“Motherhood is a political state,” declares the poet and Cambridge academic Helen Charman at the beginning of Mother State, her provocative and wide-ranging study of “motherhood” in all its iterations, and its relationship to the wider social context in Britain and Northern Ireland over the past 50 years. “Nurture, care, the creation of human life… have more to do with power, status and the distribution of resources, both by mothers and for them, than we like to admit.” It’s a version of “the personal is political” slogan beloved of second-wave feminism, which she dissects here before going on to examine the multiple ways in which mothers have collectively organised in support of broader political causes that affect the social structures within which they are raising children.
She revisits the heyday of the 1980s women’s peace camps at Greenham Common, and shows that, even at the time, feminists were arguing over the centring of maternal anxiety as a driver for anti-nuclear activism. Another chapter, titled Mother Ireland, looks at the history of women’s involvement in Northern Irish political struggles since the 1970s, on either side of the divide, and how mothers, as both combatants and peacemakers, were also battling “the gendered expectations of their own communities”.
