Against Conservative Myths of Motherhood

Review of Mother State: A Political History of Motherhood by Helen Charman (Penguin: Allen Lane, 2024)

Mothers, apparently, dream of hospitals. The “hospital fantasy” is one where an exhausted, overburdened carer becomes the cared-for. It is hard to imagine anyone in Britain at the tail of fourteen years of Tory austerity fantasizing about hospitals. Here our statist dreams of nuns at bedsides are all in sepia.

Helen Charman’s Mother State — an epic exploration of motherhood and popular politics in contemporary British history — opens with our collective nun fantasy: Call the Midwife. Set in the 1950s and ’60s, this Sunday-night prime-time BBC drama offers a nostalgic portrait of the early years of the National Health Service. In each episode, a pregnant working-class East Londoner is relieved of her duties and ministered to by nuns in a maternity unit replete with fresh flowers and primrose-colored walls. Lay down your mop pail and forget your unstarched whites and your five elder children: everything is being taken care of.

Charman ends her story just up the road, but with a quite different story about motherhood. In 2013, a group of twenty-nine single mothers were served an eviction notice from their hostel in Newham, an area of East London where £11 billion had just been spent on the Olympic Games. The mothers were told that they would be resettled in Birmingham or Manchester, hundreds of miles from their children’s schools and their families. So they broke into empty flats on the condemned Carpenter Estate and hung banners from the window. “These HOMES Need People: THESE PEOPLE NEED HOMES.” Inside the “E15 Mums” (as they became known, in reference to the local postcode)…