Mother State: A Political History of Motherhood: Book Review

Leah Sidi reviews Helen Charman’s Mother State through the lens of her own experience, exploring the cultural narrative of motherhood and its radical potential from the 1970’s to the present.

I have two pairs of glasses. One has pink frames, but neither are rose-tinted. The first pair, the pink frames, are the glasses I wear at home. The lenses are covered in scratches from my daughter’s tiny nails. She tries to eat them almost daily.  The second pair has black frames and clean shiny lenses. These are my work glasses, my academic glasses. I intended to read Helen Charman’s Mother State through my nice clean academic lenses. Inevitably, I ended up using both.

Charman has written an incredibly ambitious book. Mother State: A Political History of Motherhood aims to lay out the intersections between mothering, politics and the state from the Post-War period to the present in Britain and Northern Ireland. It holds open the ambiguities and complexities implicit in this aim. Charman attempts to consider ‘the work of mothering and the feeling of it’ and the political and economic structures that shape these labours and feelings at the same time (Charman, p. xxxii). This is a difficult move, especially for a book whose thrust is historical rather than theoretical. Rejecting an approach which would consider motherhood becoming political at moments of contact with civic society, Charman begins by ‘declar(ing) motherhood an entirely political state’ (Charman, p. xix). Following the work of contemporary feminist voices such as Lola Olufemi, Charman understands the intimate lives of women and children as intertwined with the operations of the state. For example, she writes compellingly of the way in which growing up as a New Labour baby conferred her mother with government welfare payments and conferred young Helen with a strong sense of being valued. Where such welfare provision is materially and imaginatively absent, motherhood is transformed at an intimate level. As Charman beautifully puts it: ‘Without the financial resources to outsource either [care for children or the elderly], love becomes a compulsion’ (Charman, p. xv).

Charman therefore begins with the notion that the state is both a political and a psychic structure, shaping motherhood and childhood. From here, she follows a meandering path which explores the history of maternity services, family planning, social and experimental housing, protest movements, incarceration, and government welfare policies. Historical moments such as the Greenham Common encampment, the miners’ strikes, and the Northern Irish Troubles serve as flashpoints around which Charman returns to the questions of how motherhood responds to the state’s intervention or neglect and, occasionally, how the state has itself been shaped by the political work of mothers. Her arguments encompass popular culture (Call the Midwife, Grange Hill and reality television), poetry (especially Adrienne Rich and Denise Riley), feminist life writing and theatre (Mother Courage, Gay Sweatshop). This sometimes-unwieldy range of material is held together by sustained interest in healthcare and the maternal body, housing and violence.

The maternal body and childbirth are a meeting point between public and private, body and state. As Charman compellingly argues, a narrow focus on service provision of both maternity and family planning services fails to address how far politics reaches into and shapes the experiences of pregnancy and birth. The decision to have a child, to continue with or terminate a pregnancy, and ‘every aspect of pregnancy and early motherhood is shaped by socio-economic factors’ (Charman, p. 6). Charman traces the ways in which medical institutions and proto-natalist policy put the gestating and maternal body to work in service of the state from the eighteenth century onwards. Theorising the gestating and birthing body turned into a factory (following Emily Martin’s argument in The Woman in the Body), Charman traces a history of women’s knowledge being sidelined by a patriarchal medical profession. She finds resistance to this trend in the work of natural birth movements (The National Childbirth Association, the Association of Radical Midwives), proponents of orgasmic birth, and a reading of Mundruscó and Wéber’s (2020) Pieces of a Woman.

I felt unsure about how to write about these chapters on childbirth and maternity and family planning services, which she titles ‘Suffering’ and ‘Choosing’. I bristled when I read them in a café. I took a walk to calm down. The memories of birth too recent in my mind, as my own 9-month old baby waiting for me at home. Charman volunteers as a birth companion and is an excellent scholar so I can’t say she doesn’t know what she’s talking about.

