Radical Mothering

A new book on mothering interrogates how maternal roles were constructed by the patriarchy — and the history of women’s resistance.

A woman holds her baby in 1950. (Image: Bert Hardy via Picture Post, Hulton Archive, Getty Images.)

A woman is giving birth. Her hopes, fears, and pains are her own, but her experience is universal, shaped by the society in which she lives. She could be the wealthy wife of an Athenian citizen, or a Victorian ‘fallen woman’. She could be labouring in a stable in first-century Nazareth or in an English hospital in 1948 — the year feminist cultural writer Elinor Cleghorn’s mother Sarah was born, just weeks before the launch of the NHS made free healthcare available ‘from the cradle to the grave’.

History is often told as a story of men, the masculine narratives of war and politics. Yet motherhood and mothering are constants across time and space, and are among our most formative experiences as human beings. In A Woman’s Work: Reclaiming the Radical History of Mothering , Cleghorn explores this forgotten history, providing a wide-ranging and sensitive survey of mothering and motherhood from antiquity to the present day. A feminist cultural historian, Cleghorn’s previous work, Unwell Women (2021), sought to give voice to female patients silenced by centuries of misdiagnosis and medical misogyny. In A Woman’s Work , she applies the same lens to examine ‘how the patriarchal institution of motherhood was constructed and enforced’ while re-centring the ways in which women experienced, narrated, and resisted it.

Despite the male medical monopoly on knowledge of the reproductive body for most of its history, Cleghorn sets out to reclaim a diversity of female stories from the archive. While ‘the institution of motherhood is monolithic’, Cleghorn writes, ‘mothers are not monoliths’, and she is equally attentive to both biological mothers and ‘othermothers’ — the midwives, activists, educators, and caregivers who form a network of support around children and communities. Along the way, we meet a sisterhood of formidable women, like the Empress Theodora, a former sex-worker turned reform-minded wife of the sixth-century Roman Emperor Justinian; Louise Bourgeois, the pioneering French royal midwife who advocated for women’s rights to greater knowledge about their bodies at a time when men had a monopoly on learning and anatomy lectures were closed to women; and Sojourner Truth, whose dehumanising experience of mothering under American chattel slavery shaped her abolitionist politics. Each woman’s story illustrates a larger period and theme in the history of childbearing; the latter is deeply moving, as is a section on the shame and sufferings of single mothers in early modernity and the lurid trope of the ‘murderous mother’.

The wide scope of Cleghorn’s book means A Woman’s Work can sometimes feel a bit like a cursory overview, with all-important social context taken out (a chapter on the seventeenth-century midwife Elizabeth Cellier doesn’t acknowledge that Cellier was a Catholic operating in Protestant England, who found herself implicated in an alleged plot against the monarchy, both facts which would nuance Cleghorn’s account of her failed efforts to reform the training and organisation of English midwives). Yet the empathy with which Cleghorn depicts particular women’s stories ensures this broad-brush approach never becomes reductive. Even in her earliest examples, when a lack of female-authored sources renders her reliant on the testimonies of husbands and male physicians, Cleghorn deploys material culture to help reconstruct the experience of premodern birth. Ancient votive offerings, such as a tiny clay foetus nestled in the hull of a ship manned by women, or a vase depicting a pregnant female figure in the arms of a caregiver, both discovered at the Tsoutsouros cave archaeological site in Crete, speak to the precarious nature of premodern childbirth and the precautions women took to navigate its treacherous waters. Medieval birth girdles, made for ritual purposes from animal skin, parchment, cloth, paper, and silk, were wrapped around the belly and offered women a means of spiritual protection and emotional support as they went into labour. Some treasured girdles were holy relics, purportedly worn or touched by saints or the Virgin Mary. These items, which ‘were felt right upon the skin’, bring us closer to the physical experiences of childbearing women in the past. A colour-plate section here would have been illustrative — a fifteenth-century girdle has recently gone on display at the Wellcome Collection, as part of an exhibition on ‘Birth, Belief, and Protection’, and its intricate Biblical illustrations and prayers for salvation invite poring over — but Cleghorn nonetheless effectively conjures up intimate scenes of ‘the tender, tactile history’ of premodern childbirth with her words.

A central theme of A Woman’s Work is the way in which motherhood has been essentialised as a natural, normal part of women’s nature. The Biblical punishment for Eve’s transgression in the Garden of Eden, that ‘in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee’, coupled with the growth of the cult of the Virgin Mary, led Christianity to an emphasis on childbearing as both ‘women’s salvation and their punishment’. But Cleghorn shows that the institution of motherhood had deeper roots in ancient culture, and more secular purposes, as a means to control the power of women’s reproductive bodies — the power over life itself. This was particularly true from the eighteenth century, as the developing science of demography, as well as increasing imperial, industrial, and military demands, put new pressures on women to produce and raise ‘future citizens’, reframing maternity ‘not only as women’s biologically and biblically ascribed purpose, but their venerable duty to their country’. Under the Enlightenment, motherhood was accepted as a political necessity, a means of cultivating the future of humanity, in its soldiers and administrators and leaders, but mothers remained excluded from politics; a paradox which echoes in today’s pronatalist arguments about the necessity of reproduction. ‘[The] early education of man is…in a woman’s hands’, wrote Jean Jacques Rousseau. ‘A woman’s education must therefore be planned in relation to man.’ Enslaved women, meanwhile, were expected simply to bear future slaves, and denied both a modicum of bodily rights and the intimacy with their children increasingly deemed essential for white women.

The final section of A Woman’s Work focuses on the emergence and gains of the women’s movement from the late nineteenth century, and its challenge to the idea of women’s ‘natural’ subjugation. Cleghorn presents a familiar narrative through a new lens, drawing attention to early feminists’ efforts to gain maternal rights and recognition, as well as freedom to determine their own reproductive destinies (‘I care neither for the reproduction of the race, nor the reproduction of any man’, wrote one impassioned correspondent to the short-lived magazine The Freewoman in 1912). But A Woman’s Work also shows that women have been organising, agitating, and advocating for the rights and protection of mothers throughout history, from the medieval mother-turned-mystic Margarey Kempe, to pioneering midwives like Cellier and Bourgeois, and Black abolitionists like Truth and Harriet Jacobs, who wrote bravely of the situation of the ‘slave mother’. In doing so, Cleghorn deftly connects the historical and the contemporary, weaving a narrative of care and resistance which serves as a reminder that ‘women have mothered through every past attempt to govern who gets to be a mother’ with ‘resilience and ingenuity’. A Woman’s Work ultimately serves as a call for action in the face of global attacks on reproductive rights, maternal healthcare, and the rights of caregivers and families which refuse to conform to the heteropatriarchal norm. In the face of such attacks, Cleghorn’s profoundly empathetic, expansive history is, like her subject, a necessary and radical act of love.