Austere Mothering
On Helen Charman’s Mother State
Sarah Stoller
Confronting the realities of contemporary motherhood in the UK is impossible without facing the brutality of a state that neglects and punishes its most vulnerable. Helen Charman’s Mother State: A Political History of Motherhood depicts a society where care is privatized, dissent routinely crushed, and mothers alternately admonished and scapegoated. Charman tells us about the events that followed from rioting that began in Tottenham, north London, in 2011 after the Metropolitan Police fatally shot a 29-year-old Black man, Mark Duggan. In the aftermath of the riots, more than 2,000 people —half under age 20, around a quarter children, and half Black or mixed race—were convicted of crimes. They were given sentences that far exceeded those issued for similar crimes committed in the prior year. A mother of two children aged 1 and 5 was separated from her children and jailed for a week for accepting shorts that had been stolen by a friend. The sentencing judge chided her for failing to be a good role model for her children. In another instance, the Conservative Wandsworth council suggested that they would consider evicting tenants who had been involved in the riots. Their first target was a mother whose son had participated, but herself had not.
To read Mother State is to feel, at times, hysterical. Mother State turns away from nothing: the treatment of pregnant Irish prisoners in the Troubles, the weaponization of hunger to crush the 1984–1985 miner’s strike, the sexism and violence of means-tested benefits, and the harsh social judgment of teen mothers, to name a few. It’s a book that grapples, in the very first chapter, with the theme of suffering in childbirth. To examine maternal suffering as such as a starting point is bold. To transform it into a force both for inquiry and for radical change is Charman’s distinctive art.
Mother State weaves together overlapping stories that are normally told separately: stories about mothers as activists, motherhood as social and cultural form, and the uses of the maternal in high politics. Charman is interested in the historical experience of being a mother, and in the relationships between mothers—and often by extension their children—and the state. She’s equally concerned with the instances in which motherhood has been politicized and depoliticized. She’s interested, too, in how the state—be it the welfare state, the Thatcherite state, or the Irish state—has been figured as a maternal entity. She treats these interwoven themes historically, but with equal psychoanalytic attention to genealogy and the ways that the histories of mothers and daughters overlap and bleed together.
As with many landmark feminist texts, interwoven in a sharp, analytical prose are elements of memoir. Charman writes within and about her own historical experience as a child of the New Labour era. In this sense, Mother State is also a book about Charman’s relationship with her mother. While most books on the politics of mothering have been written by mothers through the lens of their experience as such, here the footing is reversed. Charman writes instead from within the uncertain possibility of her future maternity.
As Mother State moves chronologically from the feminist activism and social and intellectual contributions of the 1970s to the austerity of the 2010s, it resonates as deeply in its testaments to the cyclical nature of human experience. It begins with the interwoven histories of childbirth and reproductive “choice” since second-wave feminism politicized these issues. From there, she tackles the state and how it interfaced with activism for welfare benefits, communal living experiments, environmental protection, and economic security in a deindustrializing Britain. Finally, Charman turns to motherhood as a metaphor, and explores how ideas of the maternal have figured in everything from Britain’s political relationship to Ireland to understandings of single mothers, teen pregnancy, and parenting in the era of austerity. As the book touches on the material concerns of the everyday—housing, education, work, health, community—Charman is also attentive to the less tangible world of emotions and to the fears, hopes, and desires that bind us.
It is no coincidence that Mother State begins and ends with bodies. Birthing bodies appear at both the opening and close of the book. But when Charman thinks of her mother, it’s not her uterus that feels emblematic of motherhood; it’s her knees. Afterall, pregnancy lasts only 9 months. The work of caring for children, often on hands and knees, carries on for far longer. Charman’s mother spent her career as a physiotherapist in an increasingly emaciated NHS caring, among other things, for other people’s knees. When her knee in turn needed care, it was the NHS that failed to adequately repair it.
In Mother State, bodies connect mothers and children as the locus of care, and the locus of both conscious and less conscious bonds. Visiting her mother following her knee surgery, Charman injures a ligament running—as if, she thinks, in solidarity with her mother’s pain. Charman begins here as a way of moving from the innermost realm of human experience out into the world. As she puts it: “I’ve started with where I came from—the worn-out cartilage in my mother’s knee, her NHS uniform going endlessly round and round in the washing machine—before beginning to work my way out, to the state of affairs we face today.”
