Summary
Laurie Taylor talks to Helen Charman, Fellow and Assistant College Lecturer in English at Clare College, University of Cambridge, about her study of mothers fighting for alternative futures for themselves and their children. Is motherhood an inherently political state, one that poses challenges to various status quos? Also, Caitlin Killian - Professor of Sociology, Drew University, Madison, New Jersey argues that US mums are held to ever higher standards and now subject to an expanding list of offences - from falling down the stairs while pregnant to letting a child spend time alone in a park - which were not seen as criminal behaviours a generation ago. Are mothers likelier to be held accountable than fathers?
Producer: Jayne Egerton
Transcript
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| 0:43.4 | Hello, it was C Wright Mills contention that the principal task of the social scientist was to turn personal troubles into public issues. And that originally |
| 0:48.9 | fired my own interest in sociology. So I was particularly pleased to read a new book which |
| 0:53.9 | not only abided |
| 0:54.8 | by Mills' injunction, but did so in relation to a condition that has, well, has historically |
| 1:00.1 | been regarded as inherently personal and private, motherhood. That book is entitled |
| 1:06.5 | Mother State, a political history of motherhood. And I'm now joined by its author, Helen Charman, |
| 1:12.4 | who is a fellow in English at Clare College, University of Cambridge. |
| 1:16.7 | Helen, motherhood's become something of a zeitgeist topic in recent years, |
| 1:21.0 | and generating a whole lot of journalism, fiction, nonfiction. |
| 1:24.7 | But you want to argue that the conversation's too limited. |
| 1:28.0 | There's been a space, I think, of publications, television programs and radio broadcasts, |
| 1:32.9 | that think about mothering. But often from a very specific particular perspective, |
| 1:38.3 | middle-class, white, straight woman's experience of mothering, for example. |
| 1:43.8 | And I suppose my contention with the book is |
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