What would it mean to acknowledge that motherhood is a political concept? Unlike other aspects of everyday life – exercise, say, or rest – motherhood is already visible, to a certain extent, as a political “issue”. In recent months, for example, there has been increasing coverage of the particular toll the pandemic is taking on mothers and primary caregivers, although much of this reporting tends to conflate the two categories, or group mothers as uniformly heterosexual: the opposite number to fathers, who aren’t pulling their weight. In terms of political representation – such as, in parliament – motherhood, as a lived experience for MPs, hovers toward the top of discourse around equality, from Andrea Leadsom’s now infamous comments during the 2016 Tory leadership election, that being a mother gave her a greater “stake” in the future of the country in comparison to Theresa May who has no children, to Stella Creasey’s campaign for her own maternity rights in the workplace.
The fight for fair employment practices for mothers is fundamentally political, and it’s true that the pandemic is entrenching existing inequalities at a terrifying speed: the legal advice service Pregnant then Screwed have experienced a tenfold increase in requests since the beginning of the pandemic. Yet this focus on discrete elements of maternal experience as isolated politicised moments falls short of what it would mean for motherhood to be understood as a political concept in its entirety: it still cleaves to a traditional understanding of the public and the private as entirely separate spheres, connected only via the experiences of individuals who happen to have children or become pregnant. It suggests that motherhood becomes political only at these moments of contact with civil society, and that the pandemic, in contracting all public life to the home, has temporarily dissolved the boundaries between the two.
Content from our partners
