Unloving State

The postwar British state was an everything-but-mother state. It was an employer, a doctor, a builder, and a teacher. Unabashedly pronatalist, the architects of the welfare state wanted to fill cradles — promising the babies placed in them care until they reached their graves. But the act of cradle care itself was left for mothers because mothering was the one role that the state could not adequately perform. A state could not love. And love (or as postwar psychoanalysts would have it, motherlove) was the essential ingredient of a well-adjusted child who would become a democratic, productive citizen. (The rival imaginary of the productive, democratic child was found in the Stalinist USSR, whose care by cold efficient nurses in collective nurseries left an emotional vacuum, to be filled by blind obedience to Mother Russia.)

The state’s veneration of mothers gave them both more and fewer freedoms. Mothers were pushed out of the jobs that many had taken on during wartime, to make way for returning veterans. New, nationalized employers paid male workers a family wage, an income high enough to render the working mother obsolete. Stay-at-home women who made babies were rewarded with child-benefit payments, new council houses, state-funded formula milk, airy maternity units, and even pain relief in childbirth (sometimes administered by nuns).

The Victorians had imagined motherhood as sacrifice. It was not until the mid-twentieth century that motherhood was reconfigured as labor. While the state did not employ mothers (in the way it came to employ the rail-making, dockworking, coal-mining fathers of the era), its ministrations to them recognized mothering as work worthy of reward. Left-wing feminism, with its origins in and against the labor movement, has tended to be preoccupied with the question of mothering-as-work: How should motherhood be compensated? How can we share its labor? Or even, is it possible to mother while also working in some other role? (This question preoccupies liberal feminism, too, with the bourgeois working mother as its most aspirational, and most beleaguered, icon.)

But there is more to motherhood than work. Or as Charman shows in her first chapter on birth, there is more to labor than labor. The working women we meet in Mother State are not stereotyped East End fishwives, rewarded for their work by a teapot-wielding nun (a precursor, surely, to the much-feted postpartum meal of “tea and toast” laid on by the present-day NHS). They are women obliterated, going to pieces. They are women reproducing themselves, reborn as Mother, dying (usually metaphorically) in the process.

Mothering was the death of the self. But for the postwar welfare state, some women had not died enough. They were still what they were before they were Mother: poor, single, black, or (God forbid) employed. Because the state’s ideal of the mother was so narrow, and provisions for anything beyond her so limited, second-wave mothers fought against a state that had (in many cases) lifted their own mothers out of poverty but left them in drudgery. This was a muddled fight: the state was both ally and adversary. Women of the second wave recognized the state not as a mother, but as a patriarch. The provisions laid on for mothers had locked them in the home and enshrined their dependence on the male family wage. So they had to fight simultaneously for the expansion of state provision and the curtailment of its judgment and surveillance. They wanted more support, more care, while at the same time limiting the reach of what black feminists knew as the “uncaring arm of the state.”

One of these fights — unwon, ongoing — was the fight for reproductive justice. Abortion was never legalized in Britain. Rather, what was legalized was the termination of a pregnancy under specific circumstances (namely, injury to the mother’s physical or mental health, defined as broadly or narrowly by two signatory doctors as they choose) up to twenty-four weeks’ pregnancy. Outside these circumstances, women have continued to be prosecuted. In 2023, a mother of three was sentenced to twenty-eight months in prison for taking abortion pills she procured online after the ten-week legal limit for this method of termination (she could not have known this, since she could not access a scan that would have dated the gestational age of the fetus, since at the time Britain was under the COVID-19 lockdown). Today as in the 1960s, poor women remain (three times) more likely to seek abortion. In 1970, the Women’s Liberation Movement at Ruskin College demanded, in the same breath, truly accessible abortion and free twenty-four-hour childcare. True choice could only exist in a world in which all options were equally accessible to all, in a state which gave them more and judged them less.

The Future of All Our Children

For reproductive rights, child benefits, and accessible childcare, mothers fought against a father state that was both tight-fisted and overbearing (as patriarchs often are). But maternal claims have always transcended the rights of mothers. We meet mothers fighting for a liberated Northern Ireland, for Coal Not Dole, against the destruction of the planet via nuclear holocaust or rising seas. Are mothers better tooled for the fight? Is self-obliterating maternal love more powerful when it is harnessed not just in defense of a child but of the world they inhabit?

At the yearslong anti-nuclear-weapons protest camps on Greenham Common, maternity framed women’s struggle. At the culmination of a march from Cardiff to Greenham in September 1981, the Welsh peace-campaign group Women for Life on Earth handed a letter to the commander of the military base that read, “Some of us have brought our babies with us this entire way. We fear for the future of these children. We fear for the future of all our children.” When the first nuclear warheads arrived in Greenham in 1983, women at the camp staged a teddy bears’ picnic, juxtaposing the playfulness of the children they claimed to speak for with the warmongers they fought.

The teddy bears stormed the base. Police chased women clad in fur suits away from warheads, arresting some and clubbing others. This encounter with the uncaring arm of the state was, to many of the white peace activists at the women’s camps, a revelation. Encounters with the police and short-term incarcerations in Holloway Prison drew some into a critique of the forms of state violence beyond bombs. Black women were rightly skeptical of a peace movement that, as the landmark 1985 book The Heart of the Race: Black Women’s Lives in Britain argued, had “only just discovered imperialism . . . only worried about it because it affects their particular lifestyle.”

