Mother State: A Political History of Motherhood

(Hardback)

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A radical case for motherhood as a political state, and what liberated mothering could be When we talk about motherhood and politics together, we usually talk about isolated moments - the policing of breastfeeding, or the cost of childcare. But this is not enough- we need to understand motherhood itself as an inherently political state, one that poses a serious challenge to the status quo. In Mother State, Helen Charman uses this provocative insight to write a new history of Britain and Northern Ireland. Beginning with Women's Liberation and ending with austerity, the book follows mothers' fights for an alternative future. Alongside the mother figures that loom large in British culture, from Margaret Thatcher to Kat Slater, we meet communities of lesbian squatters, anti-nuclear campaigners, the wives of striking miners and teenage mothers protesting housing cuts- groups who believed that if you want to nourish your children, you have to nourish the world around them too. Here we see a world where motherhood is not a restrictive identity but a state of possibility. 'Mother' ceases to be an individual responsibility, and becomes an expansive collective term to organize under, for people of any gender, with or without children of their own. It begins with an understanding- that to mother is a political act.

Author Bio

Helen Charman is a Fellow and Assistant College Lecturer in English at Clare College, University of Cambridge. Her critical writing has been published in the Guardian, The White Review, Another Gaze, and The Stinging Fly among others. As a poet, Charman was shortlisted for the White Review Poet's Prize in 2017 and for the 2019 Ivan Juritz Prize for Creative Experiment, and has published four poetry pamphlets, most recently In the Pleasure Dairy. Charman volunteers as a birth companion in Glasgow.