Motherhood: A Manifesto, by Eliane Glaser

Covid-19 has hit mothers hard. The Women’s Budget Group recently reported that over the past year, one in five mothers either were made redundant or lost hours because of caring responsibilities compared with 13 per cent of fathers. UK studies have shown that during lockdown in January and February considerably more mothers than fathers were responsible for home-schooling their children and had experienced a negative impact on their well-being as a result. In the UK as elsewhere, women – and women with children more specifically – have often borne the brunt of the pandemic’s devastating fallout in physical, emotional and financial terms, even as men have been more likely to die from the virus.

Obviously, this heavily gendered burden is not simply the result of the pandemic. Covid-19 has, however, exacerbated and laid bare the growing crisis around paid work and childcare in the Anglo-American world as well as in other countries. Instead of improving the conditions of mothers in the paid workforce, successive governments in countries such as the US and the UK have, if anything, made it more difficult for women to juggle jobs and caring responsibilities. We see this perhaps most glaringly in the lack of affordable childcare – with costs rising at three times the rate of wages in the UK. Moreover, the “motherhood penalty” is ever more pronounced, where women with children earn considerably less than their childless counterparts. Social norms around gender and motherhood also play a critical role in maintaining the unequal distribution of labour (and its recompense) both within the home and in the workplace.

A slew of excellent books by feminist scholars have been published in the past few years about the challenges mothers face today. Shani Orgad’s trenchant Heading Home: Motherhood, Work, and the Failed Promise of Equality (2019) shows how professional women’s “choice” to leave their often high-power jobs and stay home with children is, in reality, a consequence of toxic “always on” workplace culture, gender expectations and the incompatibility of work and childcare schedules. Emily Chivers Yochim and Julie Wilson’s Mothering through Precarity: Women’s Work and Digital Media (2017) examines how working- and middle-class women in the US increasingly navigate the difficult reality of 21st-century motherhood through digital media.

Thus, Eliane Glaser’s Motherhood: A Manifesto is timely, coming as it does on the heels of these other more scholarly interventions and just as the UK is emerging from another lockdown and beginning to take stock of what post-Covid life might look like.

Glaser’s manifesto has a clear mission: to expose the myriad ways in which society is failing mothers and to provide a template for change. “Motherhood”, she insists, is “feminism’s unfinished business”. She goes on to declare that the conditions are so retrograde today that “big improvements are well within reach”.

The book details many of the flashpoints that have developed around contemporary mothering in the Anglo-American context. Weaving in personal anecdotes about her own experiences with her two children, Glaser first describes the growing pressure on women to give birth “naturally”, without medical intervention and without pain relief. From the investment of natural birth with virtuosity and bravery, she then moves on to demonstrate how traditional gender norms continue to shape our perceptions of successful womanhood – namely, to be a successful woman you need to have children, whatever else you might do with your life. Women are consequently bombarded with messages about the best time to have children as well as warnings about delaying motherhood for too long.

The pressure and moralising merely intensify when women do get pregnant, as their gestating bodies become a site of ever more scrutiny and control. Glaser documents the array of directives regarding what pregnant women should and should not ingest (and how they should behave) in order not to harm the fetus. The obsessive focus on what is good for the baby later transforms into an almost complete silence around postnatal depression. Society, Glaser highlights, not only tends to minimise the pain and disorientation that often follow childbirth, but also refuses to engage in serious conversation about the profound ambivalences that can emerge around becoming a mother. This refusal is also reflected in the endless discussions around breastfeeding, where, despite the fact that many women find breastfeeding painful or difficult, or simply do not want to do it, they are “told to breastfeed at all costs”.

After this, Glaser tracks how this lack of concern for maternal well-being continues throughout the toddler years, arguing that mothers are subjected to the “strictest forms of discipline by government edicts, advice literature and social media, which claim simply to be reinforcing what is ‘natural’”. She insightfully adds that women internalise these normative strictures, often becoming fierce disciplinarians themselves.

