Mother State: A Political History of Motherhood

Helen Charman's book, "Mother State," offers a radical new history of Britain and Northern Ireland, challenging the dominant view of mothering and highlighting the political nature of motherhood. It follows mothers' fights for an alternative future, featuring communities of lesbian squatters, anti-nuclear campaigners, and teenage mothers protesting housing cuts. Charman argues that motherhood is not a restrictive identity but a state of possibility that can be organized under to nourish the world around us.

Format: Hardback
Length: 512 pages
Publication date: 29 August 2024
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd

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 State blows 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 Intellectually luminous and deeply affecting, 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. - Daisy Lafarge With ease and precision, Charman examines all the waged and unwaged labour that create 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 mothers knees. - Lola Olufemi This monumental book will inform the future of action and thinking on the politics of motherhood for generations to come. 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 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 A necessary study and intervention into contemporary thinking around care, love and the multifarious ideas of the 'mother'. Helen Charman writes wit.

Weight: 894g
Dimension: 241 x 165 x 38 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780241512821