What does it mean to truly care for one another under a patriarchal state? Helen Charman’s vital new book positions motherhood as a contested site of political struggle both bound to, and shaped by, the British state. Deftly handling well-meaning but limited attempts to ‘make motherhood visible as a political issue’ in contemporary discourses around childcare, women’s careers, and breastfeeding, Mother State blows open ‘the dominant view of mothering […] culturally and politically as one that belongs to the domestic realm, where it can be conveniently ignored’. Instead, Charman’s history from below situates a radical, collective conception of motherhood and care as central to all our lives.
Mother State charts the act of mothering and the condition(s) of motherhood under the shadow of the British state between the 1970s and 2010s. Charman’s opening chapters on the body (birth, suffering, family planning) contextualize subsequent case studies on the role of the state – literally and metaphorically – within the women’s liberation movement, Greenham Common, the 1984-85 British miners’ strike, privatized and precarious housing, and present-day austerity. While the book is primarily concerned with contemporary motherhood in Britain, it also critiques the British state’s colonial and post-colonial impacts, such as the Falklands war’s ‘sons of mothers’ and the organizing work of Irish Republican women.
