Motherhood and the contradictions of feminism: Appraising claims towards emancipation in the perspective of surrogacy

Introduction

The claim that the feminist movement has been the main promoter of change in the condition of women, at least since the mid-twentieth century, is undeniable. Thanks to the valiant and often controversial struggles of feminism, women enjoy a higher level of education, improved entry into the labour market, recognition of talents, and have seen an end to their social, legal – and sometimes, even physical – subjection to men (husband, father, brother). One of the movement’s central tenets has been its disparaging conceptualization of motherhood as the bastion of women’s subordination in a patriarchal society. In some instances, feminist authors even launched direct attacks on the institution of motherhood and ventured to term it a condition of slavery; more frequently, however, their harsh criticism of the divide between the domestic and paid employment spheres represented motherhood as an obstacle on the road to emancipation. In order to foster conscious choice and alleviate the burden placed on the shoulders of women, motherhood was conceived solely as a social practice whose demands conflicted with women’s activities in the public sphere. The emancipation of women could therefore take place through opposition to or, at best, despite motherhood.

Since the close of the twentieth century, extensive development of artificial reproductive technologies (ARTs) has transformed the context in which we appraise emancipation in relation to motherhood. ARTs and, in particular, gestational surrogacy (GS) offer infertile women and couples options that were unimaginable some years ago. Yet – until technology can deliver, and ethics consent to, artificial uteruses for extracorporeal human pregnancy – they do so solely on condition that another woman make her body available. Although feminism has long been in consensus over deeming motherhood a hindrance to emancipation, it nonetheless split into irreconcilable for and against fronts over GS, whereby both positions are founded in the language of individual rights and control over one’s body. Contradictions of feminism have thus emerged: nature versus culture, domestic versus working life, insistence on free choice versus a critique of extreme individualism.

From the outset, however, feminist theory has not offered significant space to the notion of motherhood as empowering, rather than encumbering and disempowering women. This article therefore intends to examine the relevance that conceptions of motherhood pose today for feminist thought. It does so, in particular, by setting motherhood in the wider framework of two factors that help define our present context: the relentless advancement of ARTs, on the one hand, and the development of motherhood studies as an area of interdisciplinary research describing an extensive array of mothering practices across societies and cultures, on the other (Beyer, 2019; O’Reilly, 2010). These two fields, which have flourished particularly over the past 20 years, not only add new notions to the existing structure and terms of reference, but also largely concur in redefining the ‘bigger picture’ of motherhood and feminism in a thought-provoking manner.

This article thus aims to explore some of the fundamental notions that have built the narrative of feminist emancipation elucidating any inherent contradictions, appraise their implications for motherhood and assess their respective salience for feminist thought today. The article developed from extensive critical readings of feminist and non-feminist empirical and theoretical works analysing motherhood, either directly or indirectly, as well as original empirical research on GS. Although not cited here specifically, that body of research forms an important part of the generative background to several significant contentions in this article (Bandelli and Corradi, 2019; Corradi and Bandelli, 2019). As with any theoretical construct, the writings of leading feminists such as Shulamith Firestone, Susan Moller Okin, Nancy Fraser, Adrienne Rich and Sara Ruddick reflect the period, preoccupations and socio-political environment in which they emerged, but they were and still are extremely influential in setting the scene and shaping discussions of the women’s movements in the world (Freeman, 2015; Moghadam, 2015). As giants of feminism, they paved the way for questions about inherent contradictions between constructs and empirical evidence: they have guided this re-examination of findings from different social sectors and the sphere of scientific advances in ARTs and GS, particularly in relation to the transformation of women’s bodies into ‘open access flesh’. ¹

The first two sections of this article trace the dialectic dynamic within feminist thought in relation to motherhood, social emancipation, equality and vulnerability, alongside significant inconsistencies about the duality of women’s roles from two authors’ theoretical reflections and personal experiences. The third section addresses feminist controversies and contradictions inherent in the ARTs and GS age and the implications of those positions. The fourth section brings findings from a range of surveys in motherhood studies, with grassroots insights into self-image and empowerment through motherhood. The conclusion addresses the significance of these findings in terms of their intrinsic value, as well as their potential to impact the development of feminist constructs of motherhood.

Motherhood as a bastion of subordination

Although mid-twentieth-century feminism may not represent a homogeneous collection of theories, authors from this period generally viewed the burden of childrearing as an obstacle to women’s emancipation; indeed, it appears as a central tenet running through feminism like a leitmotif. In this respect, three authors stand out as particularly significant and influential for subsequent development.

