Mother State: A Political History of Motherhood

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Motherhood is a political state. Helen Charman makes a radical case for what liberated mothering could be, and tells the story of what motherhood has been, from the 1970s to the 2010s.

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 has the potential to pose 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 organise 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.

Review

[Charman] writes with intelligence and generosity, and sprinkles her history with details that are enraging, provocative and, frequently, amusing -- Megan Gibson ― The New Statesman

Mother State blows open the dominant view of mothering … instead Charman’s history from below situates a radical collective conception of motherhood and care as central to all our lives… meticulously researched... Mother State is both a prodigious historical analysis and a sobering one -- Ruth Gilbert ― New Internationalist

This monumental book will inform the future of action and thinking on the politics of motherhood for generations to come. The stunning level of study undergone by Charman draws out crucial new perspectives on the institutions of the UK that have classified motherhood as morally and socially fertile for both symbolic rendering and systematic economic construction. As the state continues to contrive damaging figures of motherhood, this book tirelessly evidences contrary models and resists bad mythologies. All of the narratives, documents, testimonies and policies reviewed here are articulated in brilliantly readable prose with expert understanding, while methodologically ensuring the personal-as-political ethical contract that drives feminist writing. I hope everyone reads this book. It feels like we are in a new golden age of political, cultural and critical writing, with Helen Charman at the forefront ― Holly Pester

Totemic and graceful. A necessary study and intervention into contemporary thinking around care, love and the multifarious ideas of the ‘mother’. Helen Charman writes with such intellectual command, open generosity and nuance: she is a genius ― Rachael Allen

With ease and precision, Charman examines all the waged and unwaged labour that creates mothers as well as the political processes that produce their vexed relationship to the British state. Mother State is at once a sorely needed politicised history of motherhood – sharp and critical – and a tender love letter to her own mother’s knees ― Lola Olufemi

Mother State places Helen Charman alongside Jacqueline Rose, Angela Davis, and Denise Riley in a lineage of psychical and political history that lets us re-see this ubiquitous form of care at a critical juncture. ― Hannah Zeavin

Mother State is a remarkable, revelatory and life-changing book, and an indispensable tool and guide in the ongoing struggle towards radical, liberated and collective care. Its tracing of the ‘stubborn and delicate’ histories of motherhood - as body, state and metaphor - also offers glimpses of possible futures, visions of reconfigured care in which motherhood thrives beyond categories of gender and biology, and the limits of the individual. Charman’s project, both intellectually luminous and deeply affecting, becomes a part of the radical legacies it takes as its subjects, revealing care as a social interdependency: the labour and love of giving birth to one another ― Daisy Lafarge

This book is a magnificent achievement. Mother State radically rethinks the history of modern Britain through the figure and labour of the mother. Helen Charman has pulled off the remarkable feat of compelling storytelling underpinned by rigorous research. Required reading! ― Rebecca May Johnson

In my days of early mothering, this book ― so assuredly, compellingly written, and staggeringly well researched ― is helping me to look outside of myself, to conceive of this state of motherhood as one that connects and binds us all. It is a state of the greatest possibility, the greatest hope ― Harriet Baker

With the weaponisation of gender across the world at present, Mother State is both timely and necessary. Looking at the myths, flaws and dangers of focusing on the idea of the mother as the individual rather than the collective, and the power, strength and visibility that is created when we include those who are all too often at the fringes of the conversation. A vital book for all ― Marie Mitchell

Mother State is a staggeringly well researched body of work, made all the more indispensable by Charman’s burning insights throughout. I’m so incredibly glad it was written, amazed by what it must have taken, and know that I will return to it again and again ― Hannah Regel

About the Author

Helen Charman is a Teaching Fellow in the Department of English Studies at Durham University. 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.

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