Katie Tobin

Mother State, Helen Charman, Allen Lane, 2024, 512 pages, £30.99.

.

In Sheila Heti’s Motherhood, an ambivalent narrator who may or may not be Heti herself spends the run of nearly 300 pages deliberating over whether she should have a child. ‘I know a woman who refuses to mother, refuses to do the most important thing,’ she writes, ‘and therefore becomes the least important woman. Yet the mothers aren’t important, either. None of us are important.’ Heti here gets at an age-old paradox – that mothering is an act as derided as it is valorised – but she also probes at something deeper. While ideas of womanhood have long been tied to childbearing, now a heady cocktail of sexual liberation and gnawing anxieties about the future means that having children no longer feels like the cultural imperative it used to. Among my friends, at least, paternal ambivalence seems to be de rigueur; babies are time-consuming and expensive. Pregnancy is painful and quite literally laborious, as I’m sure childrearing is. It takes a village, after all.

Animated by a similar line of thinking, Helen Charman’s Mother State evinces mothering in all senses as demanding – but vital – work. In this concise yet densely packed précis of the past fifty years, we meet a cast of trade unionists, protestors, strikers and squatters. These women are all activists in their own way, many of them mothers, refusing to acquiesce to a broken system. Neither does Charman, an academic, poet and arts writer, who stages motherhood as a state of collective social responsibility to claim a better future for all. Making her mission statement clear from the offset, the preface ends with a call to arms: ‘We have to help each other with the difficult work of living that is yet to come.’

In that sense, Mother State works to try and elicit the same sort of utopian idealism brought about during Corbyn’s tenure as Labour leader. (‘For the many, not the few’ feels as apropos for Charman’s politics as any other slogan.) But this is not surprising. Born under New Labour, she writes lovingly of her own mother, a former NHS physiotherapist, who raised her with help from the welfare state. It is ‘a rose-tinted conception’ of Blair’s Labour, albeit one that I’m sure many other nineties babies like me share. Margaret Thatcher, then, figures as somewhat of a central antagonist throughout the book: she opposed maternity leave, cut child benefits and failed to provide affordable childcare. Were she around today, Thatcher would no doubt brand herself as a do-it-all girlboss: using her ‘working mother’ image to advance her political career, stripping the rights of others. As Charman tells us:

Such fantasies of matron had a certain erotic power that legitimised a latent desire to be dominated. It allowed Conservative politicians to adopt the passive postures of an institutional childhood: nasty medicine to be swallowed, but at least you didn’t have to make any decisions yourself.

Sure enough – befitting of these febrile and turbulent times – Charman also makes the case against becoming a mother. Or rather, that we should have the right not to be one. Either way, ‘the point is, we get to choose’. Although much has been written and published about the aftermath of the 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade in the United States, considerably less attention has been paid to the state of abortion in Britain and Ireland today. In advance of the Irish referendum, Sally Rooney wrote for the London Review of Books that ‘the ban on abortion has less to do with the rights of the unborn child than with the threat to social order represented by women in control of their reproductive lives’. Charman reminds us that to have or perform an abortion here is still, technically, a criminal act. Even in Scotland, she notes, writing in 2022, ‘pregnant people are being sent across the [Scottish] border to England to access abortion’.

Suffering is a prerequisite of mothering.

Alongside carefully charting what’s at stake medically speaking, Mother State also delineates the thorny link between reproductive autonomy and the material circumstances that may govern our choices. Class plays a big part, as women from low-income backgrounds today are still three times more likely to have an abortion. Likewise, the Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1970s called for accessible abortion for all as well as twenty-four-hour childcare. To the WLM’s mind, these issues were two sides of the same coin: women fighting to mother on their own terms.

Another oft-referenced campaign is the Wages for Housework movement. Led by the likes of Selma James, Silvia Federici and Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Wages for Housework tried to galvanise recognition of women’s labour in the home. This unwaged work, habitually framed as an expression of loving or maternal desire, is essential for serving the interests of the ruling classes under capitalism. But what of the people doing it? What’s in it for them? Love, giving and receiving it, is supposedly one perk. Maybe, but not always.

Fleeting references to Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (‘to let the baby out, you have to be willing to go to pieces’) and Rachel Cusk’s divisive A Life’s Work, her disarmingly frank account of motherhood, remind us that suffering is a prerequisite of mothering; whether it’s ultimately worth it, whether you get back the love that you give is a different matter altogether. Locating the genesis of maternal self-sacrifice in Coventry Patmore’s nineteenth-century poem, The Angel in the House, Charman argues that this ‘angel’ is a product of a distinctly Victorian heritage – one whose legacy proved useful in exporting foreign policy to colonised British states and controlling the sexuality of women and wives. Anything that risked jeopardising the fantasy of the British home was considered a threat; women’s autonomy – bodily, social and economic – curtailed as collateral for the ‘greater good’.