If it wasn’t so perfectly elegant, Charman’s use of the phrase “state of affairs” might read like a productive error. She shows that while bodies are the locus of maternal care, they are also frequently a site of pain and violence. Along this terrain of embodiment, we find the state straddling the “uneven seams that join the public with the private.” This is true above all when it comes to reproduction, where the state has long regarded the maternal body as a public good. State intervention has variously shaped everything from the possibilities of childbirth to the availability of contraception, pregnancy testing, and abortion. It has tended to afford privileges to white, middle-class women that have simultaneously been denied low-income women and women of color. In grappling with the abuses of the state, Charman takes up a longstanding feminist debate about the possibilities and limitations of reform. She notes that there is no feminist consensus on the “viability, both politically and practically, of making demands on the state.” In highlighting this ambivalence in feminist politics, Charman begins to make the case for the radical possibility of claiming ambivalence itself as political.
While Charman tells us that there is “no single unifying maternal feeling,” she makes an exception for ambivalence: the “canonically maternal feeling.” Take, for instance, abortion. Since abortion became de facto permitted in Britain in 1967, it has tended to be viewed as a regrettable necessity, one that is sometimes theoretically used correctly, but more often than not, abused. Alongside “some platonic ideal of the perfect termination” has been the assumption that abortion is shameful, and inevitably experienced as such. And yet, in interviews where women discuss abortion, ambivalence about the experience is far more pronounced than shame.
Mother State is characterized by a longing to capture experiences with new narrative forms, which have so often been overdetermined by what Charman terms “traditionally masculine lines” of storytelling. She rejects the familiar and powerful dichotomies that regard mothers as good or bad, peace-loving or cruel, and deserving or undeserving of support. In her brilliant chapter on childbirth, Charman searches for a way to talk about birth that is not principally about sacrifice, labor, or the erasure of self. Instead, she wants to forge “a vocabulary of maternal experience and emotion that draws on the sexual, the adult and the taboo. The moment of birth does not symbolize a woman crossing the nursery threshold and being banished from adult life.” So what, then, can we make of this singular experience? Birth, Charman suggests, is an act of reinvention: “It takes strength to let yourself disperse, and even more, afterwards, to gather the pieces up again, work out how they might now fit together.” Far from a sacrificial transformation, birth is active self-(re)making.
In speaking to the radical possibilities for redefining motherhood, Charman acknowledges a fundamental tension between the past as it has been and the future we might yet shape. Mothering in late 20th-century Britain has surely involved suffering and sacrifice, but it has also been a time of hope. Charman documents with affection the ways that mothers squatted and established communal living arrangements in the 1970s—most often out of sheer necessity for shelter, and, in many cases, safety from domestic violence. But they did so with inspiration and desire, too, for shaping new models for collective care. As squatters and the organizations they formed responded directly to the urgent needs of their communities, they were forced to grapple with the very notion that sacrifice is somehow necessarily central to maternal love. As Charman puts it, “what freedoms are afforded to the category of ‘mother’ when it is allowed to be multiplied?” If we let go of the notion that one person is mother to a child, and solely responsible for their care, motherhood might well need a new theme song.
Mother State is a testament to the resounding presence of maternal activism in the drive for liberation in the twentieth century. Mothers were foundational to the diverse campaigns of the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s, to the birth of the environmental movement in Britain, to the robust opposition to Thatcherite policy both “within and against the state” visible in the welfare claimants movement, in the miner’s strike, and in anti-war activism. In the face of inadequate provision of basic services, and at times actively punitive state policy, mothers have fought for change on the basis that care is fundamental to human need.
And yet, despite the prominence of a notable maternal political actor in this period—Margaret Thatcher herself—it has been surprisingly easy to depoliticize mothers’ activism. Charman recounts the story of the 1981 Lee Jeans factory occupation in Greenock, Scotland. In response to management’s decision to close the plant, the mostly female workforce seized control of the site. After more than 7 months of struggle, the workers were temporarily successful in preventing the factory’s closure. In 2011, the Scottish National Party member of parliament Anne McLaughlin spoke in honor of the occupation. In her speech to the Scottish parliament she noted, in passing, “These women were not political. . . . What they were was determined.” What does it mean, Charman asks, to define this sort of prototypical activism as “not political”?
