By Victoria Smith

Like many feminists who are also mothers, I’ve noticed a phenomenon common to both experiences. When you are new to them, you often find yourself thinking “why did no one warn me about this?” You rage at all those earlier mothers and/or feminists who never saw fit to mention any of the real issues. Finally, someone—you—has got to the nub of the matter! Finally, something will be done! Then, a few years pass, and you’re listening to a new batch of women say the exact same thing, while you rage at them for not having noticed you were saying it first. Still, you can’t get too angry, because you’ve since learned that plenty of other women were saying it long before either of you. 

Ten years ago, pregnant with my third child, I decided to read Adrienne Rich’s 1976 work Of Woman Born. At one point Rich recalls looking at her own mother and thinking “I too shall marry, have children—but not like her. I shall find a way of doing it all differently.” It stopped me in my tracks, because I found myself thinking, “I felt that way, too, only not just about my mother. I felt it about Rich’s generation of feminists.” I didn’t think they’d addressed maternity with any degree of seriousness, though I didn’t blame them for it. I presumed that they, like all women who’d gone before me, had been too busy being oppressed.

I came of age in the 90s, and my view of feminism was shaped by both its absorption into mainstream culture and by the obsessions of its loudest opponents. As Susan Faludi noted in 1991’s Backlash, the careerist ballbreaker who either forgets to have a baby, or fails to care for the one she has, was the leading target of many an anti-feminist politician, cultural commentator, and filmmaker. Naturally, this made me—a young woman with no immediate desire to have children—extremely defensive of said ballbreaker. The so-called “Mommy Wars,” which played out in made-for-TV movies, newspaper columns, and women’s magazine articles, seemed to revolve around a few basic, not especially nuanced questions. Should all women be barefoot and pregnant? Is having a job evil? Is daycare child abuse? If the topic had been explored in any greater depth, I didn’t know it, nor did I particularly care—at least, not until I had children myself.

In 2001, former Spare Rib editor Rosie Boycott wrote an article for the Times titled “Motherhood: the fight we feminists forgot.” She described the 1970s as a time when “the women’s movement finally had a platform and was able to effect change”:

But there was one issue that we all but ignored: children. We marched and shouted about our rights to abortion, to equal pay and an end to discrimination in financial and business matters. … But how motherhood would fit into our utopia was rarely discussed.

Years later, in 2018, Amy Westervelt wrote for the Guardian, asking whether motherhood was “the unfinished work of feminism.” “The topic comes up in fewer than 3% of papers, journal articles, or textbooks on modern gender theory,” she noted. “Discussing it marks one as a ‘gender essentialist’ in academia, a label that can end one’s academic career before it even begins.” Around the same time, a Prospect magazine article by Hephzibah Anderson told us “How feminism forgot motherhood—and why fathers don’t mind.” “In ascending the ivory tower and bedding itself down in theory and semantics,” claimed Anderson, “feminism by and large became too grand to engage with the daily realities of its core demographic’s lives.”

I’ve made similar arguments myself. In 2016, I wrote a New Statesman piece under the title “Why disregarding motherhood and women’s bodies won’t help feminism.” Like Boycott and others before me, I regretted my earlier lack of interest in this particular issue. Now, however, I’m starting to wonder whether there comes a point when the self-flagellation ought to stop.

In recent times, headlines such as “I was a radical feminist. Now I devote my life to my husband and children” have become familiar, amid claims that “the ‘tradwife’ aesthetic is surging worldwide as young women seek nostalgia and escape from modern pressures.” The belief that feminism—all feminism—dropped the ball on maternity by insisting that male and female bodies were more or less the same, and that women needed “liberating” from their children in order to work, has led to the insistence that if young women are unhappy now, they only have their anti-maternal feminist foremothers to blame. Falling birth rates, the rise of trans activism, commercial surrogacy, employers pressuring women to freeze eggs, the continued undervaluing of motherwork—all of this can be laid at the door of feminists who felt, to quote Susan Maushart in 1999’s The Mask of Motherhood, that “the best we were capable of doing about motherhood … was asserting our right to evade it.”

