By the summer of 1978, not one but two conception stories had made UK headlines that year. The bigger story was that of Louise Brown, the world’s first “test tube baby”, who was conceived via in vitro fertilisation after her parents, Lesley and John, discovered that Lesley’s fallopian tubes were blocked and sought help from a team of doctors in Oldham. Though there had been some public hostility to the Brown pregnancy, once baby Louise was born that July, reassuringly healthy and “normal”, the UK press celebrated the feat of science. While it’s very easy to imagine that first procedure being framed as an unnatural, freakish intervention, IVF was instead heralded as an “all-British miracle”, as the Manchester Evening News put it.
Earlier that year, the Evening Standard published an investigation into Dr David Sopher, a gynaecologist in Belgravia who had been artificially inseminating lesbian patients at his private practice. Referring to Sopher as “Dr Strangelove”, the report falsely claimed he was acting against the advice of the British Medical Association. Artificial insemination wasn’t new, but the revelation that Sopher was performing the procedure on lesbians – rather than married couples where the husband was struggling with infertility – prompted condemnation. The Conservative MP Rhodes Boyson advocated banning the procedure for lesbians, claiming that to “bring children into this world without a natural father is evil”. Another Tory MP, Jill Knight, insisted that while she was “not concerned with the lifestyle of the lesbians”, she was alarmed, as “a child needs above all a normal and natural family”.
The starkly different portrayals of these two cases of reproductive intervention by the press is a tidy example of how the idea of nature in relation to motherhood has long been exploited. It’s a preoccupation that still underpins many of today’s debates, from birth (the immense pressure on women to have “natural” births, meaning labour without pain relief or medical interventions) to feeding (the “breast is best” debate). In the cultural imagination, child-rearing remains largely the domain of the “naturally caring” mother, though it is politically preferable within a nuclear family rather than done by the widely demonised “single mum”. But who defines what, precisely, is natural? And who is served by such definitions?
These are some of the foundational questions explored in Helen Charman’s Mother State, a history of Britain and Northern Ireland over the past 50 years in which she maps the political, social and cultural landscape that mothers have been forced to navigate. She finds that motherhood is repeatedly politicised in order to serve an agenda, often reducing the mother to “a weapon to be deployed in someone else’s argument”.
Implicit in all the discussions about nature is the sorting of women into two categories: good mothers and bad mothers. In many cases the women deemed bad mothers are those already stigmatised in some way – for being the wrong class, race or sexuality. A good mother, meanwhile, is a “conveniently wholesome container” for “whatever doctrine is poured into her”. But, as Charman writes, “Nurture, care, the creation of human life – all immediate associations with mothering – have more to do with power, status and the distribution of resources, both by mothers and for them, than we like to admit.”
Mother State argues that motherhood is not merely politicised, but needs to be understood as a political state in itself. Charman writes that the campaigns of recent decades – on the politics of breastfeeding or the rising costs of childcare – are worthy but atomised, and “fall short of understanding motherhood in its entirety”. Just as feminism made us acknowledge that what had once been considered private and natural was actually public and socially constructed, motherhood is due for a similar awakening. And yet, in politics and culture, it remains stubbornly in the domestic realm “where it can be conveniently ignored”.
Charman’s book is an attempt to correct that. She writes with intelligence and generosity, and sprinkles her history with details that are enraging, provocative and, frequently, amusing. (She notes of Marie Stopes, the early-20th-century women’s rights activist, that she was an unabashed eugenicist who “disinherited her son for marrying a woman who wore glasses”.) It’s also ambitious. Charman explains that she selected the title as it encapsulated a number of things she hoped to explore: the state of being a mother; the relationship between mothers and the state; the politicisation of motherhood by the state; and, perhaps most challengingly, “the conception of the welfare state as some kind of maternal entity in and of itself”.
Margaret Thatcher looms over a significant portion of the book. Her policies, like the austerity of later Tory governments, were disastrous for working mothers – she sneered at the idea of “crèche children” – though she used her identity as an ambitious mother to shape her political persona. Yet Charman also highlights the mothers who have been erased from certain moments of history: those who organised to support the miner’s strike in the 1980s; the republican mothers sent to prison during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Mother State weaves these individual stories into a wider history in order to show how all mothers function in some way as cogs of the machinery of the state.
I am somewhat embarrassed to admit that I found myself mentally chafing at times against this idea. Though I suspect I fall within Charman’s target audience politically, after a lifetime of social and cultural conditioning, an urgent, jealous part of my brain insists on viewing my own relationship to motherhood – not just my experience of loving and caring for my young daughter, but also my memories of being loved and cared for by my own mother – as not only wholly personal but akin to sacred.
Charman reckons with this tension. When recounting the complicated attempts at communal living in the People in Common cooperative in east Lancashire in the 1970s, Charman notes that upending entrenched cultural narratives around care often “endangers the specialness of the category of mother”. She acknowledges the need to unburden women from the sole responsibility of mothering without denying the individual’s experience “or submitting to the weaponisation of such feelings in the service of the status quo”. (She also writes movingly of her own mother, Jane, a former physiotherapist for the NHS who raised two children on her own with help from the welfare state under New Labour.)
I recognise this weaponisation, something that mothers often willingly partake in, forming cages “for ourselves and each other out of obligation and expectation, which we call duty or love”. I recall the crushing guilt I felt when I returned to work after maternity leave, sharply exacerbated by the choices I saw others making (relatively few of the mothers I know returned to full-time work after having children) and the unsubtle message from the state that I still belonged at home since subsidised childcare wasn’t offered until a child turns three years old. No one, after all, wants to be a bad mother. But my personal choice was so clouded by economic reality and a sense of competing obligations (to my family, to myself) that it ceased to feel like a choice at all. I know the same is true for many women. And yet the guilt persists – a cage that it feels impossible to escape.
Collective political organisation is how Charman imagines disrupting the status quo for mothers, “where so much is expected of them and so little provided”. It is abundantly clear who benefits from transferring the weight of responsibility of motherhood on to individuals – “a government and an economy reliant on the denial of collective responsibility” – and, more importantly, who suffers from that transfer.
Charman argues we can reject this transferral, though how, precisely, that rejection and the necessary, widespread political organisation would work in practice isn’t spelled out. Near the end of the book, Charman acknowledges that she is committed to “utopian thinking”, in spite of the grinding challenges facing mothers. Sceptics might not be swayed by such idealism. But by reconceiving motherhood as not a natural state but a political one, we are taking up an “emancipatory tool” which can be used to try to break out of the prison of obligation and expectation. Will it be enough to radically transform the state of motherhood? Perhaps not. But it’s far better to pick up our own tools than to be used as someone else’s weapon.
Helen Charman appears at Cambridge Literary Festival, in association with the New Statesman, on 24 November
Mother State: A Political History of Motherhood
Helen Charman
Allen Lane, 512pp, £30
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[See also: The women that books built]
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This article appears in the 28 Aug 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Trump in turmoil