Shulamith Firestone’s book The Dialectic of Sex, published in 1970, is considered a landmark text in this respect (Condit, 2010; Freeman, 2015). Inspired by Marx and Engels’ class dialectics, the author posits a feminist theory of social organization aimed at the liberation of women from sex class oppression, as existing from time immemorial. The fundamental biological condition of reproduction (where the activities of childbearing and childrearing are singled out and reconsidered) renders women dependent on males. The role of feminism is to question ‘not just all of Western culture, but the organization of culture itself, and further, the very organization of nature’ (Firestone, 1970: 4) because nature and the reproduction of the human species, in particular, justify the maintenance of a discriminatory sex system we need to eradicate. Consequently, the end-goal of the feminist revolution must be ‘not just the elimination of male privilege but the sex distinction itself: genital differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally’ (Firestone, 1970: 11). Nature, namely pregnancy, gestation, giving birth and all the activities centred around childbearing and childrearing, confines women in limited functions and spaces and hampers their freedom. To eliminate the sex system discrimination, Firestone assigns paramount importance to technology: this is one of the features that renders her book particularly relevant today. Fifty years ago, this author already had an extremely lucid perception of the role technology played in changing women’s social status, by providing birth control and fertilization techniques. She acknowledges that ‘artificial insemination and artificial inovulation are already a reality. Choice of sex of the foetus, test-tube fertilization . . . are just around the corner. Several teams of scientists are working on the development of an artificial placenta. Even parthenogenesis – virgin birth – could be developed very soon’ (Firestone, 1970: 179).

In debunking the foundations of male dominance and propelling the emancipation of women, Nancy Fraser has been a leading intellectual for more than 30 years. On the occasion of the publication of Jürgen Habermas’s The Theory of Communicative Action, Fraser (1985) examines his division between domestic and waged work from a feminist standpoint. She engages with Habermas’s distinction between socially integrated and systems integrated action contexts, which lie at the core of his theory and serve to construct a two-level concept of society that, by combining the lifeworld and systems paradigm, offers a broader understanding of the differentiation process typical of modernity. In ‘socially integrated action contexts’, agents coordinate by reference to an intersubjective consensus about norms and values that is predicated on linguistic speech and interaction; Habermas’s example here is the modern nuclear family. In ‘systems integrated action contexts’, each individual action is determined by self-interest and utility-maximizing calculations, typically entertained in the idioms of money and power; for Habermas, the capitalist economic system is the paradigm case of this action context. Fraser criticizes this distinction harshly: in both contexts, the difference is actually one of degree, since intersubjectively shared meaning and norms are active in the capitalist marketplace and because the modern family is not devoid of individual, strategic calculations in the idioms of money and power. The distinction hides the fact that the household is a place of labour and that, within the family, women are ghettoized in distinctively feminine and often sexualized occupations (Fraser, 2013 [1985]: 28). In both the lifeworld and systems spheres, women are thus subordinate to men. Feminists, in empirical analyses of familial decision-making, handling of finances and wife-battering, writes Fraser, have shown that families are thoroughly permeated by money and power (Fraser, 2013 [1985]: 29).

Symbolic reproduction activities, claims Habermas, are unlike material reproduction activities in that they cannot be transferred to specialized, system-integrated institutions set apart from the lifeworld. Hence, women’s unpaid childrearing labour could not be incorporated into the economic system without pathological results. In Fraser’s view, Habermas’s theoretical framework is androcentric and ideological because it is primed to defend the separation of the economic sphere from the domestic sphere. It therefore defends ‘an institutional arrangement that is widely held to be one, if not the, linchpin of modern women’s subordination’ (Fraser, 2013 [1985]: 32). Fraser adds that childrearing is a ‘dual-aspect activity’, pertaining to both material and symbolic reproduction, but does not elaborate further (Fraser, 2013 [1985]: 28). She maintains that privatized childrearing is already, to a significant extent, permeated by the media of money and power and that there is no empirical evidence that children raised in commercial day-care centres become any more ‘pathological’ than those raised, say, in suburban homes by full-time mothers.

