In the individualistic culture in which many of us now live – our fractured attention spans bombarded by thought control beyond Orwell’s most fearful imaginings – perspectives informed by wide, deep, reliably corroborated research, which explore the construction and maintenance of what the dominant paradigm holds as “just the way things are”, offer harbours we can pull into for a bearing on what the actual f**k is going on out there.
Mother State: A Political History of Motherhood by Glasgow-based poet, English literature academic and volunteer birth companion Helen Charman offers such a harbour.
Through feminist lenses of cultural representation, psychoanalysis and social history “from below”, Mother State considers “mothering” – both in its traditional sense, plus expanded to include many forms of collective care – as an explicitly political and public act. Here the welfare state is also critiqued as a maternal entity; and mothers can be cruel and neglectful as well as nurturing.
While Mother State focuses on the last 50 years in the UK and “Northern Ireland” (Charman uses the contested term to denote what she elsewhere refers to as “the six counties”), the book is nevertheless of monumental relevance to anyone living in a neo-liberal capitalist society.
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The gift of minds as expansive, synthesising, self-aware and socially responsible as Charman’s is that they can transmit the fruits of their research and thinking beyond academe’s ivory towers into challenging yet digestible books; which can in turn be used by social justice advocates and activists as inspirational maps, educational tools and rallying calls for compassionate social change.
From Mother State, the debut book of this 31-year-old author, it’s clear that Charman – with her insights into power, status and the distribution of resources – is a socialist revolutionary writer and thinker comparable to Denise Riley, Jacqueline Rose and Angela Davis. Charman is ever-mindful of race, class and nationality; economic, immigrant and citizenship status; and sexual orientation and gender identity. There is, however, a stark absence of analysis from the point of view of the “disability sector”, within which are people in our societies who need the most mothering and support.
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Nevertheless, the scope of Mother State is jaw-droppingly impressive. There is much here that I’ve never heard of nor thought about before, even in areas that I’m familiar with, such as the history of reproductive justice.
Charman’s observations on State hypocrisies are often delivered wryly: “Mothers were not permitted to have sexual desires and be good mothers; the only acceptable container for those desires was a heterosexual marriage which produced children, sanctioned by a state that… routinely forced children to remain in violent domestic situations and denied abused mothers divorces.”
Mother State gives a gripping account of the fight for and subsequent demolition of the welfare state, and the demonisation of lone and teen mothers and benefits “scroungers”, begun in 1979 under Margaret Thatcher – the “iron lady” who liked to compare her “tough” (violent) approach to that of a “firm mother”.
With a poet’s linguistic verve, Charman writes: “Thatcher repeatedly emphasised her identity as a wife and mother while refuting and actively hampering the feminist gains that had allowed her to succeed in the first place… Such fantasies of matron had a certain erotic power that legitimised a latent desire to be dominated. It allowed Conservative politicians to adopt the passive postures of an institutional childhood: nasty medicine to be swallowed, but at least you didn’t have to make any decisions yourself.”
Charman brilliantly blasts through the miners’ strike, the Falklands War, Greenham Common, the squatters’ movement, alternative communities and families, the Troubles – including an extraordinarily radical chapter on women’s experience in the six counties – right up to the state’s ongoing austerity policies which today mean that, despite inhabiting the world’s sixth-largest economy, 3.9 million children in the UK live in poverty.
“Despite alleged protection by the NHS,” writes Charman, “researchers who studied the impact of the combined cuts to healthcare, public health and social care between just 2010 and 2015 concluded that they had led to 57,550 more deaths than average.”
By the end of Mother State, I was thirsty for the current-day seeds of collective caring and revolutionary reform that I thought the book had promised at the start. But in what feels like a bit of a rushed ending – or maybe Charman was out of room, given that, with its references, bibliography and index, Mother State weighs in at over 500 pages – sadly, these barely appear.
The radical signposting of Mother State to a more nurturing future is largely in its thrilling retelling of the attempts at community-organised care, and resistance to state violence and austerity, from the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. It’s to this recent history that we must look, in our isolating times, for paths to liberated, interdependent mothering.
