually. David, now a young man,
showed an increasing interest in Greece as a result of a family trip to Greece taken
in 1975, and he followed it up with a study semester on the Greek island of
Kalymnos, which further whetted his interest in Greek culture and literature.
This reinstated the anthropological themes from our earlier exchanges and
discussions, more often now from the perspective of theory and method. Soon
the balance of knowledge shifted, and I was learning as much as I was imparting.
We were becoming colleagues.
My husband Sam died of a heart attack in the spring of 1986, just as David
began his graduate studies at the University of Chicago. We both responded to
this great loss by creating new forms of family life.
Two years after Sam died, David reconstructed family by getting married in a
ceremony that incorporated elements of an African marriage. I now had a
daughter-in-law, Beth, and, in 1991, a grandson, whose arrival David announced
over the phone in typical Yoruba fashion: "Papa has been born again." And with
"reborn Sam" back on earth I experienced the Yoruba principle of continuity
through transformation. My role as mother now extended to that of grandmother.

Greece: 1992 and 1993

Unlike his mom, David took his family with him to the field, which, like my
initial research site, was an island. This time it was I who visited David in the
field. This was in the summers of 1992 and 1993. No surprise, then, that the
Kalymnians cast me exclusively in the role of mother of the anthropologist and
grandmother of his son. My being an anthropologist was irrelevant to the
Kalymnians. I did not mind. I enjoyed being entertained by the two Kalymnian
families who had adopted David, Beth, and Sam. I saw that David continued the
pattern of accepting surrogate mothers and fathers into the family.
Sutton "Motherhood Is Powerful" 145

Kalymnos, like Barbados and the Yoruba of Nigeria, has now become part of
my anthropological worldview. It constitutes the background cosmology I draw
on to think about my life: my past anthropological and family life, my present
families, and the anthropology I still do. Sometimes I even peer into the future,
taking comfort in the belief that the future might also be one faithful to the Yoruba
concept of "changing continuities."
As for my immediate future, I am returning to Barbados to study how Barbadi-
ans of differing gender, generation, and socioeconomic status reenvision and
gender their past, personally and nationally.
On a final note, I recall that it was the Barbadians who proclaimed that children
would "crown you in the late." They were so right! It helps, however, to live a
lifetime so that one can come to know it.

Notes
Acknowledgments. I dedicate this article to my son David and to Edith Low, a powerful
"mom" who shared with my husband and me the parenting responsibilities for David.
Both Edith and David have contributed to my good experience as a mother. I also thank
my partner, Antonio Lauria, for his encouragement and support in the writing of this
essay, Renate Fernandez and David Sutton for their multifaceted roles in the making of
the essay, and Barbara Jaye and William Mitchell for their careful reading and correcting
of manuscript errors.
Funding for the Barbados research was provided by the Research Institute for the Study
of Man and later by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. Funding
for research in Nigeria was provided by the Social Science Research Council and the
National Science Foundation.
1. Much has been written about African Caribbean kinship since the time of my first
fieldwork. An excellent summary can be found in Barrow 1996. An article by Sutton and
Makiesky-Barrow (1977) gives an early account of the gender system, and Kerns (1997)
and Sutton (1997) show that African Caribbean kinship is an internally coherent system
built upon an African-based family/gender logic rather than a series of ad hoc arrange-
ments to deal with a history of poverty and oppression, as it has so frequently been
depicted.

References Cited
Barrow, Christine
1996 Family in the Caribbean: Themes and Perspectives. Oxford: James Currey.
Kerns, Virginia
1997 Women and the Ancestors: Black Carib Kinship and Ritual. 2nd edition. Urbana:
University of Illinois Press.
Sutton, Constance R.
1997 Foreword. In Women and the Ancestors. 2nd edition. Virginia Kerns. Pp. ix-xv.
Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Sutton, Constance, and Susan Makiesky-Barrow
1977 Social Inequality and Sexual Status in Barbados. In Sexual Stratification: A
Cross-Cultural View. Alice Schlegel, ed. Pp. 293-325. New York: Columbia University
Press.