Charman has written an impassioned and highly researched first political history of motherhood in the UK and Ireland in the last fifty years, in order both to recapture and propose the idea of motherhood as a collective, political act – to consider the bearing and/or raising children to be the responsibility of society as a whole. We are all the children of mothers whose social circumstances and political experiences have moulded us as much as her care. In this sense, mothering has always been collective and political. But it is seldom seen that way.  

Growing up the daughter of a ‘single mum’ in the 1990s, Helen Charman believed in the notion of a ‘maternal’ state: a vision of shared social responsibility that has fallen away since then. Was that notion of the state or of motherhood ever a reality? Could we imagine instead, today, a world where mothering ceases to be a solely individual responsibility and becomes one of shared possibility – a term to organize under, for people of any gender, with or without children of their own? If so, it begins with an understanding: that to mother is a political act.