The third author is Susan Moller Okin, whose book Justice, Gender and the Family (Okin, 1989) was a breakthrough because, for the first time in academic literature, it scrutinized the ‘neutral’ concept of justice from a gender perspective. After critiquing some of the most influential theories of justice of her day, the author shows that the exclusion of the social organization of marriage from those theories and the uncritical assumption that the family is a just institution sustain women’s social inequality. The inequitable division of family responsibility is based on the deeply-ingrained principle that innate sex characteristics – rendering women primarily responsible for childrearing – legitimize various rights and restrictions, whether formal or informal, between men and women. The outcomes of this principle sustain women’s dependency on men, disadvantage at work, social exclusion, increased likelihood of abuse and poverty. Women are ‘rendered vulnerable by the actual division of labor within almost all current marriages’ (Okin, 1989: 139); they become involved very early in a cycle of vulnerability beginning with the anticipation of marriage, then domesticity and motherhood, exclusion from sex-segregated workplaces and, consequently, diminished money and power leverage in the relationship. In a detailed and informative chapter on the gender-based social organization of domestic life in her time, Okin notes that a housewife with preschool children is at the least powerful point in her marriage and that ‘her power decreases as the number of children rises’ (Okin, 1989: 157).

Motherhood and genderless mothering

Mid-twentieth-century feminism also engaged directly with motherhood from the standpoint of a new fomentation of ideas about the status of women in society. Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born (1976) is the first comprehensive attempt to examine motherhood from a feminist perspective and distinguish between two meanings: ‘the potential relationship of any woman to her powers of reproduction and to children; and the institution, which aims at ensuring that that potential – and all women – shall remain under male control’ (Rich, 1976: 13, original emphasis). Since Rich, this distinction has been widely used in sociology and motherhood studies (Beyer, 2019; Kawash, 2011; O’Reilly, 2010). One salient contribution to contemporary social theory is its presentation of the ambivalence of motherhood as an experience: the intermingling sentiments of frustration and joy, impatience and dedication, irritation and love that mothers experience. Her detailed accounts of and reflections on personal experiences of fertility, pregnancy, giving birth and nurturing her children are captivating. Rich never praises the experience of mothering unequivocally; she rather provides a narrative of conflict between passionate love of her dependent children and freedom to choose the terms of her own life. ‘I remember’ – writes Rich – ‘anxiety, physical weariness, anger, self-blame, boredom, and division within myself: a division made more acute by the moments of passionate love, delight in my children’s spirited bodies and minds, amazement at how they went on loving me in spite of my failures’ (Rich, 1976: 15).

Nonetheless, when Rich offers an intellectual scrutiny of the reasons for this inner division, she invariably reverts to criticizing motherhood as an institution that has ghettoized and degraded female potentialities. ‘The patriarchal institution of motherhood is not the “human condition” any more than rape, prostitution and slavery’ (Rich, 1976: 33). Patriarchy thus plays a fundamental role in Rich’s explanation of the alienation of mothers from their bodies. The institution of motherhood creates prescriptions and conditions in which women’s choices are made; it ‘demands of women maternal “instinct” rather than intelligence, selflessness rather than self-realization, relation to others rather than the creation of self’ (Rich, 1976: 42). ‘The woman’s body is the terrain on which patriarchy is erected’ (Rich, 1976: 55).

Although Rich is the first to make room for the experience of motherhood in women’s lives, the notions brought do not differ from other feminists of her time. The historical examination and her critique of patriarchy bring new evidence to the same theoretical framework discussed in the preceding section. Her many insights into the enlivening experience of motherhood are presented in stark opposition to the construct of the enslaving institution of motherhood. Only emancipation from patriarchy will overcome the central ambiguity characterizing motherhood: namely, the conflict between self-preservation and maternal feelings as a primal agony, and the sacredness and redemptive function socially attributed to motherhood – which, to Rich, stands in contrast to the degradation of women in the order created by men (Rich, 1976: 83).

Rich’s work elicited significant interest in feminist discussions on what mothers do. In 1989, philosopher Sara Ruddick published what is still considered a watershed investigation into the thinking that emerges from the work and practices of mothering, opening academic space for motherhood studies (Ruddick, 1989; Stephens, 2011). According to Ruddick’s practicalist, philosophical standpoint, ‘mothers are not identified by fixed biological or legal relationship to children but by the work they set out to do’ (Ruddick, 1989: xi). Giving birth and mothering appear to Ruddick as two distinct and quite different activities. ‘No individual need engage in both in order to do one of them well’ (Ruddick, 1989: xv). In a society that must be freed from gender stereotypes and respectful of female humans, her objective is to avoid restricting mothering to women. Men are, and increasingly should be, engaged in mothering as well as lesbian and celibate women; indeed, a woman is no more, and a man no less ‘naturally’ a mother. ‘It is of the first importance, epistemologically and politically, that a work which has historically been feminine can transcend gender’ (Ruddick, 1989: 44, my emphasis). Although birthing labour is an undeniably female activity, it is possible to minimize its importance to mothering as a whole. Pregnancy, birth and lactation are distinctly different from other maternal work and, measured by the life of one child, are brief episodes in years of mothering (Ruddick, 1989: 48).