And yet I find these chapters challenging. Charman’s emphasis on natural birth as an anti-patriarchal project feels ideological, in a way that enlists women’s suffering into a supposedly feminist project. The idea promoted in popular culture products such as Call the Midwife that the medicalization of birth can be ‘something which perpetuates and incorporates women’s knowledge’ is, she implies, naïve at best.  Yes, she notes Queen Victoria’s radical decision to take chloroform during labour, and yes, she emphasises that choice and flexibility is more important than a target for reducing Cesarian births.  But I’m reading this with my scratched-up glasses on and a pretty fresh C-section scar on my abdomen and from here it feels like nature-goddess propaganda is only a few steps away. I don’t know what to do with Charman’s suggestion that we recast the experience of childbirth as catharsis, or with her description of transition between the first and second stages of labour as ‘often a moment of extreme beauty and terror’ (Charman, p. 30). That might have been the bit where I vomited all over my partner and they had to cut me open anyway.

Putting my academic glasses back on, I am still stuck on the notion of birth as catharsis. Catharsis for whom? As a theatre scholar, I would argue that catharsis is generated through a relationship between spectacle and audience, and that it functions for the audience and not the performer. Considering birth as cathartic seems to me to fall into an impulse to make birth mean something more than it is, for an audience beyond the birthing person.   In a sense all of the perspectives Charman surveys, (the biomedical model, the protonatalists, the natural birth movement) act as audiences to birth and seek their own catharsis in the extreme nature of this experience. Reading this chapter I found myself yearning for a discourse on birth divorced from the pressure for it to be for anything. It provoked me to think further about whether we need to abandon ideology when talking about birth. If we do, how do we maintain a commitment to progressive politics, and the reduction of maternal health inequities?

This said, the questions of whether childbirth is sublime, cathartic or just kind of sucks take us away from one of Mother State’s most important insights: which is that the wider political and economic conditions in which mothering takes place actually shapes what mothering is and what it could be. Charman navigates the highly practical politics of mothering in different historical moments, emphasising that caring for a child means having somewhere ‘to put a baby’, and access to a world in which it will be healthy and safe (Charman p. 43). She argues after Rich that abortion ‘is only a matter of choice if both options – having a baby and a termination are equally possible’ (Charman, p. 35).  This insight is extended to other areas of mothering throughout the book. The considerable focus on housing throughout (from 1960’s communes to E15 Mums) underpins this insight, and once again demonstrates the extent to which the boundary between public and private does not hold. The state is implicated in housing failures, and housing is essential to mothering, and to the freedom to mother as one chooses.

If I read Mother State largely from the perspective of being a new mother, Charman writes it explicitly from the position of being an adult daughter. Daughtering, the work of it and the feeling of it, is a quiet presence throughout the book. There is an interest in witnessing births and in the load that mothering takes on a body over a lifetime which is compelling. Charman characterises this load through a tender interest in her mother’s knees, which are worn down from years of working as physio and carrying around her children. A year into mothering, I feel this load in my back aches which seem to also be the ghost of my own mother’s chronic back pain. There has not been a day in my life in which my mother has not been in pain. That this fact of my family life might also be political is something I need time to reflect on, and a thought I would not have arrived at without reading Mother State.

Thinking through mothering as a daughter as well as a scholar allows Charman to write from a liminal space, navigating the political, the personal and the intimate without falling into the traps of being either too close to the topic, or too far from it. She doesn’t provide a grand unifying theory of the politics of motherhood. Instead, she plots a route through the messy relationships between mothering and the various operations of the state, with nuance and compassion. I’m very glad I read it. I think you should too.

About the Author

Dr Leah Sidi is a Lecturer in Health Humanities at University College London and co-director of the UCL Centre for Health Humanities. Her research focuses on representations of mental suffering and care in feminist theatre and life writing.  She is the author of Sarah Kane’s Psychic Life: Theatre Thought and Mental Suffering (Methuen Drama, 2023). Follow her work through @leahmilena.bsky.social

References

Chapman, Helen (2024). Mother State: A Political History of Motherhood, Allen Lane.