Review | Mother State: A Political History of Motherhood

Motherhood isn’t just personal, it’s political. Kika Hendry reviews Mother State, and how the state shapes who gets to mother, who suffers, and who survives — and what a liberated future could look like.

Considering motherhood raises a critical political question: what does it mean to give and sustain life? What does it mean when the circumstances and ability to give and sustain life are denied? In Helen Charman’s Mother State: A Political History of Motherhood, mothering correctly assumes life-or-death stakes and a key role at the centre of state and capitalist processes.

Sex, pregnancy, childcare, and reproductive justice are part of the fabric of all lives, not only for mothers. Whether or not you might want a baby (and when, and how, and how many) is not a discreet personal question but a political one which runs along all axes of class, race, and age. Charman asks ‘What do you want? Why do you want it? How do you know?’ And, – what happens when your desires do or do not align with the desires of the state?

Mother State analyses the ways in which mothering has been made possible and impossible in Britain from 1945 to the present, and the changing ways that the figure of the ‘mother’ has been used as a potent metaphor. It is essential reading for deepening our understanding of the politics of the British state. It also functions as a kind of revised history of resistance in Britain and Ireland: placing women’s liberation at the centre rather than the margins of the frame. Charman works towards ‘a balance between a belief in what liberated motherhood could be and an accurate representation of what it has been.’

This accurate representation portrays how women have borne the brunt of a state which can be directly and indirectly violent. Charman lays bare how the state can only provide viable care to some at the cost of others by maintaining internal and external borders, warfare, and dividing between those “deserving” or “undeserving” of welfare benefits.

This is the conflict at the heart of Mother State: that Charman’s life, as the child of a single mother, has been made possible by Child State Support, but that the government that provided her family with financial assistance in 1997 also strip-searched a pregnant Roisin McAliskey seventy-five times in four months, holding her without specific charge. The mechanism that can sustain life also takes it away. In looking back over the history of the welfare state, she writes from this current moment in which austerity and neoliberalism becomes increasingly entrenched, where housing and childcare provision ranges from ‘insufficient’ to ‘actively punitive.’ 

In moving towards a liberated and inclusive definition of mothering, Charman recounts the different ways in which the government has prescribed what a family can and can’t be. From 1988 under Thatcher’s Section 28, queer relationships were ‘pretend family relationships,’ and in the 1980s ninety per cent of lesbian mothers lost custody of their children. Sex workers’ children were taken away from them, as sex workers were defined as bad mothers in the eyes of the law. By the same hand, single people suffered when only married couples with children were able to receive social housing. A poster produced by 1970s squatters reads: ‘SINGLE PEOPLE NEED HOUSES TOO.’

As Charman notes, the demands of caring for infants can make mothers particularly vulnerable. Considering feminism in the late twentieth century, she highlights the complicated position of mothers in working against the state: ‘if you are more in need of an anti-capitalist way of life, you are less able to resist the pressures of capitalism itself.’ Debates around Wages for Housework opens this question, considering what’s worse: financial dependence on a specific man or on a patriarchal state?

The question of universal income is also central in considering the choice of abortion. Charman draws attention to the failures of the phrase “the right to choose” when, if a young and poor woman decided to have a baby there would be no resources to feed, clothe, and shelter the baby. Is that still a free choice? As she writes: ‘economic precarity – itself unevenly spread along racial lines – is one of the most significant factors that govern reproductive decisions in twenty-first century Britain.’

Charman’s writing is most empathetic in listening to the voices of teenage mothers and what they actually want and need. A belief that teenagers, young single women, or people in poverty would give birth to children whose lives are not worth living means that they are not encouraged to give birth. A latent or active encouragement of abortion reaches dangerously close to a eugenic position. Of course, accessible abortions, sex education, and reproductive health advice are good things, but as Charman points out, they are not apolitical: ‘there is no such thing as a straightforwardly liberatory technology.’

At the same time, emphatically, abortions on demand are essential to acknowledging a woman’s right to personhood – to decide what happens to her own body, rather than, as Sophie Lewis writes, having ‘our care ripped from us.’

In describing a litany of offenses carried out by the British state – including a compelling and angry chapter on the Troubles – it might be expected that the narrative resolves into an anti-state position. Charman doesn’t explicitly articulate this, though she does suggest there are widening ‘cracks’ in the stability of the British state. The book onboards readers to a radical (if not explicitly revolutionary) perspective, doing the work of rigorous feminist consciousness-raising. It might be most revelatory for readers who start where Charman’s teenage self was, identifying with Carolyn Steedman’s line: ‘I love the state, because it has loved me.’

Kate Tobin notes in her review that Marx is scarcely mentioned, though Charman’s conception of liberated mothering and a babyful world shares much with the Marxist call to ‘abolish the (bourgeois) family’. ‘Abolish the family!‘ calls not for an end of infants and love, but of private patriarchal worlds and the inheritance of capital. Although Charman’s ideas of liberated mothering don’t highlight this theoretical antecedent, the book engages with a practical history of alternative ways of living and raising children, quoting substantially from women engaging in struggle.

Charman’s method is close attention to the voices and words of ordinary people fighting oppression: from miner’s wives and mothers forming Women Against Pit Closures (WAPC) during the 1984-5 strike, to E15 Mums fighting for adequate housing in Newham, London at a time of austerity cuts and huge spending on the Olympics in 2012. This attentiveness makes the book a moving and compelling read, although moving from granular detail to granular detail sometimes loses the thread of Charman’s own voice.

Some of the best moments are when struggles speak to one another: in opposition and support. I love the story of WAPC arriving at Greenham Common in 1984 to give solidarity to the women camping on the land to oppose nuclear armament, sharing knowledge on resisting police violence and keeping warm. Anne Scargill describes bringing her own lard, frying pan, and bacon, and how the smell of bacon butties would lure the long-haired vegetarian women out of the forest to secretly devour one, each asking her ‘don’t tell the others please.’ 

On the other hand, the Women’s Liberation Movement, which had made radical demands for abortion on demand and free 24 hour nurseries in 1970, refused to accept the imprisonment of republican fighters, and their subsequent ‘no-wash’ campaign to highlight the brutal conditions of Armagh jail, where women were physically abused, as a feminist cause.

As the chapter on ‘communal experiments’ makes clear, there isn’t anything specific about having a uterus, or being attached by umbilical cord that makes one a mother. It is not an untouchable, transcendental state: it takes effort and like everything, can be learnt by ‘repetition, proximity, commitment and desire.’ Charman’s conclusion that mothering occurs in the constant bending down of the knees – not the uterus – also creates a trans-inclusive (and celebratory!) narrative.

Volunteering as a birthing companion in Glasgow, Charman enacts her commitments to utopian thinking and hopes for liberated mothering. She inhabits an intimate maternal position for strangers going through the intense experience of birth where they would have had to experience the cold institutional space alone: not leaving, holding their hand, supporting their baby. This work – and her writing – identifies the institutional space as a potentially threatening one, and ourselves as capable of caring deeply and well for strangers. 

Mother State is published by Penguin Books.