Charman repeatedly shows the long shadow of Victorian notions of mothers as tarnished through engagement with the public alongside expanding expectations of mothers in every sphere—including the political. The depoliticization of mothers’ activism has been an enduring strategy in undermining maternal resistance. In 2013, a group of 29 single mothers and their neighbors were served eviction notices in east London. They had been living in a council-owned hostel that provided one-bedroom flats for women who had been made homeless, along with training, education, and support for finding work. Many of the residents were teen mothers. When council funding for the service was cut, the women were told to expect to be relocated outside of the borough and perhaps even the city. Instead of leaving, they came together to form a campaign with neighbors and left-wing organizations. In the media coverage that followed, their organizing efforts as mothers were consistently downplayed. Charman describes how the campaign was represented as the work of seasoned political organizers—the implication being that “young mothers themselves couldn’t have come up with such an effective political strategy.”
To claim the political acts of mothers as such is not to say that motherhood is inherently aligned with the public good. Case in point: Thatcher, who is spared none of Charman’s rhetorical precision. Reckoning with “matron-nanny-mummy Margaret Thatcher” who waged outright war in Ireland and the Falklands, as well as countless domestic battles against the vulnerable, finds Charman invoking another psychoanalytic insight: “that hatred is as inherent to maternity as love.” For Charman, the Conservatives were the logical party to have elevated a maternal figure as their leader. This, she argues, enabled “women’s traditionally subordinate role to be celebrated and utilized to great effect.”
It’s when writing passionately about the politics of austerity that Charman’s argument about maternity specifically becomes subsumed within more general claims about care. Centering motherhood as a political formation becomes unstable because of the ultimately ambivalent position of motherhood relative to virtue. Charman notes that as Prime Minister, David Cameron, who’s eldest son was born with a severe disability and required 24/7 care until his early death, oversaw significant funding cuts to the very charity that had helped care for his son. For Charman, there is no virtue or knowledge inherent to parenting that “‘transcends’ the political,” for fathers any more than for mothers.
“In writing a new political history of motherhood, Charman lays claim to the concept of hysteria as her analytic ally.”
In writing a new political history of motherhood, Charman lays claim to the concept of hysteria as her analytic ally. In the introduction, she writes: “Canonically, the hysteric is an unreasonable, overly emotional, irrational woman, familiar in so many iterations of the stock mother character. In a feminist reading, however, she is simply a woman who can no longer bear the conditions of her life: in response to the unlivable demands imposed upon her, her body rebels.” If, as a psychoanalytic concept, hysteria describes the past manifesting in the present, why not take it as a framework for doing the work of history? Charman proposes that we embrace hysteria aspirationally, and craft hysterical histories as a way of making sense of the “repetition, ill feeling, dead-ends, confusion, falsehood, and misreadings that make up real life” in the political as much as personal sphere. Inducing hysteria in the reader is, then, central to Charman’s narrative project.
In the end, Mother State itself affects the “repetition, ill feeling, dead-ends, confusion, falsehood, and misreadings that make up real life” in its account of motherhood in the era of austerity. It is a bleak picture: a law-and-order state where “poverty is criminalized, and the guilt is transmitted generationally”—the coerced inheritance of psychic and material punishment. Within this political context, motherhood becomes something both wielded or withheld against the public. Having described in harrowing detail the conditions faced by women prisoners interned as affiliates or suspected affiliates of the IRA in Armagh Jail in the 1970s, Charman turns to the growth of the carceral state in Britain over the last 50 years. For Charman, “the incarceration of pregnant people criminalizes an infant before it is born, and makes a mockery of any concept of equal maternity care.” With fiscal austerity has come lower basic standards for carceral maternity provision, and consequently a higher potential for preventable suffering and for outright abuse. Austerity has meant not only a neglectful state, but a cruel one.
In a book that begins and ends with maternal suffering, there are nonetheless nascent themes of hope in resilience. Careful throughout to avoid the essentialism that has so often constrained both the conception and realities of motherhood, Charman is tempted, in the end, to claim one virtue as maternal: “Simply staying. Against a collection of near insurmountable odds, persisting.” But how, in practice, do we do it? In this case it is more the metaphor of birth than of working knees that we can draw on for inspiration. If birthing is an act of going to pieces and reassembling a self from within the rubble, then this is the power we need to marshal forward. Not all mothers give birth, and not all women are mothers, but this is beside the point. We can all attend births, and we can mother our collective children and our communities. In a statement that reads like a wish, Charman writes: “We are ambivalent mothers, giving birth to each other.” If we are hysterical in the face of suffering, or hysterical ourselves, all the better. Our hysteria can do more than help tell a story; it can shape a better world.