Mother State

[Charman] writes with intelligence and generosity, and sprinkles her history with details that are enraging, provocative and, frequently, amusing -- Megan Gibson * The New Statesman *
Mother Stateblows open the dominant view of mothering … instead Charman’s history from below situates a radical collective conception of motherhood and care as central to all our lives… meticulously researched... Mother State is both a prodigious historical analysis and a sobering one -- Ruth Gilbert * New Internationalist *
This monumental book will inform the future of action and thinking on the politics of motherhood for generations to come. The stunning level of study undergone by Charman draws out crucial new perspectives on the institutions of the UK that have classified motherhood as morally and socially fertile for both symbolic rendering and systematic economic construction. As the state continues to contrive damaging figures of motherhood, this book tirelessly evidences contrary models and resists bad mythologies. All of the narratives, documents, testimonies and policies reviewed here are articulated in brilliantly readable prose with expert understanding, while methodologically ensuring the personal-as-political ethical contract that drives feminist writing. I hope everyone reads this book. It feels like we are in a new golden age of political, cultural and critical writing, with Helen Charman at the forefront * Holly Pester *
Totemic and graceful. A necessary study and intervention into contemporary thinking around care, love and the multifarious ideas of the ‘mother’. Helen Charman writes with such intellectual command, open generosity and nuance: she is a genius * Rachael Allen *
With ease and precision, Charman examines all the waged and unwaged labour that creates mothers as well as the political processes that produce their vexed relationship to the British state. Mother State is at once a sorely needed politicised history of motherhood – sharp and critical – and a tender love letter to her own mother’s knees * Lola Olufemi *
Mother State places Helen Charman alongside Jacqueline Rose, Angela Davis, and Denise Riley in a lineage of psychical and political history that lets us re-see this ubiquitous form of care at a critical juncture. * Hannah Zeavin *
Mother State is a remarkable, revelatory and life-changing book, and an indispensable tool and guide in the ongoing struggle towards radical, liberated and collective care. Its tracing of the ‘stubborn and delicate’ histories of motherhood - as body, state and metaphor - also offers glimpses of possible futures, visions of reconfigured care in which motherhood thrives beyond categories of gender and biology, and the limits of the individual. Charman’s project, both intellectually luminous and deeply affecting, becomes a part of the radical legacies it takes as its subjects, revealing care as a social interdependency: the labour and love of giving birth to one another * Daisy Lafarge *
This book is a magnificent achievement.Mother State radically rethinks the history of modern Britain through the figure and labour of the mother. Helen Charman has pulled off the remarkable feat of compelling storytelling underpinned by rigorous research. Required reading! * Rebecca May Johnson *
In my days of early mothering, this book — so assuredly, compellingly written, and staggeringly well researched — is helping me to look outside of myself, to conceive of this state of motherhood as one that connects and binds us all. It is a state of the greatest possibility, the greatest hope * Harriet Baker *
With the weaponisation of gender across the world at present, Mother State is both timely and necessary. Looking at the myths, flaws and dangers of focusing on the idea of the mother as the individual rather than the collective, and the power, strength and visibility that is created when we include those who are all too often at the fringes of the conversation. A vital book for all * Marie Mitchell *