The manifesto is a damning indictment of society’s failure to support mothers or to solve the most basic tensions between work and family. This charge is spot on. The nearly impossible and gendered juggle between raising children and pursuing a career needs to be seen for what it is: a systemic injustice. And this injustice needs to be redressed.

Motherhood: A Manifesto is a page turner, providing fascinating historical and cross-cultural examples to challenge “absolutes” around motherhood. Glaser reveals how the natural birth movement, now associated with women’s empowerment and choice, was historically a conservative movement led by a man keen to push women back into the home after the Second World War. The book also documents the still shocking lack of scientific research and thus conclusive evidence on many issues around pregnancy and childbirth, precisely because they are considered “women’s issues”. Questions about fertility in women’s early forties or about moderate alcohol consumption during pregnancy are too often presented as completely unambiguous, even though scientific knowledge about them is quite limited.

The book also helps to debunk more current myths circulating around birth, such as the dangers of using pain relief – particularly an epidural – during labour.

Finally, Glaser provides straightforward solutions: mothers need to be valued, domestic work needs to be properly shared, and proper resources need to be invested to ensure quality maternal care and childcare. Ultimately, then, Motherhood: A Manifesto reinforces and updates many of the issues and urgent concerns that feminists have raised for a very long time. For this alone, the book should be considered a contribution to continuing debate.

Yet Glaser’s answer to the question of why we are witnessing increasing pressures on mothers is not completely satisfying. It is not entirely clear why women are being pushed to give birth naturally or to breastfeed. Is it about saving costs? Is it an anti-science trend? Or, as Glaser claims somewhat facilely, is it to ensure that ambitious, successful women are prevented from achieving equality with men? Missing from the analysis are the political and economic factors at work here: the devolving of responsibility for the well-being of children on to mothers is part and parcel of the entrenchment of neoliberal and neoconservative forces in our society. Moreover, the intimation that motherhood is the unfinished business of feminism seems misguided, as it assumes that we have achieved equality in other realms. As much as Glaser and I might wish it otherwise, we are a far cry from gender equality in almost any sphere.

This is a very well-written and worthy tome on contemporary motherhood. Yet, as a manifesto offering incisive analyses and radical solutions for mothers facing a post-Covid future, the book falls somewhat short of the mark.

Catherine Rottenberg is an associate professor in the department of American and Canadian studies at the University of Nottingham, author of The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism (2018) and a co-author of The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence (2020).

Motherhood: A Manifesto
By Eliane Glaser
Fourth Estate, 240pp, £16.99
ISBN 9780008311889
Published 27 May 2021

Eliane Glaser, a research fellow at the University of London’s School of Advanced Study, has also worked as a radio producer and senior lecturer in creative writing at Bath Spa University.

She was born in London, grew up in Camden Town and still lives in Camden, she says, “very attached to its progressive, multicultural atmosphere”. She studied English at the University of Oxford, where her tutors “were all staunchly feminist women, which felt exceptional at the time in terms of the wider university culture”. After an MA in Renaissance studies at Queen Mary University of London, she went on to a PhD in English at Birkbeck, University of London, which formed the basis for her first book, Judaism without Jews: Philosemitism and Christian Polemic in Early Modern England (2007).

Although her subsequent books such as Get Real: How to See through the Hype, Spin and Lies of Modern Life (2012) and Anti-Politics: On the Demonization of Ideology, Authority and the State (2017) and now Motherhood: A Manifesto all focus on contemporary culture, Glaser sees them as “similarly concerned with identifying concealed or disavowed ideological agendas”. The latest one explores how “the apparently free choices of mothers are actually constrained by our culture’s validation of certain positions – natural over medicalised birth, breast over bottle, home over work. This rhetoric of individual choice makes many mothers feel guilty, anxious or a failure, and it prevents society from improving motherhood structurally.”

“Perhaps the greatest taboo” she discusses, Glaser goes on, “is that of anger. In an age of intensive, perfectionist parenting, maternal ambivalence is denied as a reality. Yet it is normal for a good-enough mother to lose her temper sometimes. I argue that this fact should be normalised, but also that if mothers were more supported, they would find themselves less often at the end of their tether.”

Matthew Reisz