‘Mother State’ Reveals the Political Stakes of Motherhood

Helen Charman is worried about her mother’s knees. They are ‘ruined’ – partly from bearing two children, but also from decades of working as a physiotherapist for the NHS, supplemented by cleaning jobs. (‘Pregnancy, like cleaning, fucks up your knees.’) Being a single parent employed in an undervalued caring profession meant a triple shift – with a triple strain on her cartilage.

Mother State is Charman’s first non-fiction book; in opening with this personal detail about her own mother’s body, the poet and academic is making a political intervention. ‘Not all maternal stories begin in the womb,’ she asserts. ‘It seems to me that it is my mother’s knees that are the true record of mine and my brother’s existence.’ While the noun ‘motherhood’ means the state of being a mother, the verb ‘to mother’ is to perform acts of care for others, whether we gave birth to them or not.

As Charman notes, motherhood has become a ‘zeitgeist’ topic in recent years. However, the discourse is too often limited to the concerns of ‘middle class women who work’ – a category into which discussions about whether having babies is a barrier to creating art or writing books arguably fall. Early on, Charman interrogates the current cultural fixation with this idea. She cites a scene from the 2017 television adaptation of Chris Kraus’s novel I Love Dick (1997), in which two men appear as Chris floats in a pool. ‘I’m your miscarriage,’ says one. ‘I’m your abortion,’ says the other. ‘Did you get to do everything you wanted?’

‘In the case of women artists like Chris,’ Charman explains, ‘there is a historically confirmed dichotomy between making babies and making art.’ In other words, if you don’t reproduce you’d better produce, and vice versa. This is the assumption that underlies many recent books exploring maternity, including Sheila Heti’s Motherhood (2018), in which the author grapples with the decision over whether to have a child or not.

Other books have approached motherhood from a political perspective – the 2014 anthology Revolutionary Mothering, for instance, centred the voices of marginalized mothers of colour and argued for the radical potential of mothering. At the same time, there has been a publishing boom in motherhood novels, memoirs and self-help guides focused on the isolated experiences of individual mothers. Purely personal accounts have their own value, but often lacking are explanations of how wider societal forces have shaped them, as well as stories of mothering collectively. Charman declares motherhood ‘an entirely political state’, and sets about reckoning with the uneasy relationship between maternity and the state – that is to say, the governing body of Britain and Northern Ireland.

At almost 500 pages, Mother State is ambitious and impressive in its breadth and depth. Part cultural, critical and psychoanalytical study, part social and political history, it weaves together analyses of an expansive range of sources, from the British television period drama Call the Midwife (2012–ongoing) to Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida (1981). Charman writes compellingly, whether about debates within the Women’s Liberation Movement regarding how to engage with the welfare state in the 1970s, the pivotal role of the Women Against Pit Closures in resisting former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (the self-styled ‘Iron Mother’ who, Charman notes, is ‘this book’s own bad mother’) in the 1980s or the Focus E15 single mothers’ fight against their eviction from an east London hostel during the austerity era of the 2010s.

Charman was born in the middle of the 50-year period her book covers and she perceives herself to be ‘a New Labour baby’. Not only did she start school in 1997, the year former Prime Minister Tony Blair won his landslide election victory, she was also raised by single mum : ‘There was a sense that a single mother could be a good thing, was even, perhaps, a symbol of the new girl power thing.’ Yet, while ‘good’ single mothers, such as Princess Diana, were celebrated, ‘bad’ single mothers (those reliant on benefits) were pilloried.

In 2008, the artist Tracey Emin added a more thoughtful contribution to the conversation, creating Baby Things for the Folkestone triennial. Bronze sculptures of lost baby items – a bootie, a cardigan, a teddy bear – were placed around the town, a place that has historically had a high teenage pregnancy rate. Charman quotes Emin discussing the artwork: ‘There are some girls out there […] who just don’t want to be girls; they want to grow up […] they want to get away from their childhood as quickly as possible.’

By the time the Labour Party was voted out of office in 2010, there were 600,000 fewer children living in households with less than half the median income. However, one of the first things Blair’s government had proposed was to cut benefits for single mothers. ‘I had mistaken being merely permitted to exist for encouragement,’ Charman writes of neoliberal policies that shaped her childhood. Her belief in the welfare state was rooted in the politics she inherited from her mother, rather than the realities of their life under New Labour. ‘I love the state because it has loved me,’ wrote the historian Carolyn Steedman in a 2017 article for the London Review of Books. Yet Steedman, who Charman describes as her ‘lodestar’, was writing about the 1950s and ’60s. ‘We lived within a fantasy,’ Charman admits, ‘of the postwar commitment to nurture.’

Rather than writing from the perspective of being a mother, at least in the narrow sense of the word, Charman uses her own experiences as a daughter – both of her mother and of the state – to frame her book. In the introduction, she quotes the poet Denise Riley, who asked in The Words of Selves (2000), ‘What am I up to when I depict myself?’ and counters with the question, ‘What am I up to when I don’t?’ The personal, as the second-wave feminist adage goes, is political. So, perhaps I should mention now that I am writing this piece in the early weeks after the birth of my second child, while under the care of the mother state (in the form of my local NHS perinatal mental health team).

I bring this subjectivity to my reading of the book. Having recently had a c-section, I have complicated feelings about a lot of the theorizing around birth that the first chapter delves into, for instance. More crucially, however, the way Charman pulls the ‘many mothers’ of her book together gives me hope when I most need it. I don’t want to – I can’t – do the work of mothering alone. None of us can. Mother State ends with a vision of a ‘babyful’ world, in which we can all play a role in mothering the babies in our lives and in our political imaginations. This may sound utopian in our individualist age, but we would be following in a long maternal tradition of fighting for better futures.

Helen Charman’s Mother State: A Political History of Motherhood is published by Allen Lane 

_{Main image: Women Against Pit Closures protest in Barnsley, 1984. Courtesy: London School of Economics Archives}