This book confronts the core claims of postmaternal thought and criticizes dominant representations of feminism as having forgotten motherhood. It does this through an investigation of oral histories, life narratives, web blogs, and other rich and varied sources. The book highlights the deep cultural anxiety that exists around public expressions of maternalism. It examines why postmaternal thinking has become so influential in recent decades and asks why there has been a growing unease with maternal forms of subjectivity and maternalist perspectives. In moving beyond policy definitions, which ... More

This book confronts the core claims of postmaternal thought and criticizes dominant representations of feminism as having forgotten motherhood. It does this through an investigation of oral histories, life narratives, web blogs, and other rich and varied sources. The book highlights the deep cultural anxiety that exists around public expressions of maternalism. It examines why postmaternal thinking has become so influential in recent decades and asks why there has been a growing unease with maternal forms of subjectivity and maternalist perspectives. In moving beyond policy definitions, which emphasize the priority given to women’s claims as employees over their political claims as mothers, the book details an elaborate process of cultural forgetting that has accompanied this repudiation of the maternal. The book uses the interpretive framework of memory studies to examine the political structures of forgetting surrounding the maternal and the weakening of nurture and care in the public domain. It describes the promotion of an illusory, self-sufficient individualism as a form of social unmothering that is profoundly connected to this ethos. In rejecting both traditional maternalism and the new postmaternalism, the book challenges prevailing paradigms and makes way for an alternative feminist maternalism centred on a politics of care.