Alicia Modestino

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in an unprecedented disruption to caregiving as daycare centers and schools were closed, exposing the critical link between childcare and the labor market. For many working parents, this unexpected childcare shock meant finding back-up childcare, rearranging responsibilities within the household, or cutting back on work. Some optimists speculated that this unexpected disruption to the status quo might usher in a new era of gender equity with respect to caregiving. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, women had recently achieved parity with men in terms of employment, accounting for 50 percent of US payroll employment at the end of 2019.

Yet a plethora of studies since then have shown that the burden of childcare during the COVID-19 pandemic was not shared equally but instead fell disproportionately on women. Time use data shows that mothers significantly increased their time spent on remote learning and playing with children—more so than men—adding up to an extra two days per week—on top of their regular prepandemic jobs. And this burden was felt more heavily by women with fewer options, greater needs, and less resources—who largely had to rely on grandparents to provide backup childcare.

A Woman’s Work by Elinor Cleghorn reminds us that society has a very long history of denying that childcare and mothering is work – a history that she deftly traces as far back as the ancient world through a clay model of a human fetus used in a childbirth ritual over three thousand years ago. Early on, much of this history was preserved in the form of funerary monuments of women who had perished in childbirth or medical texts written by men, such as the Hippocratic Corpus, which focused solely on motherhood as a physiological condition. Only later, when women were allowed to be educated, are their perspectives on becoming mothers able to be expressed in their own words. By lifting up the stories of women from each era, Cleghorn draws on the lived experiences of mothers, midwives, activists, community leaders, and even her own mother to give voice to the feminist fight for motherhood to be recognized as a choice rather than what God or nature intended.

For me, the book’s most interesting contribution was highlighting the inherent contradiction in how patriarchal societies have simultaneously assumed that motherhood is a “natural” instinct that all women possessed yet also that women are somehow not intelligent or skilled enough to know how to mother children on their own. This recurring theme is most apparent in the denigration of midwives, who do all of the hands-on “labor” to help women during delivery by drawing on knowledge passed down from one generation to another; yet they are told by book-smart male physicians that what they are doing is unscientific, unskilled, and downright dangerous. Ironically, modern history repeats itself when women eventually reach parity with men in terms of their medical education, become the majority of ob-gyns, and then become cast  by the medical profession as simply having a primary care specialty rather than the highly praised surgical specialty it once was when it was majority male.

Even more impressive is how Cleghorn stitches together this historical tapestry to reveal a set of conflicting rules of motherhood that have been imposed on women since the dawn of time: Don’t abort an unwanted child but also don’t produce a bastard. Don’t live off the public dole but also don’t work in the labor market. Raising children is the most noble of activities but we don’t want to pay for it. Together, these societal constraints have pitted women against each other: married versus single, wealthy versus poor, working versus stay-at-home, and even Black versus white. After all, enslaved mothers were portrayed as lacking the maternal qualities necessary to raise their own children but could be trusted to nurse and nurture slave owners’ infants and children.

The history of devaluing women’s work—whether it be midwives caring for mothers or mothers caring for children—has left society with a costly legacy that does not appear likely to be remedied any time soon. Even prior to the pandemic, the lack of childcare was costly for American businesses, with the cost of lost earnings, productivity, and revenue due lack of childcare totaling $57 billion each year. During the pandemic, the closure of schools and daycares for weeks and months starkly revealed childcare to be an important piece of infrastructure, prompting the Biden administration to argue for its inclusion in the subsequent Build Back Better (BBB) Act. Childcare enables parents to “get to work” just like roads and bridges do for commuters – maybe even more so, since many people can effectively skip the commute and work from home, but it becomes more difficult when there’s a toddler in their Zoom background. However, when the BBB bill stalled in the Senate and later evolved into the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, what was the one thing that was missing? Childcare.

As an economist, I have to admit that I was blissfully unaware of how far societal notions of motherhood have come, aside from the more-recent history of my own mother’s journey. But this book made me think more deeply about the  women who fought to have their stories told so that the next generation would be able to define motherhood on their own terms. As the mother of an amazing fourteen-year-old daughter, I worry now more than ever that those gains are being eroded and that her choices will be even more constrained than my own. So, my hope for this Mother’s Day is that we can collectively draw on the lessons of our foremothers to help our children rewrite the rules of motherhood, for the hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world…

Amanda Montei

To mother or not to mother, that is often the question. Social media representations of motherhood have, in recent years, helped conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation whittle women’s lives down to this question, one that feels new but that has, in fact, always plagued feminist thought, itself trapped within patriarchal culture and language. Home or career? Private or public?

The far right wishes women to believe that a return to pronatal, submissive gender roles is, for women, the only escape from late-stage capitalism. Fantasies of patriarchal marriages lived out on farms where raw, unpasteurized milk flows like water and women “do not work” have overtaken our collective imagination. These dominant representations of uncomplicated motherhood are paired with policy briefs, too: those that make it harder for single mothers, and single women without children, to survive.