In the effort to reconcile birth-giving and genderless mothering, Ruddick divides the process into small analytical segments: gestating a foetus, taking care of it, imagining taking care of a future child while gestating a foetus, giving birth, lactating and, finally, mothering a child. All mothers, she says, are adoptive, in that they engage in a social, non-natural act when they sustain an infant in the world (Ruddick, 1989: 51). Ruddick makes a quick reference to technology as ‘a way to intrude on and exploit women’s bodies in unprecedented ways’ (Ruddick, 1989: 48), but never openly refers to surrogacy practices already developing in the USA. ²

Yet, her genderless endeavour notwithstanding, Ruddick recognizes differences. ‘To deny the different relations of women and men to human birth founds the entire egalitarian project on an illusion’ (Ruddick, 1989: 49). Moreover, in the final, generally overlooked part of her book, where she employs maternal thought as an anti-militarist resource to promote peace, the importance of bodily differences is celebrated. Ruddick, who has hitherto adopted a constructivist approach to motherhood, relinquishes efforts to separate genderless mothering from the female body on which it depends and sets out to write a ‘history of human flesh’ that is centred on birthing labour and ‘the unique relation of birthgiver and infant’ (Ruddick, 1989: 187). To write a ‘maternal, revisionist history of the human flesh’ (Ruddick, 1989: 198), Ruddick first presents the physical and uncontrolled aspects – namely, the revulsion associated with birthing labour, menstruation and breastfeeding in some cultures, the somewhat repellent characteristics of a woman’s birthing body (bloody, swollen out of shape) and exposure to pain. Then she turns to ‘natality’, defined as the promising event of beginning, an event ‘whose end and shape can be neither predicted nor controlled’ (Ruddick, 1989: 209). She concludes as follows:

I do not believe that any one relationship between birthgiving and mothering is mandated by morality or nature. What I do believe is that to divide new life from the life on which it depends – the hopes and aims of a particular woman – is to violate the connectedness symbolized by birth and aimed for in maternal nurturance and nonviolence. (Ruddick, 1989: 211)

These words stand in patent contradiction to her practicalist approach.

Birth-giving, mothering and surrogacy

So far, the notions defining the compelling narrative of emancipation have revolved around changes in the social organization of domestic life. New roles, new spaces must open up to women; a new concept of justice and women’s agency needs to dismember and realign the fundamental inequality of the family structure. In this narrative, nature does not define innate sex characteristics but serves to justify a patriarchal separation between the public and the private that renders women vulnerable and ghettoized. In Firestone’s visionary claims, a revolution in the very order of nature is required to eliminate sex distinction. Not without ambivalence, genderless mothering is posited as one further step along this road.

In the last 20 years, the development of ARTs has profoundly changed the context in which we appraise reproduction, women’s emancipation and the workings of nature. Techniques of sperm injection, in vitro fertilization and artificial insemination are so sophisticated that they allow implantation of fertilized embryos in the womb of a woman, genetically unrelated to the foetus, who carries it for nine months. At clients’ requests, embryos may be submitted to sex selection and pre-implant diagnosis (Aird, 2010). Legal regulations differ from country to country, framing GS either as an altruistic gift relationship providing for the surrogate’s medical, legal and daily expenses and paying services of a surrogacy agency, or as a commercial service and remunerated labour of the gestating woman (Dickenson, 2017). Women surrogates lending their wombs submit to massive doses of hormone injections to facilitate embryo implants; their life for nine months is regimented in detail with all kinds of demands – such as special dietary regime, exercise, sexual abstinence, and video-recorded birth. In some countries, surrogates may be isolated from their families during gestation to augment control over daily activities and medical monitoring of their health (Klein, 2017; Olavarría, 2018; Rudrappa, 2015). Birth is always by C-section, timed to facilitate delivery to the designated parents, especially where these are overseas clients. In both altruistic and commercial GS, a detailed contract regulates the rights and obligations of the respective partners in a transaction culminating with the service rendered – production of a human baby – delivered at a price (Danna, 2019).

International feminism is divided into for and against fronts on GS, their strongest central claims being the autonomous use of versus commodification of the body, respectively. Both arguments are alluring, evoking concepts from the internationally established narrative of emancipation. Before GS, there was a unitary, non-self-contradictory feminist narrative, relying on the notion of individual choice: divorce, abortion, access to work and career, and gender equality all fitted the map. In the face of ARTs innovations, however, the narrative breaks into two incompatible opposites. Thus, contradictions of feminist theory on motherhood, nature, the body and the individual self surface clearly.