This is the story, and it’s not entirely untrue. It’s not as though anyone imagined Shulamith Firestone fantasizing about the days when “barbaric” human pregnancy would be replaced by babies gestated in pods, or Simone de Beauvoir declaring that “snared by nature, [the pregnant woman] is plant and animal, a collection of colloids, an incubator, an egg … a human being, consciousness and freedom, who has become passive instrument of life.” If the kind of feminism that governments and businesses embraced was the kind which extracted more paid work from women without re-evaluating their unpaid labour, then that’s hardly surprising. As soon as that offer was on the table, what else would they do? Yet it’s too convenient, and too risky, to focus only on what “feminism” did wrong. If we want to value mothers and motherhood, we need to move past endlessly blaming our feminist foremothers.

The Cycle of Erasure

The line that feminists neglected motherhood has become the standard entry point for arguments about why feminists shouldn’t neglect motherhood now. Yet mid-to-late twentieth-century feminist work on motherhood and mothering is rich and complex. To view it as failed or inadequate because other feminisms and other priorities became dominant risks replicating the matrophobic dynamics this feminism sought to challenge. If we underestimate what maternal feminists and those engaged with feminist care ethics were trying to achieve, convinced we can “do it all differently,” we end up repeating the cycle of erasure. One day it will be asked why “no one” was saying the things we are saying today.

It is sometimes suggested that early feminists understood the importance of maternity, care work, and sex difference, even using them as leverage when campaigning for women’s education and the vote, only for their ideas to be overridden by second wavers, with Beauvoir and Betty Friedan leading the charge. In her 1992 article “Feminism and Motherhood: An American Reading,” Ann Snitow paints a more nuanced picture. She proposes the existence of “three distinct periods” of the second wave (though allowing for exceptions):

First, 1963 (Friedan, of course) to about 1974—the period of what I call the “demon texts,” for which we have been apologizing ever since. Second, 1975 to 1979, the period in which feminism tried to take on the issue of motherhood seriously, to criticize the institution, explore the actual experience, theorize the social and psychological implications. … By 1979, in a massive shift in the politics of the whole country, some feminist work shifts, too, from discussing motherhood to discussing families.

It’s a framing echoed by others, such as Elaine Tuttle Hansen in her 1997 book Mother Without Child (though the latter suggests that the second phase started slightly earlier).

What comes through in these analyses is not just that motherhood, far from being overlooked or dismissed, remained a live and contested area, but that anxiety about being anti-maternal, or perceived as such, was never far away. There was a constant push-pull dynamic. Hansen notes that the assumption that feminists rejected motherhood was “so ingrained as early as 1971” that an anthology of women’s liberation writing was prefaced with a disclaimer reassuring readers they did not. Meanwhile, Snitow claims that books such as The Feminine Mystique were “demonized, apologized for, endlessly quoted out of context”:

In retrospect, it’s an amazing thing that books in the early seventies dared to speak of “women alone, or women against men.” It was, plain and simple, a breakthrough. … The early texts are trying to pull away from the known and, like all utopian thinking, they can sound thin, absurd, undigested. But mother-hating? No.

Whether or not one accepts this, in the years that followed, feminist writing on female bodies, pregnancy and motherhood—by those such as Rich, Mary O’Brien, bell hooks, Barbara Katz Rothman, Sara Ruddick, Patricia Hill Collins and others—was radical, creative and incredibly challenging not just to conservative but to liberal norms. We lose this texture when we boil down feminist engagement with motherhood to first wavers who “got it” versus second wavers who thought no further than demanding free childcare. Understanding what was so radical about much of this thought—and why it stood in tension to other feminist principles—is essential if we want to understand not just what our mothers were up against, but what we are up against, too. 

