Why do our ideas of motherhood tend to start with motherlove, and what is to be gained by changing our focus to maternal labour? This lecture explores the powerful and long historical trajectories that hold our focus on maternal love. In switching our attention to maternal labour, we gain a wider history of ordinary work and life, especially what the Black feminist theorist Patricia Hill Collins termed ‘othermothering’. Wetnurses, grandparents, aunts, and a host of other historical figures come into view. Attending to maternal labour also lets us see the intimate relationship of mothering and politics, and the role of the state. These are useful historical perspectives in a moment of the rise of far-right reassertions of ‘traditional’ femininity and conservative patriarchal norms.

Sarah Knott read History at Magdalen College from 1990-1993, just ahead of Ewen Green’s arrival, before graduate studies at Oxford and the University of Pennsylvania. After two decades working in the United States, she has returned as the Hillary Rodham Clinton Chair of Women’s History and a Professorial Fellow of St John’s College. She has published widely in the history of women on such topics as subjectivity and reproduction, and under such titles as Women, Gender and Enlightenment; Sensibility and the American Revolution; and Mothering’s Many Labours. Her widely reviewed and translated Mother: An Unconventional History investigated pregnancy, birth and the encounter with a child and explored history and memoir. She is a Senior Research Fellow at the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction, and currently at work on the history of care.

There will be a drinks reception after the lecture. All welcome.

This event is free to attend and registration is not required; admittance will be on a first come first served basis.