A woman with no biological children is running for high political office, and of course it will be used against her. Kamala Harris has, in the short period since she became a democratic candidate for the president of the USA, found herself under scrutiny for not having biological children. Conservative lawyer Will Čemberlen posted on the X Network that Harris "shouldn't be president" because she doesn't seem to have "a lot of stake in the game." Republican and candidate for vice president JD Vance he called Harris and other Democrats "a bunch of frustrated childless women who are unhappy with their lives."
This tendency is especially present in the United States, where the right-wing movement, which is obsessed with women's reproduction, is gaining strength. However, who can forget (and if you've forgotten, I'll be happy to remind you of a low blow that still bothers me) Andrew Lidsom, who stated during the election for the leader of the Conservative Party in 2016 that Teresa May may have nephews and nieces, but "I have children who will have children ... who will be part of what follows". "Honestly," she added, as if the message wasn't clear enough, "I think being a mom means you have a real stake in the future of our country, a tangible stake."
This is an argument about political ability that imposes a deep aversion to the idea that a childless woman should be invested with any kind of credibility or status. In other comments, Vance said that "so many leaders of the left, and I hate to be so personal about this, are childless people who are trying to brainwash our children, which really confuses and upsets me." He seems so obsessed with it that it's almost comical: a man whose obsession with childless women verges on the complex.
But his "confusion and upset" is a political tendency that persists and persists. She constantly asks the question of women who do not have children, both in a subtle and an explicit way, especially when they are highly positioned in the professional sphere: "What about that? What is it about?" Public space becomes a space for answering that question. The women make a sort of mass appeal to leave them alone for God's sake, with their exhausting questioning of how they came to the decision not to have children, or why they actually celebrate not having children, or considerations of ambivalence about parenthood.
Behind all this lies the classic old-fashioned inability to imagine a woman outside the role of motherhood. But one of the reasons this traditionalism persists in seemingly modern and progressive places is that women's withdrawal from motherhood in capitalist societies - with poor public services and support for parents - raises questions about our unequal, unrecognized economic arrangements. A woman who does not bear children is a woman who will never stay at home and provide unpaid care. She is less likely to be kept in the household zone and extend her care to older relatives or others' children. It cannot be a resource that supports the male partner's career, his weaknesses, time constraints and social demands.
The mother is an option and a worker who is always available, a joker in the deck. The absence of motherhood creates a gap in that "free" service that societies increasingly depend on, because they are organized around the family and those poorly subsidized rights. The absence of maternity leave, childcare and elderly care would become deeply visible, "disorienting and disturbing", if that service disappeared.
"Motherhood," writes the author Helen Čarman in his new book "Mother State", "is a political state. Care, attention, the creation of human life, all the immediate associations with motherhood, have more to do with power, status and distribution of resources... than we would like to admit. Because raising children is the basic work of society, and, from gestation onwards, it is unequally distributed".
In other words, motherhood becomes an economic item, a public good, something that is talked about as if the women themselves were not present. The data on the decline in the birth rate provokes comments from Ilona Maska (“extremely worrying!!”). Not having more children comes down to personal motives, selfishness, being seduced by the false promise of freedom, lack of values and vision, irresponsibility, instead of external factors: the need for affordable childcare, support networks, flexible work arrangements and the risk of financial oblivion that motherhood often brings, thereby creating attachment to partners. To put it mildly, these are material factors that should be taken into account when entering a state from which there is no return. To assume that motherhood arises without such a context, says Čarman, is a "useful fantasy".
It is a binary public discourse, which obscures the often thin line between biological and social actualization. Women who do not have children do not exist in a state of blissful detachment from their bodies and their relationship to motherhood: many have had pregnancies, miscarriages, abortions and menstruation. Some have entered borderline stages of motherhood that do not fit the single definition from which they are excluded. Some extend motherhood to various children in their lives. Some, like Harris herself, have stepdaughters (who are not counted, just like Theresa May's nephews and nieces). Some have become mothers, just not in a way that includes them in the club of the blessed. They feel remorse, depression, and face insecurities that don't fit the picture of simple validation of your life purpose.
But the privilege of those truths cannot be granted to beings whose rejection of the maternal bond has become a rejection of a wider unspoken, colossally unjust contract. Women with children are granted social acceptance for their vital contribution to "the future", in exchange for unfair, unrecognized work that supports and stabilizes the economic and social status quo. And all this while still suffering ridicule about the value of their work compared to the "serious" work of men who bring bread.
In addition, women have to navigate all that motherhood, or the lack of it, entails, all the deeply personal, confusing, unacknowledged realities of both states, while being saddled with a constant barrage of tiresome, infantile, and indiscreet public theories and notions that invade their privacy. Along with that comes feelings of self-doubt and shame for making the wrong decision, or being dissatisfied with those decisions to the extent that they are expected to be. It is a constant, imposed vivisection. It's a really confusing and disturbing experience.
The text is taken from "The Guardian"
Translation: NB
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