Pro-surrogacy advocates claim women must retain full self-control of their bodies and the freedom to choose what to do with them. From this theoretical premise it derives that surrogacy offers a source of income for disadvantaged women (Jacobson, 2016; Pande, 2014; Rudrappa, 2015), provided that contracts are accurate, well-drafted and protect the surrogate woman’s rights – and not only the economic interests of the surrogacy industry (Spar, 2006). Once this claim is made, other supporting arguments derive from it. Surrogacy facilitates configurations of the family structure that better reflect today’s non-traditional model (Stuvøy, 2018); maternal intimacy is socially imposed upon women, so there are no bonds at birth (Lewis, 2017); banning surrogacy is unrealistic, therefore risk-reduction is the correct path to pursue (Olavarría, 2018; Parks, 2014), to be organized on a fair-trade model (Pande, 2014).

Anti-surrogacy advocates claim that women’s self-determination is an important principle, but is being exercised in a social context that reduces women’s bodies to fragmented objects, fully controlled by ARTs clinics and the pharmaceutical industry (Klein, 2017). Surrogates do not actually choose freely because they lack sufficient and truthful information on health risks, live in conditions of marginality or poverty and are indoctrinated to ignore bonds with the babies they carry for nine months. All these factors make it impossible to talk about rights, choices and agency (Saravanan, 2018). Other claims derive from these. Banning surrogacy would end detrimental phenomena such as reproductive tourism, commodification, new forms of slavery, subjugation to a patriarchal system of technology and growing inequalities between the affluent couples who can afford the price of surrogacy and women who must rent their wombs to raise money (Agacinski, 2019; Bandelli, 2019; Stoicea-Deram, 2016).

With few exceptions, advocates of both positions generally avoid thinking out of the box – to observe surrogacy from other perspectives. One opposes the idea that women ‘own’ their bodies, considering that selling parts of it does not represent an expression of freedom (Dickenson, 2017). The other views the perspective of the newborn as the central issue (Bandelli, 2019). This alignment risks convergence with the schism between the ‘pro-choice’ front, defending abortion and the ‘pro-lifers’, opposing it. This paradigm also offers an excellent example of the unsuitability of the progressive/conservative division, in the classification of the bigger picture related to ARTs.

A third, novel option – beyond the autonomy versus commodification argument – is ectogenesis, inspired by Firestone, i.e. to imagine not using a woman’s body for pregnancy: possibly, a further logical step towards complete equality to men. If an artificial womb is already a reality for animals, would it be feasible (or acceptable) for humans? One online image currently depicts this new and imminent possibility. ³ In a laboratory or medical facility, human foetuses at different stages of development float in an oval container almost full of a bluish, softly bubbling liquid. Each umbilical cord (artificial or natural?) is attached to a machine, which is connected to a monitor. An adult human figure (man or woman?) in a white coat, cap, gloves and surgical mask passes along the flasks, recording foetal status on a tablet. In the laboratory, we can see incubated foetuses, which is not the case in a woman’s womb. Scientists describe this as ‘a “glass cabinet with UV protection” containing a gelatinous protein substance. The fetus would be sustained by a maternal blood supply, which is oxygenated by an artificial lung, circulated by an artificial heart, and filtered by artificial kidneys’ (Preskey, 2018). Transhumanists stress the positive consequences of ectogenesis, ‘every heartbeat, kick, and moment of a foetus’s life could be carefully monitored, from zygote to the moment the baby takes its first breath of air. Every nutrient the foetus gets would be measured, every movement it makes would be filmed, every heartbeat would be analyzed for proper timing’ (Istvan, 2014). Connections between surrogacy and ectogenesis are manifest. As one bioethicist explains, ‘One of the potential benefits of ectogenesis is it could outsource contract pregnancy to a machine, rather than a person.’ In addition, ‘As it is not possible to exploit or dehumanize a machine, this can be seen to be preferable to commercial surrogacy’ (E Kendal quoted in Preskey, 2018).

Returning to Firestone, Rich and Ruddick’s claims – should feminists today persist in a clear-cut separation of childrearing from childbearing? The discussion above suggests otherwise. There is a profound conceptual distinction between promotion of a social division between birth-giving and mothering and the acceptance or celebration of an epistemological division, on which genderless mothering is supposedly rooted. The social division acknowledges that mothers may want or need to surrender their children to adoption, need or want help to share tasks and responsibilities with others – such as partners, fathers, other members of the family and paid-for care. If the social division of roles serves the child’s best interest (which means that he or she is nurtured and protected), it may only benefit him or her. In terms of the social organization of tasks, Ruddick’s analysis is correct. One may echo Fraser’s critique of Habermas and maintain that relinquishing childrearing to the market does not have pathological consequences.

