Natasha Walter: The shock of modern motherhood

'Even for successful young women with supportive partners, too many of the first steps through parenthood are taken alone'

Once upon a time there was a woman writer who had a baby. And lo, she looked at the shelves of books about having a baby – how-to books by Sheila Kitzinger and Penelope Leach, imaginative fiction by Helen Simpson and Doris Lessing, cultural critiques by Julia Kristeva and Adrienne Rich – and she decided that none of them was true to her own experience, so she sat down and wrote another book. One about herself and her own baby.

This month sees the publication of two of these me-too books – A Life's Work, by Rachel Cusk, and Misconceptions, by Naomi Wolf. It would be easy to giggle at these writers for finding their own experience of birth so extraordinary that they came to believe that nobody had ever written truthfully about it before.

It would also be easy to judge both of these women for the kind of mothers they reveal themselves to be. Already, Cusk has said that she is shocked that so many reviewers have chosen to see her chilly wit as somehow unmotherly. Wolf, on the other hand, will no doubt find when her reviews begin appearing that she is judged for displaying absolutely the opposite trait – an American touchy-feeliness that some Britishers will find hard to swallow.

But is it possible to lay aside such personal judgements and to ask ourselves what can actually be learnt from this new generation of mothers who are now moving into print?

When I wrote in my book The New Feminism that I looked forward to a feminism that was "less personal, more political", I meant that it is vital that we work together in looking for collective solutions to problems that are often framed in deeply personal terms. Although feminism has rightly insisted that we should respect women's personal experiences, we can't stay in the purely private realm if we want to produce any real changes for this generation of women.

This need to take the personal into the political arena is particularly pressing when it comes to motherhood. As parents, we are continually pushed into looking for private solutions to our problems. Mothers-to-be often find they must harry a failing health service, all by themselves, into giving them the information and support they require. In labour, they often have no continuous support except from their own partner.

When they come home from hospital, they are left to negotiate their own solutions to the work/family dilemma. If parents decide to seek childcare, they must check out childminders and nurseries and nannies individually, without any support from their employers, and try to find a package that their budget will stretch to. If they want to go back to work, they must negotiate their leave and their return to work, usually without any support from colleagues or a trade union.

And if they decide to look after their children themselves they are often isolated in a world that hardly falls over itself to provide child-friendly public spaces. For single parents, the isolation is even more intense. I will never forget interviewing one particular mother a few years ago. She only managed to survive her poverty and the dangers of the estate where she lived by staying indoors, alone with her child. "When she was a baby," she told me, "I'd go in, shut the door, and I wouldn't talk to anyone else for a week at a time."

This is an extreme case, but many parents know that as they contemplate each hurdle of parenting, their family must stand or fall alone. Because in our society, motherhood has been privatised. If we are personally lucky, and have a great partner, a supportive family, flexible work and enough money for good childcare, things can work out just fine. I count myself blessed on all these counts, and so I've been able to revel in motherhood for all the nine months of my daughter's life.

But the privatisation of motherhood means that too many women just cannot access the support that they need, and many are driven half-mad with isolation and frustration. One of the most telling aspects of both Cusk's and Wolf's books is the shock of the solitude that they encountered – even for these successful young women with their supportive partners, too many of the first steps through parenthood were taken all alone.

For Wolf, life in a "cavernous suburban house" with her nanny and her baby came as a shock to a woman who had imagined that she would be moving in and out of work with her husband and using "nurturing, community-based care". For Cusk, becoming a parent meant entering a state of "claustrophobia, my feeling that I was shut in a box, that I couldn't breathe".

Mothering, especially in the first year of a baby's life, will always be an intense relationship, but this sense of isolation is particularly real in societies like the US and Britain that put such a low premium on public services and set rock-bottom standards for maternity services, employment rights and childcare. Just because many middle-class women can buy their way out of these problems with private midwives and nannies doesn't mean that they can afford to be blind to them.

If we are to see the situation improve for parents of all classes and in all situations, we must work together. That may sound utopian. After all, if mothers have too little of anything, it is too little time – too little time to read the papers and go for walks, let alone to join campaigns and fight battles that should have been won long ago. But it is worth looking kindly at the manifesto at the end of Naomi Wolf's book. Some of it doesn't translate into a British context, but much of it does.

For instance, take her desire to see a "radical overhaul" of maternity services. Pressure is building up on that issue here too. As more and more questions are being asked about the rising rate of caesareans in Britain, women are waking up to the fact that the care they receive in childbirth is too often sub-standard. After I wrote an article on the downgrading of midwifery earlier this year, I received a deluge of e-mails from mothers and midwives, some of whom said they had wept over it. The frustration and anger that rose from those responses felt explosive.

Parents are also asking why, after an entire term under a Labour government, we still have the worst standards of childcare in Europe. Is it so impossible for the state to fund what parents want and children need? Why, if we take it for granted that most parents would like to work at least part-time, have we not managed to ensure that the state enters into partnership with us to organise childcare that is truly about care?

But there is one issue where I must part company from these books. Wolf says that she is advocating a "motherhood feminism", a "mothers' lobby". I would argue that what we need is a "parenthood movement", a "parents' lobby". We will never revolutionise the workplace and the attitudes of the state unless men see this as their issue too. In my experience there need be no difference, once birth and breastfeeding are over, between the parenting of the father and the mother.

It will only enshrine our inequalities if we argue that men have not changed and will not change. And it is only when men see the need to move towards a society that celebrates parenting as their struggle too, that the revolution we need will happen.

n.walter@btinternet.com