It is hard to make motherhood matter within current political frameworks because motherhood is not like anything else. Indeed, knowledge of this fundamental difference is at the heart of a radical feminist theory of patriarchy. When Mary O’Brien wrote The Politics of Reproduction she was not suggesting that female bodies were hampered or made inferior by pregnancy, but that men were alienated from the essence of life. “In a very real sense,” she wrote, “nature is unjust to men.” “She includes and excludes at the same moment,” writes O’Brien. “It is an injustice, however, which male praxis might reasonably be said to have overcorrected.”

Maternal feminist texts are fascinating to read because they circle two areas which seem very disparate: namely, the mundanity and repetition of care (“to mother is to clean, to mop, to sweep, to keep out of reach, to keep safe, to keep warm, to feed, to take small objects out of mouths, to answer impossible questions, to…”) and the awe-inspiring creative power of female human beings (“female biology … has far more radical implications than we have yet come to appreciate”).

Crucially, many maternal feminist writers were quick to identify the relationship between the low status of female reproduction and flight from the female body, and the difficulty of reconciling feminism’s (entirely legitimate) attachment to individual female subjectivity with a re-conceptualisation of personhood that takes full account of relationality. Rich wrote beautifully on the way in which young women, reflecting on the status of the maternal body, might feel that it is “easier to shrug it off and travel as a disembodied spirit.” Half a century on, in the age of egg freezing and gender affirming surgeries, I don’t think it is reasonable to claim feminists never thought this might happen. Some did, and their work helps us to understand the fears of those who did not.

Toward a Truly Maternal Feminism

In their 2004 book The Mommy Myth, Susan J. Douglas and Meredith W. Michaels wrote that “today, having been to the office, having tried a career, women supposedly have seen the inside of the male working world and found it to be the inferior choice to staying home, especially when their kids’ future is at stake”:

It’s not that mothers can’t hack it (1950s thinking). It’s that progressive mothers refuse to hack it. Inexperienced women thought they knew what they wanted, but they got experience and learned they were wrong. Now mothers have seen the error of their ways, and supposedly seen that the June Cleaver model, if taken as a choice, as opposed to a requirement, is the truly modern, fulfilling, forward-thinking version of motherhood.

I routinely see the same arguments being made today, as though they are brand new. Old-style feminists messed up, and a return—albeit a more self-aware one—to domesticity must be the way forward. Such arguments pick up on some threads of maternal feminist thinking, such as the need to value care and reciprocity, but the radicalism that went alongside this tends to be stripped away. Valuing the uniqueness of female biological capacities, and the work of mothers, must go beyond a re-instatement of a supposed “complementarity of the sexes”—too often a smokescreen for exploitation—to proposing ways of thinking, being, and relating that challenge “masculine” norms.  

I accept that there are no easy answers here. In her 1999 article “Mothering and Feminism,” Patrice DiQuinzio described how feminism has to “rely on individualism in order to articulate its claims that women are equal human subjects of social and political agency and entitlement” yet can find it impossible to theorize mothering on these terms. “The difficulty for feminist theory,” she writes, “is that, in an individualist ideological context, the subversive and liberatory possibilities of accounts of mothering that challenge individualism in terms of difference are never far removed from the risks of reconsolidating elements of essential motherhood that occur in the project of theorizing mothering.” Tradwifery is not the new feminism, but there will always be someone who tells you it is.

A true pro-maternal feminism is demanding, not idealizing. It does not involve the stripping of rights from women, but a prioritization of care and a redistribution of resources. It does not involve the control of female bodies, but an appreciation of their capacities. “If feminism has empowered women, it has often done so by attacking the identification of women with maternity,” wrote Sara Ruddick in 1989’s Maternal Thinking. “Conversely, emphasizing the maternity of women has proved an effective strategy of male supremacists.”

If there is a path between the two, it does not start with blaming the mother.

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