This campaign promotes a real, material return to a false past that maintains women’s subordination and oppression. It has also been immensely successful in degrading the real beauty and radical futurity of caring for children and the subversive power possible in acts of mothering. The complementary image of feminism that has come to dominate public consciousness—a picture of a movement defined by individualistic careerism, unchecked ambition, cruel sexlessness or hypersexualization, and an ambient spirit of manhating, complaint, and heteropessimism—subscribes to the same worldview. The premise in both visions is that women’s liberation threatens not just manhood but what male power requires to maintain itself—that is, women’s unquestioned participation in the nuclear family.

Elinor Cleghorn’s A Woman’s Work: Reclaiming the Radical History of Mothering reminds us that another world is possible by returning to the histories of motherhood we have forgotten. Bringing together stories that stretch as far back as the ninth century BCE—as well as stories of those who have worked to wrest their experiences, and the institution of motherhood, from patriarchal control—the book considers “the empowering potential of motherhood,” and not through pat stories of sacrifice, nor mamas who got this.

Instead, the book looks at those who have worked to reclaim autonomy in and for mothering—a fight waged not only by birth mothers but also “othermothers, maternal carers, maternity caregivers, midwives, and birth companions, as well as activists, thinkers, writers, and community leaders.” Central to this history are those who have fought to secure the right to not mother and to ensure that childbearing and mothering are not coerced or forced.

Some have called for a new “care feminism” to fight the global rise of misogyny and femicide, but this can often serve as cover for those who, by reflex, want women to be more maternal, more appealing, and less angry in our efforts to resuscitate a much-needed feminist movement and fight authoritarianism. We too easily step over bigger questions about the most dogged problems women face today: the isolation of the nuclear family, the persistence of marital inequality, the sexual division of labor, and the violence against women that is excused or validated by these same inequitable institutions.

Not to mention, how to get anyone to believe us.

By celebrating “mothering beyond the biological,” Cleghorn pushes back against the destructive idea that care work is natural and instinctual rather than highly skilled labor born of intense effort, emotion, and intellect. And mothering is a radical practice accessible to all—one that is neither sentimental nor stoic, neither pure nor purely cynical, neither essentialist nor disembodied.

These stories—and the broader historical narrative Cleghorn herself attempts to wrest from patriarchal control—provide an antidote to the regressive views of family so popular with the right wing today, getting us closer to “what we should continue to celebrate, and what we hope to dismantle” in the story we tell today about motherhood. The history of motherhood is in fact brutal, disorderly, and deeply rebellious. It is not always pretty or nice. It is a clamoring for voice and for agency, an effort to be seen and heard, to be taken at one’s word, to be safe.

Kara W. Swanson

It has been a recent parlor game to pick the closest historical analog of our present: The 1890s, with the extreme wealth disparities of the Gilded Age? The 1930s, with the rise of fascism? The 1950s, with the exaltation of Leave It to Beaver-style domesticity? Elinor Cleghorn’s synthetic history, A Woman’s Work: Reclaiming the Radical History of Mothering, suggests that the correct answer is all of the above  – plus a few preceding millennia. She offers a readable tour of “patriarchal motherhood” from Bronze Age Crete to the Women’s Liberation Movement in the UK and US, by way of ancient Greece, Rome, and western Europe. The names of the deities changed, medical knowledge shifted, empires rose and fell, but the control over women’s bodies and thence their lives remained.

The “woman’s work” of the title refers not to long years of mothering children to adulthood and beyond, but rather to pregnancy and childbirth, with detours into contraception and abortion. Nor is there much “radical history.” Despite the welcome inclusion of rare, usually elite, women who left traces of their experiences and sometimes refused their assigned roles – such as the Roman matron Paula who cheerily left her young children in 385 CE to join a religious community – the throughline is how powerful men, speaking through law, religion, and medicine, sought to prescribe what potentially pregnant, pregnant, and birthing people should do and think.

According to A Woman’s Work, continuity gave way to change in the second half of the twentieth century. Since the 1960s, a “rich, expansive cultural terrain of motherhood” has supported an alternative to patriarchal motherhood, “liberated mothering.” Even as a liberated mother in the 2000s, however, Cleghorn found a “cultural silence around the realities of giving birth, the postpartum period, and early motherhood.” Her attempt to fill this silence led her to classic feminist works from the 1960s to the 1980s (see the fantastic bibliography) that underlie A Woman’s Work, scholarship Cleghorn updates with efforts to mark the racialized and classed differences among women as well as the infrequency of LGBTQIA+ mothering in the historical record.