One of the book’s riskier, but nevertheless convincing, contentions concerns the treatment of teenage mothers. Yes, there needs to be better provision of contraception and sex education to British teens, but that’s not to say that we should dismiss the agency of teen mothers. Among a
surfeit of pop-culture analysis, Mother State’s rightful skewering of Little Britain stands out as one of the best; the Vicky Pollard storylines are, as she tells us, ‘a cultural low point, preserved for posterity’. What’s more, Charman points out that this totalising view also risks invalidating the lives of their children as well. Although there are further analytic forays into other TV show teen mum plotlines – like Grange Hill and EastEnders – her narrative voice, veering on poetic at times, never strays far from deeply affecting. At the close of one section, she tells us that Kat Slater, a victim of ‘an unbearable litany of reproductive misery’, is long-bereft of the very thing she dreams of: a family of her own.

So far, what these lines of argument all have in common is the aim of skewing prescriptive forms of domesticity. As an alternative to the bourgeois household, Charman writes engagingly about collective care arrangements in women’s shelters, communes and the years-long anti nuclear-weapons protest camps on Greenham Common. Families of striking miners in the 1980s, shunned by their own, decided to form new ones, raising their children communally in the Women Against Pit Closures canteens. Drawing on the Black feminist tradition of writers like Lola Olufemi, Mother State advocates for the rubric of motherhood to be radically reimagined; maternal love no longer a private product of the nuclear family but instead, a right for all.

Mother State is an impressive paean to the expansive possibility of motherhood.

For the most part, Charman’s experiments in imagining otherwise work very well. There’s been a vast body of work published over the last year or so on new ways of caring for one another in small-small scale communities, yet none offer as nearly a comprehensive a history of these practices in Britain and Ireland as Mother State does.

But there are some noticeable omissions. I would like to have seen more of an explicit link between useable theory and Charman’s demands for motherhood to be recognised as a ‘collective term to organise under, for people of any gender, with or without children of their own’. A nice
dictum, although there’s little in the way of discussion about gender itself, or how recent debates about womanhood have come to usurp discourse about feminist issues. This is a real shame, not least because Charman has previously written excellently about this for the London Review of Books, but also because queer chosen families were integral to new, expansive understandings of what redistributed care could look like. (As many gay, lesbian and trans children disowned by their own biological kin, they turned to each other, out of choice and out of necessity.)

Then there’s the scant discussion of family abolitionism and those driving the movement. For one, Charles Fourier, a late-Enlightenment French silk merchant and sex-party theorist who conjured up visions of utopian communal housing to free women from domestic subjugation, might have been worth a mention. For another, Alexandra Kollontai, a Russian revolutionary and one of the first women to have a role in diplomatic office. Marx and Engels get named in the book’s introductory sections, as does Shulamith Firestone, M. E. O’Brien and Sophie Lewis. But they are mentioned sparsely, if at all, hereafter. Perhaps it’s too much of an ask for a comprehensive guide on how we might go about creating a culture of reciprocal care, interdependence and mutual aid, but Lewis’s recent Abolish the Family at least takes a stab at it.

Still, minor gripes aside, Mother State is an impressive paean to the expansive possibility of motherhood, of new ways of being and living. And of hope, too.

The book ends with a moving reflection from Charman on her own relationship to reproduction – that ‘promise of futurity’ so inexorably linked to children. She recalls a moment in Happening, a book best known for its startling depiction of illegal abortion in 1960s France, where Annie Ernaux writes about ‘the spirits of previous generations’ moving through her. Earlier in Mother State, Charman also considers how Motherhood’s narrator, the daughter of an Auschwitz survivor, feels a sense of moral duty to reproduce: ‘If you don’t have children, the Nazis will have won.’

Much of the book is hinged on this very idea, that procreative ontology is inevitably part of something much bigger than the self. Having children is so often framed as a national imperative, as a means to preserve part of ourselves for now and always. While it’s true that children symbolically shoulder the responsibility of redressing previous generations’ ills, that doesn’t mean we should leave it to them. ‘These are difficult times,’ Charman writes. ‘We have to be conduits for each other.’ What that might look like, how we might go about this, is yet to be fully realised. But that’s the beauty of the future: it can be anything we want it to be.

.

.

Image credit: Robin Christian.

Helen Charman is a Fellow and College Teaching Officer in English at Clare College, University of Cambridge. Her critical writing has been published in the Guardian, The White Review, Another Gaze, and The Stinging Fly among others. As a poet, Charman was shortlisted for the White Review Poet’s Prize in 2017 and for the 2019 Ivan Juritz Prize for Creative Experiment, and has published four poetry pamphlets, most recently In the Pleasure Dairy. Charman volunteers as a birth companion in Glasgow.

Katie Tobin is an arts and culture writer based in London. She is a PhD student at the University of Durham, researching reproductive justice in fiction, and teaches English and Philosophy. Her work has also appeared in AnOther, Dazed, Elephant, Esquire, The Financial Times and Plaster, among other places.

---

To read this and more, buy our latest print issue here, or subscribe to receive a copy of The London Magazine to your door every two months, while also enjoying full access to our extensive digital archive of essays, literary journalism, fiction and poetry.