Helen Charman in Conversation

Helen Charman will be joining us at Juno Books to discuss her new non-fiction book, Mother State, setting out a radical case for motherhood as a political state, and what liberated motherhood could be.

When we talk about motherhood and politics together, we usually talk about
isolated moments - the policing of breastfeeding, or the cost of childcare. But
this is not enough: we need to understand motherhood itself as an inherently
political state, one that poses a serious challenge to the status quo.
In Mother State, Helen Charman uses this provocative insight to write a new
history of Britain and Northern Ireland. Beginning with Women's Liberation and
ending with austerity, the book follows mothers' fights for an alternative future.
Alongside the mother figures that loom large in British culture, from Margaret
Thatcher to Kat Slater, we meet communities of lesbian squatters, anti-nuclear
campaigners, the wives of striking miners and teenage mothers protesting
housing cuts: groups who believed that if you want to nourish your children, you
have to nourish the world around them too.
Here we see a world where motherhood is not a restrictive identity but a state of
possibility. 'Mother' ceases to be an individual responsibility, and becomes an
expansive collective term to organize under, for people of any gender, with or
without children of their own. It begins with an understanding: that to mother is a
political act.

Sheffield Events Books Talk

The Lineup

Helen Charman is a Fellow and Assistant College Lecturer in English at Clare
College, University of Cambridge. Her critical writing has been published in the
Guardian, The White Review, Another Gaze, and The Stinging Fly among
others. As a poet, Charman was shortlisted for the White Review Poet's Prize in
2017 and for the 2019 Ivan Juritz Prize for Creative Experiment, and has
published four poetry pamphlets, most recently In the Pleasure Dairy. Charman
volunteers as a birth companion in Glasgow.