However, the claim of an epistemological division between birth-giving and mothering is entirely different. It demands a leap to a much higher level, where we interrogate who we are as persons with minds and bodies, not what we do as social agents. The assertion of an epistemological division creates a deep-seated principle, primed to legitimize alienation of birth-givers from their bodies and gestated babies together with the commercialization of babies. It is not surprising that ARTs specialists and transhumanists reach out to prospective clients with ostensibly emancipating, feminist arguments. The barrier to perceiving the difference between the social and the epistemological operates from confusion between and conflation of the cultural with the biological dimension of mothering. There is a vast range of extremely interesting ways in which societies, cultures and social classes organize mothering practices but – as Ruddick herself shows – a description of the body of birth-giving mothers can be compiled from a limited number of elements. One might echo Habermas and maintain that severing birth-giving from the lifeworld and incorporating it into the economic system may produce the pathological outcome of women’s alienation and commercialization. In the context of ARTs advancement, his point is very well-taken.

Until recently, it was easy to ignore the distinction between culture and biology or, following Firestone, Okin and Fraser, to challenge the segregation of women’s roles, which was a consequence of this distinction. The tremendous advancement in ARTs has, however, created a fracture along that line of thought: the mother’s body is not an abstract notion; it is not genderless; and it is not merely flesh. While the culture to which the mother belongs, voluntarily or involuntarily, may facilitate birth, diminish pain, reduce risk, nurture the newborn, etc., no maternal culture could subsist without her body. ARTs intervene heavily in mothers’ flesh – which, to rephrase Rich, is today the terrain on which technology, not patriarchy, is erected.

In issues relating to motherhood and surrogacy, twentieth-century feminism’s knowledge does not serve the purpose of emancipating women (Aird, 2010): rather, it has striven to empower them with absolute control over their bodies. In the arguments employed by ARTs specialists, this control over mother and foetus/newborn resonates clearly; yet it is also amplified deliberately, to increase the appeal of cutting-edge technology for prospective buyers. Thus far, feminism’s position rested on the progressive claim that women should choose for themselves – and against patriarchy. Patriarchy, however, is no longer the mightiest force controlling women’s reproductive choices today and technology has moved to centre-stage. In ARTs, that power exercised over women’s flesh becomes so substantial that the border between good (women’s individual choices) and bad (men’s domination), posited by feminism, is rendered both obsolete and irrelevant. To assert that technology is inherently masculine is an essentialist critique contradicting the continuing, anti-essentialist stance of feminism in all domains of social life (Grint and Woolgar, 1995). Patriarchy is not built into ARTs: today, if one advocates ARTs as an active force for social transformation, one must also attribute to it countless different faces – male and female doctors, nurses, laboratory staff, homosexual and heterosexual intending parents and women surrogates. Alternatively, one might also give it the anonymous face of a formidable, market-controlling force.

Reclaiming motherhood

Thus far, this article has shown the reasons why the relationship between feminism and motherhood is uneasy, even self-contradictory. In her extremely informative review of the field of motherhood studies, Samira Kawash makes this point clearly. Furthermore, because nature is held to be suspect, often as analogy for patriarchal power, and because women’s emancipation has been predicated on figuring out ways to liberate women from the compulsion to reproduce, feminism overlooks the fact that motherhood ‘is not just for the child but also for the mother’ (Kawash, 2011: 989).

Rich’s personal accounts illustrate that motherhood is an inherently conflicting passion, engaging the body, spirit and mind. Such conflicts do not, however, originate in patriarchy but, rather, in the convergence between the mother’s deep-set desire and the child’s existence. When Fraser briefly mentions that childrearing is a dual, symbolic-material experience, she was possibly indicating a similar direction of thought. Around this passion, all societies organize structures and cultural forms that enhance or reduce, idealize or degrade, facilitate or encumber it. To those interested in observing them, mothers and the reality of their complicated lives demonstrate daily the fact that conflicts cannot be resolved, once and for all: the dilemmas play out, rather, in everyday scenarios. Motherhood as passion – namely, love, pleasure, the enhancement of an experience engaging the entire person as well as anxiety, anger and self-doubts about being up to the task – offers an empowering capacity for those women who experience it. This empowerment is not instrumental (higher salary, more rights, better education) but existential, in that it contributes to define how the mother views herself as a social and moral agent.