In past months, I have pushed my children in a buggy behind women carrying dolls wrapped in shrouds beneath Palestinian flags. “Children’s blocs” are visible, but marches are miles long. Perhaps it is not that motherhood gives us a particular tenacity. Instead, motherhood has simply placed us in legitimate proximity to an object of universal pity: the child. But our idea of the child as universal is based on its imagined distance from politics. What would it mean to recognize not just mothers, but their children, as political?

In the 1970s, feminist theorist Denise Riley attempted to recover a left-wing politics of childhood in her poetry pamphlet, Marxism for Infants, which Charman quotes. (“If Marxism does not have to do with infants, and visa-versa, then there’s not much hope for either infants or Marxism.”) But often those who endow a child with politics would thereby deny their status as a child: a phenomenon Palestinian scholar Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian has called “unchilding.” If it feels transgressive to imagine a radical maternal politics, then how much more so to imagine a radical politics for the child? We see little of children in Mother State. Its babies are shadowy, haunting, sometimes ghosts. A faint line on a pregnancy test that never reappears, a wrapped bundle in a stage play, a many-mothered infant passed around a commune. This shrouded doll has no visible face.

Conservative Institution?

If Charman has a main character, it is Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher is the engine in the plot that drives us from the care for the Call the Midwife–era working-class mothers to the neglect of their contemporary counterparts in Newham. Mothers, and their children, were the first victims of the neoliberal politics that were cast in maternal terms. Tightening the family purse strings, giving the bitter medicine: mother knows best.

Luring other mothers’ sons into the Falklands and ironing her husband Denis’s shirts in the House of Commons, Thatcher stands in for all conservative mothering. Her self-styling as “mummy,” by turns comical and grotesque, looms so large as to obscure the landslide of women who voted for her. Until recent elections bucked a century-old historic trend, British women have been more likely to vote Conservative and (where data exists) even more likely to do so if they are mothers. If there is a political quality to motherhood, it could as easily be that of the sharp-elbowed middle classes. We do not meet this Conservative mother in Mother State, perhaps because this mother only needs to be political briefly at the ballot box. Otherwise, hers are the invisible politics of the nuclear family, of femininity, the status quo.

Historians of British conservatism sometimes accuse those of us who write about the Left of writing the histories of nice-things-that-we-like, which are inattentive to power — stories of how change was resisted (often unsuccessfully) but not how change was made. Mother State is not that. It is an overdue corrective. Mothering is only a conservative institution if we look to those mothers who had something to conserve. When communities are under attack, even the most traditional configurations of family life begin to fragment. In the 1980s, the close-knit and self-reliant families of striking miners found themselves shunned by parents and siblings (“Arthur Scargill has broken me and my mother in two”; “They said we all want sending to Russia”). But they found “new families” as they dined and raised children communally in Women Against Pit Closures canteens. When everyone was struggling, seeking help ceased to be shameful. Structures to meet need already existed: “If anyone needs a babysitter, it’s no problem. The bairns [kids] know them all and will go with them.”

Radical Motherhood

From the shadows of the Madonna, Northern Irish Catholic motherhood emerged as the most radical of all. In Republican communities, having a child did not strengthen a beatific desire for peace, but the resolve to fight a brutal state. For the mothers of imprisoned sons and daughters, this fight was not just for, but alongside, their children. The mother of Republican hunger striker Mairéad Nugent told the Morning Star, “I just cannot imagine what they will look like after a forty-day hunger strike . . . but I know my daughter is determined to win or die.” Resistance rewired the motherly instinct: her duty was not to protect her daughter but facilitate her bravery.

Radical motherhood resisted state neglect as well as state tyranny. Before Thatcher, the economic crises of the 1970s had already led to dwindling housing stock. Evicted mothers who became squatters experimented with new configurations of kinship and care. So too did women fleeing the violence of husbands, facilitated by a patriarchal state that effectively rendered women male property until they could legally hold credit and capital starting in 1975. It was easier for mothers to be radical when they were gaining support, rather than giving up status. While collective care arrangements flourished in women’s shelters, in more intentionally organized communes, such arrangements quickly became fraught. Mothers living in communes might agree, in theory, that all members had a right to parent their child. In practice, however, birth mothers wanted to be with their babies. And the children wanted to be cared for by their own mothers.

Is the desire to possess inherent in what it is to be, or have, a mother? I’ve often wondered why mothers fantasize about the temporary abandonment of responsibility in hospitals, and not the permanent dispersal of responsibility in communes. Perhaps we imagine that when we share mothering, we are less the Mother. Rather than write off the category mother — with its inherent possession of and by the child — Charman wants to disperse it.  She draws on the black feminist tradition of motherful (not fatherless) communities to imagine a babyful world. One in which we are as attentive to our interdependence, as well as to the total dependence of the baby. In this vision, we longer need to enclose maternal love; care flows along “lines of possession that cannot be so easily drawn.”

What if we imagined babies as more like people, rather than people as more like babies? If we grappled with the personhood — even the politics — of the infant, then we might be better-tooled to care for adults over whom we have no power. Charman asks, “Can we turn the psychic echo of the baby crying in the nursery into the sound that knits us all together?” I hope so, but first we must give up our desire to possess the baby, to possess each other, altogether.