HISTORIES OF MATERNAL LABOUR

Sarah Knott (Magdalen, 1990) has returned triumphantly to Oxford as the Hillary Rodham Clinton Chair of Women’s History, and a Professorial Fellow of St John’s College.

Previously the Sally M. Reahard Professor of History at Indiana University, Professor Knott is a widely acclaimed expert in the history of women, gender and reproduction broadly in the Atlantic world.

Her lecture, held in the Garden Auditorium at Magdalen College on October 17, was titled ‘Histories of Maternal Labour’. The broad argument was that the Western trajectories of the maternal tend to focus on an idealized trope of motherhood as love, termed ‘motherlove’, but that in practice the maternal was routinely experienced as work, and most often unpaid or low paid. As such, and seen historically, it is more accurate to alter our prism to one of maternal labour, and hence the title of the lecture.

A case in point about the usual centrality of motherlove is the Old Masters of the Madonna and Child on display if you wander into the Ashmolean Museum. Other examples are the sentimental ideology of the family that emerged in the eighteenth century, in which the mother was the emotional linchpin. There is also, from the sciences of the psyche, attachment theory, which has trained our attention on the mother-baby dyad.

The presiding figure over the lecture was the Black feminist theorist Patricia Hill Collins, who in the 1980s wrote extensively about ‘othermothering’, a term referring to women who play a maternal role towards children who are not their own. If this was a chink in the armour of patriarchy, Professor Knott wants to tear it open, noting that ‘othermothering’ is both ‘a de-essentializing term’ and ‘provocative’ because it opens up a richer history of maternity.

To explore a feminist history of maternal labour, she drew out four examples of women since the eighteenth century, the first the mother of a West African goat-herder, the second a wet nurse from a town outside London, the third a Welsh nursemaid called Alice Fisher, and the last an Irish Catholic grandmother from 1950s Liverpool, who she compared to a Jamaican immigrant of the same moment.

The historical evidence is that maternal labour was routinely dispersed, whether to family members, kin and neighbours, or delegated to servants of a variety of sorts. Most often, this work was done by women, a historical phenomenon that continues into the present. For example, three-quarters of unpaid childcare in the UK, is carried out by women – and calculated to be worth £92 billion a year in economic contribution. A great deal of maternal labour remains invisible or unrecognised.

It is worth understanding the history of maternal labour for its own sake. At a moment of the rise of far-right reassertions of ‘traditional’ femininity and conservative patriarchal norms, it is also valuable to understands the more complex and intersectional history of who has actually done the work.