Surrogacy, however, and artificial uteri, to an even greater degree, represent disempowering techniques. GS predicates a painful clash between the intending mother’s desire for children and her inability to reproduce, on the one hand, versus the denial of any bond between the surrogate and the baby she carries, on the other. In the use of an artificial uterus, however, passion and any other human feeling or emotion would be eliminated completely, while the process of generating human life would be placed entirely under the efficient control of technology.

It is no coincidence that motherhood is defined as ‘the lost continent’ (Kristeva, 1985: 134). It can be understood as designating both the enigma – a strong love bond that, although irreversible, must evolve in time for the child to grow up as an adult – and the absence of its conceptualization. Yet, in reality, sociological literature abounds in narrative accounts by mothers that capture this missing element: a survey of motherhood studies provides substantial evidence for this factor.

In the face of growing public concern over high rates of childbearing among poor teenagers, Edin and Kefalas (2005) present an engaged investigation on economically marginal neighbourhoods in the cities of Philadelphia and Camden. The book offers a unique perspective on the troubling questions of why low-income, poorly-educated young women have children they cannot support and why they do not marry. The women in poverty interviewed regarded marriage as a luxury yet judged children to be a necessity – an essential part of a young woman’s life: indeed, the chief source of their identity and meaning (Edin and Kefalas, 2005: 6). The key to the mystery, write the authors, ‘lies not only in what mothers believe they can do for their children, but in what they hope their children will do for them’ (Edin and Kefalas, 2005: 10). Pregnancy and a baby bring purpose, validation, companionship and the order that young women feel have been so sorely lacking in their lives. The mothers interviewed never considered children as hardship; instead ‘they believed motherhood has “saved” them’ from extreme loneliness, drugs, deviant and uncontrolled behavior, and a general sense that their lives had spun out of control (Edin and Kefalas, 2005: 11). Poor women do not feel their age or resources have much to do with good mothering. Anyone can be a good mother, they say, if they are willing to ‘be there’ for their children. Middle-class couples place great value on enjoying each other first before having children, perhaps because they anticipate what statistics clearly show – that marital satisfaction declines precipitously after a couple has children. Poor women realize that marriage is fragile, so they make their primary emotional investment in their relationships with children (Edin and Kefalas, 2005: 211).

In her well-known book on motherhood, Sharon Hays describes the tremendous amount of time and energy American women invest in raising their children (Hays, 1996). The research aims at uncovering the logic of intensive mothering and speculates on the reasons why it remains so powerful, especially in a society where the logic of self-interest is the organizing principle of most spheres of life. Hays focuses on the recurring tension between the demands of work and family life. She does this by collecting in-depth interviews with both stay-at-home and working mothers from very diverse backgrounds. Intensive mothering and its opposite logic, namely market efficiency – self-interest and profit – are socially constructed ideas: neither the former nor the latter is natural or inevitable. Differences exist across the class spectrum on the importance of a child’s formal education, good manners and self-esteem – but all mothers say their children ‘are my world’, ‘for their happiness, I would do anything’. Mothers feel they are the most qualified caregivers because of their empathy, ability to understand and altruism. When asked how they would feel if they did not have children, all the mothers, including those with a very successful career outside the home, expressed such a deep emotional intensity, for which Hays acknowledges she was not prepared. Many women responded they would feel lonely, empty, miss the sense of family and relationships that are close, warm, loving and meant to last. For Hays, love is the key and mothers experience this deeply. ‘Love is the basis of good child rearing, according to the logic of intensive motherhood, primarily because it is the basis of encouraging the child’s happiness and child’s goodness’ (Hays, 1996: 110).

A different group of mothers also demands attention and provides further insights. Although there is now greater public acceptance of gay relationships, gender-variant people are the most highly targeted group for stigma, and often violence. In a qualitative interview study, Sarah Pearlman (2010) presents the personal stories of mothers of female-to-male transgender children by focusing on the complexities of the mother’s experience and mother–daughter relationship. The vast majority of these women described an extended period of emotional turmoil during which feelings of shame and helplessness emerged, along with confusion over how to comprehend or convey to others the meaning of transgender identity (Pearlman, 2010: 77). The profound grief at ‘losing a daughter’ was also very common and represented the most painful aspect of the transition, but all the mothers acted in an accepting and supportive manner to minimize conflict and maintain a relationship with their trans son. Despite these difficulties, ‘the participant’s sense of self as both mothers and individuals [was] enhanced by a continuing bond with their trans son and a major source of self-worth’ (Pearlman, 2010: 87). Most mothers, despite still grieving the loss of a daughter, became engaged in transgender activism that empowered and transformed them as active agents in a process of change.

