The meaning of motherhood in a world that devalues, judges and polices it

On March 8th, International Women’s Day, Irish citizens voted in a referendum on whether or not to replace the so-called “woman in the home” clause in the Irish Constitution.

This clause, which dates from 1937, specifies that: “The State recognises that by her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved.” It continues, “The State shall, therefore, endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home.”

While enforcing damaging gender roles, there did seem to be a good intention within the clause: to acknowledge the importance of domestic and care work, and to ensure that families could afford to live on one full-time salary while still having an adult committed to the endless work of running a household and minding children. However, this “endeavour” was never meaningfully enforced, and instead the statute was used against women to assert that they should be excluded from the workplace in order to focus on domestic “duties”.

When more women began entering the workforce, domestic and care work should have been divided up equally in the home – but it never was. Current research shows that even in modern feminist marriages between men and women, women still do more domestic and care work, even while working full-time.

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This regressive trap that forces more unpaid labour on to women and pushes them back into the home is not accidental, and it has not gone unnoticed. Last year the National Women’s Council in Ireland called on the Government to tackle the cost-of-living crisis for women through investment in public services, including a public childcare model. “Women continue to have fewer resources, less wealth, lower incomes, greater unpaid care responsibilities, which limits their choices,” the council wrote in a statement.

Feminist writers in the UK and the United States are also calling for change, noting the myriad issues facing mothers, issues that are financial but also cultural, as we constantly create new metrics by which to judge mothers. These days, so-called momfluencers create content in their perfect homes and post photographs of their Michelin-inspired school lunches, in the process turning motherhood into a competitive sport.

Movements such “intensive parenting” demand high parental involvement and a focus on numerous extracurricular activities, which can be expensive and time-consuming. The housing and rental crisis, as well as a shifting social landscape, means that mothers no longer have the social supports they once did, and are now doing the work of the “village” alone. Meanwhile, unachievable beauty standards bombard women with the message that ageing is not acceptable and constant self-improvement is necessary.

Amanda Montei is the author of Touched Out: Motherhood, Misogyny, Consent and Control. She was working as a writer and college lecturer in California when she had her first child. She immediately found herself sucked into the trap of modern motherhood, finding herself unable to work while minding her daughter at home, but realising that any work she could get would not be lucrative enough to afford the necessary childcare.

In the US, much like in Ireland, childcare costs remain high while pay remains low because policymakers don’t recognise childcare as a shared public necessity to raise future engaged citizens and workers. Society depends on the unpaid work of women, but relies on this work being categorised as natural and inherently feminine, because recognising it as work would demand respect, protection and financial compensation, which would lead to power. As Montei writes, “Every aspect of society was designed for men with wives”, but “Wife and Mother are forms of work, not identity positions.”

Montei writes about how much of being a woman and a mother is being pressured into certain experiences only for the language of “choice” to be weaponised against them. Mothers who find themselves emotionally, financially, socially and systemically unsupported can’t complain as they “knew what they were getting into”, and many stay-at-home mothers are presented as having made a lifestyle choice rather than being forced out of work due to a lack of sustainable alternatives.

In Touched Out, Montei notes how during Covid, 1.6 million women in the United States were forced out of work. Many of these women were mothers, as mothers on average earn less than men and single women. These mothers were expected to take on caregiving responsibilities for children who were suddenly home full time.

Montei became a mother for the first time in the era of #MeToo. As she absorbed endless stories about women being abused and violated, she noticed how the language of “choice” that we use to disempower mothers is also weaponised when it comes to sex and consent. Touched Out sees Montei reflect on previous experience she had with men that were nonconsensual, or consensual but still distressing – experiences Montei thinks we still don’t have language for.

There’s a sense that husbands are entitled to the bodies of their wives

—  Amanda Montei

Montei describes feeling used and betrayed after consenting to interactions with men. She had experiences where “the feeling of getting what I wanted was immediately tainted by what I hadn’t known before consenting”.

This sense of betrayal echoes through the book as the ideals of motherhood that Montei had been promised were replaced with a much starker, harder, lonelier reality.

“We all grow up hearing that motherhood is a pinnacle,” says Montei, speaking on Zoom in between her teaching hours. “Then you get into it and it’s this endless cycle where you need to do more work, more labour, and you’re never good enough. Then you’re isolated and alone and struggling with depression. And no one’s there for you. There’s no social support, economic support. So yeah, it’s a real sense of betrayal.

“I quote Pooja Lakshmin in the book. She said that in the US we’re attached to this idea of burnout. But she says, it’s not burnout, It’s betrayal. It’s a betrayal of the systems that are supposed to be supporting us. And obviously with sexual experiences, like the kind that I write about in the book, the sense of betrayal is more interpersonal. But I think it’s also valuable to look at how both of those forms of betrayal are emerging from this broader idea of entitlement to women’s bodies.”