A Woman’s Work ends at this era of change, with the story of Cleghorn’s mother, immersed in second-wave feminism, choosing solo parenting. It thus leaves the reader to wonder about the “silence” experienced by her daughter and, more pressingly, how to explain the shift from “reclaiming the meanings of motherhood from the stranglehold of the patriarchy” to a pronatalist present in which law and medicine are mobilized to “reiterate patriarchal expectations around what women and their bodies are for.”

Cleghorn wants us to remember that “we have weathered such storms before” and that mothers “will make the world.” I ache to agree with her that understanding this history is a source of hope. When I encountered those classic books in the 1980s, I was certain that now this history was known, we were saved from its repetition. Millennia of patriarchy stopped here. Yet in 2026, this history suggests that the last half-century was not a generational click! that ratcheted us into a permanent new mode of mothering but rather a historical anomaly, a mere break in the storms. Knowing history once is not enough to prevent silence in the next generation, nor to avoid repeating it. A Woman’s Work offers the recovery of forgotten voices for another generation and a reminder that mothering has always been contested terrain. But it is also evidence that when the historical analog is measured in millennia, a few decades is not enough for lasting change.

Elinor Cleghorn

Thank you to the editors of Signs for featuring A Woman’s Work in Short Takes and for inviting these insightful responses from Alicia Modestino, Amanda Montei, and Kara W. Swanson. As a feminist cultural historian, I’m indebted to scholars who center women’s voices, lives, and experiences in historical and critical inquiry, and I hope my work contributes to and continues the conversation. To be read with thoughtful attention for a journal so integral to the communication of feminist scholarship is an honor.

When I started researching A Woman’s Work in 2022, I knew the history of motherhood and mothering was more expansive and intricate than one book could accommodate. So, I tried to determine why, at that moment, a history of maternal lives and experiences was needed. COVID-19, as Modestino notes, had exposed society’s dependence on and undervaluing of parental and caregiving labor, performed disproportionately by women. Then, in July of 2022, the overruling of Roe v. Wade reiterated the misogynistic insistence that women’s bodies, and lives, exist to serve patriarchal agendas. With women’s reproductive autonomy and safety diminished and the work of mothering invalidated, I wanted to explore how, over time, women have been defined primarily as reproductive beings endowed with the “natural” capacity to mother – a capacity that has negated the provision of resources, support, and community outside of, as Montei observes, the regressive ideal of the nuclear family.

Since finishing A Woman’s Work, the need to examine the patriarchal construction of motherhood has even more become glaringly clear. Alongside the far-right’s insistence on women’s purpose as child-bearers and unpaid caregivers, we are witnessing, in Europe and the US, the rise of the far-right’s pronatalist agenda. Anxieties around so-called fertility and birthrate crises are being exploited to promote motherhood as women’s natural destiny, and duty to their nation’s future. Demographic panic is rooted in racist, colonialist, anti-LGBTQ+ ideology – and the Right’s solution is to limit women’s rights and freedoms until marriage, childbearing, and economic dependence on men are the only options for our safety and stability. During book talks, audience members have talked about their fears around the rise of misogynistic rhetoric about what women’s lives and bodies are for. Readers and interviewers have been keen to talk about how and why patriarchal systems of power have conspired to accomplish certain reproductive ambitions. While I appreciate Swanson’s hesitation about historical knowledge being a source of hope, I do believe that understanding the foundations and development of today’s pernicious ideologies is instructive and illuminating.

I’m grateful to Modestino, Montei, and Swanson for highlighting how A Woman’s Work recovers and centers the voices and experiences of people who mothered. For it is in women’s stories that the “false past,” as Montei puts it, evoked by the far right’s nostalgia project, is exposed. Modestino and Montei both acknowledge how “fantasies” about bygone times – that mothering is not work but nature and women’s true fulfillment was achieved through submission to domestic maternity – are fueling this project. The textual and material traces of women who mothered confirm that mothering has always transcended the boundaries imposed upon it by the patriarchy. And this is where I’ll push back against Swanson’s assertion that there’s “not much radical history” in my book. I discuss how mothering – across social classes, racialized identities, and political sensibilities – was integral to the abolition of slavery, the organized movement for women’s and equal rights, the emergence of socialized infant and maternal healthcare in the UK, the welfare activism movement in the US, and more. The engines of patriarchy have long assumed that women’s biologically and socially determined duty exempts them from the public spheres of paid employment, political participation, and intellectual production. But the history that mothers made for themselves, that mothers inscribed themselves into, shows how false this assumption is. Patriarchal motherhood has produced the “destructive idea”, as Montei writes, that “care work” is “natural and instinctual rather than highly skilled labor born of intense effort, emotion, and intellect.” But history shows us that bearing, nurturing, and raising children has always required, and engendered, creativity, ingenuity, resilience, courage, and thought. Recovering and retelling our history is one way to disrupt ingrained maternal narratives and myths – and engaging with our history can help us at least imagine a safer, more supported, and liberated future for mothering, in all its diversity.