Similarly, mothering in racial minority groups is a critical site of formative racial identity development; it also sustains intergenerational, biography-based teaching that helps children confront and resist derogatory stereotypes. Investigating the concrete micro-interactions of Chicana mothers at home, Jessica Vasquez shows the fundamental and influential role that mothers play (Vasquez, 2010). They are especially supportive of their daughters in their educational pursuits, and of their sons in fending off racial discrimination. They teach their children to be proud of their cultural heritage and promote cultural appreciation; they also perceive a role for themselves as their children’s advocates and become activists in the school district.

Peruvian mothers, living in a context of poverty, engage their children in vending food and souvenirs on the city streets, bring them to the fields where they work, or rely on children to watch the street food stand while the mother is away (Aufseeser, 2019). Mothers are aware of street risks but, as they very often raise their children alone, they struggle to create care networks to protect their children while on the street. To this end, they apply complex strategies where the child’s well-being is integrated into the family’s well-being; yet they are criticized, more often than not, as ‘bad mothers’ for non-compliance with global perceptions of ‘good childrearing’. They, too, often portray motherhood as altruistic – for the benefit of the children whom they consider as a gift, given to save them from loneliness and disarray (Aufseeser, 2019: 8).

Across social class and cultural diversity, mothers thus continue to place their children’s needs before their own and cherish an irreversible bond of love, an engagement in intersubjectivity. This acquires a particular force in societies where other bonds are both fluid and reversible.

Conclusion

The question is whether mothering as empowerment represents solely a missing piece in feminist theory or whether it transforms the ‘big picture’ of emancipation. The personal narratives of motherhood above (and numerous others collected by empirical research) have not been afforded due consideration. Indeed, their inclusion in feminism would have rendered it simplistic to hypothesize and applaud theories about a philosophical separation between birth-giving and mothering. Feminism would thereby have acquired improved cognitive tools to resist ARTs’ commodification of bodies and the sale and purchase of babies. This statement in no way implies that the experience of motherhood is an imperative requirement, without which a woman’s identity is incomplete. What it means is that when women decide to become mothers, and sometimes even when this happens beyond planning, motherhood becomes a component that contributes a central purpose and meaning to their lives. Feminist theory rightly rejects sugar-coated images of motherhood but, in so doing, it eschews the experience of maternal passion as the ideal type of a love relationship. Practices (to recall Ruddick – what mothers do) are not the only defining element of motherhood. Values also play a fundamental role, as motherhood is an intersubjective moral world – the sole surviving, irreversible bond in contemporary societies – where values of good, bad, love, sacrifice, joy and the future are continually reviewed and enacted. In the words of women living in poverty, mothers only make promises they can keep; grassroots findings show this concurs significantly with the definition of who they are, as both moral and social agents.

Since the 1970s, the separation between birth-giving and mothering has been a cornerstone of the feminist approach to motherhood. In the early writings of mid-twentieth-century feminism, this separation was primed conceptually by both an identification of the alliance between patriarchy and nature as the strongest obstacle to emancipation and a refusal to accept any relevance to the separation between the worlds of market and life. Fraught with contradictions, the next step into emancipation was the concept of genderless mothering. At the close of the twentieth century, these sets of concepts (closely interwoven with those of freedom and individual choice) delayed prompt recognition of the aberrant consequences of surrogacy on the sale and purchase of bodies. Today, they cloud the need for regulations to control widespread acceptance of embryo manipulation in order to breed ‘designer children’ – namely, babies itemized with great care in terms of hair and skin colour, IQ, height, weight and athletic prowess, inter alia (Aird, 2010). Contemporary feminist theory inclining towards individualism thus aligns itself uncomfortably with the fantasy of market liberalism, i.e. the notion of an unencumbered, self-sufficient, rational and freely choosing individual – the antithesis of maternal experiences in intersubjectivity (Stephens, 2011).

Motherhood studies as a field of scholarship presently resides on precarious ground and remains overlooked, at best, by mainstream feminism. In her comprehensive assessment of the future of feminism, Sylvia Walby assigns very few words to motherhood – and these, only in the specific context of violence against women (Walby, 2011: 16–17). Failure to acknowledge the value of mothering is more than a blind spot: it constitutes an obstacle to envisaging and creating possibilities for change – namely, more stable lives and equitable social conditions for women and mothers. In the twenty-first century, feminism cannot rely on sustaining relevance for women without an alignment and recognition of motherhood, in all its contradictions and complexities (Kawash, 2011). Motherhood as passion thus demands serious engagement by the scholarly world of feminism, not least in light of substantial empirical findings within our own societies so that it can be part of, rather than outside the dialogue.