The title of Montei’s book comes from how mothers can feel after they have been touched by children all day – that they have a lack of bodily autonomy.

For Montei, this reached fever pitch during the pandemic as she was the default parent during the day, and had a partner who expected her to gamefully have sex when he came home from work. As Montei grappled with parenthood while bearing witness to women all over the world sharing their stories of being violated by men, she began to question the ways in which society encourages women to constantly prioritise everyone else above their needs and desires.

“New parents pass on ethics or a set of values to children,” she says. “There’s a scene in my book where I’m trying to talk to my daughter about consent and autonomy and then I’m realising that I didn’t feel very free in my own life or like I had a freedom of movement or identity.”

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Touched Out also explores the societal prioritising of men’s sexual desire. In her book, Montei notes how new mothers are targeted with “listicles of tips for reviving post-baby sex drive,” whereas men are targeted with articles “addressing husbands as though they are impatient children sitting on their hands, trying desperately to hold back a force beyond their control.”

“There’s a sense that husbands are entitled to the bodies of their wives,” says Montei. “Of course, we see this on extreme levels in terms of violence against women in domestic settings, but we see it also in ways we take less seriously, like missives to women telling them ‘Don’t forget your husband when you have a child’, because the man has to stay at the centre.”

Montei is hopeful that progressive resistance and redefinition will help in the movement towards genuine equality. “After publishing this book, I received so many notes from readers who read it, then gave it to their partners,” she says. “Some decided to stop having sex for a little while and just explore their own sense of desire. Or they have just been more articulate with their partners about like, ‘I don’t like when you touch me like that, or when you’re ogling me like that’.

“They started to allow themselves to say no, but also to advocate for their own needs and desires because they could see the possibility of something better. There’s been so much great writing on marriage since #MeToo, so I do think women are redefining the terms of long-term relationships.”

As for systemic change that supports mothers in particular, Montei notes that women’s anger is often dismissed, but the anger of mothers is even more so, as the cultural idea of motherhood is a person who is constantly caring for and nurturing others. To provide real support to mothers, we have to listen to them.

“Women who are full of rage – or just sad and falling apart,” writes Montei, “are rarely seen as responding with reason to [modern society’s] unique isolating, intensive parenthood models, or the historical depreciation of their round-the-clock work in the home, much less to this misogynistic culture in which they grew up.”

Motherhood and feminism: Four essential reads

While works such as Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born and Silvia Federici’s Wages Against Housework remain hugely influential in the area of motherhood and feminism, some new books are tackling the pressures facing women and mothers today.

Matrescence by Lucy Jones

In a deeply personal investigation, science and nature writer Lucy Jones draws on neuroscience, evolutionary biology, psychoanalysis, economics and ecology to show how much the maternal mind, brain and body change over the experience of pregnancy and motherhood – and how much these changes have been ignored and undervalued. As Jones summarises, “The closest I had ever been to death, to birth, to growth, to the co-conscious, to rapture, to rupture – was, according to the world around me, boring”. Arguing for social recognition of this time of change, as happens with adolescence, this creative and unexpected blend of memoir and critical analysis is personal and political, and feels radical in form and scope.

Momfluenced: Inside the Maddening, Picture-Perfect World of Mommy Influencer Culture by Sara Petersen

Petersen’s book explores the decidedly 21st-century issue of social media, and how motherhood is not only turned into public performance, but advertising opportunity, preying on women’s desire to be the perfect mother to influence them to buy, buy, buy. With insight into her own relationship to momfluencer culture, as well as cultural analysis and interviews with psychologists and tech experts, Petersen offers searing insight into the way motherhood has been packaged into a white, middle-class, heteronormative and very expensive endeavour.

Mum Rage by Minna Dublin

A blend of memoir and research with testimony from more than 50 mothers, Dublin’s book explores the ways in which society devalues women, then polices their anger. Dubin writes about the relentless pressures that tell “mothers we must throw ourselves full throttle into our mothering job, researching, planning, contacting, scheduling, overseeing, washing, tidying, folding, driving, thanking, inviting, hosting, cooking, preparing, and sharing”. She writes that rage is simultaneously “a natural reaction to being systematically stripped of one’s power” and a source of “power in its potential for individual and cultural change”.

How Not To Exclude Artist Mothers (And Other Parents) by Hettie Judah

Using evidence-based research and first-hand accounts, Judah explores the dilemma facing artists who want to have a family, noting the particularly precarious reality of being an artist, which often doesn’t offer stable employment, maternity leave, pay rises and pensions, and relies on relationships and relevance. Judah explores these structural hindrances and issues a rallying cry for a restructuring of how the art world works so that we can benefit from the work of artist parents.