GABRIELE NEHER draws attention to an astoundingly skilled Flemish painter who defied the notion that women cannot paint like men
Latest editorial
Motherlode
HENRY BELL admires a bold exploration of the material reality and political representations of mothering in Britain
HEROINE: Veteran campaigner Sarah Hipperson, who spent much of the 1980s at the Greenham Common women's peace camp. The site had a continuous women's peace protest from 1981 until the Cruise missiles were removed in 1991. Sarah Hipperson remained an active campaigner and spent most of August 1997 in prison for cutting the fence at Aldermaston
The Bard pays homage to Hull’s finest promoter and venue, and awards Douze Points to Laibach
KEVIN DONNELLY outlines how the bourgeois institutions inhibit our ability to to view art in revolutionary ways, and suggests some tactics to overturn it
ANDY HEDGECOCK welcomes an accessible - and optimistic - take on our relationship to new technology
JOHN GREEN suggests that a new, biased, and highly readable re-hash of the story of the Cambridge Five be taken with a large pinch of salt
BRENT CUTLER welcomes a timely reminder of the long history of protests and the outdoor spaces in which they takes place
Mother State: A Political History of Motherhood
Helen Charman, Allen Lane, £30
IN the 1980s The Sisterhood of Black Single Mothers used the word “motherful” rather than “fatherless” to describe their families. Why describe something by a character it neither has nor lacks?
In her epic political history of motherhood, Mother State, Helen Charman goes further and asks if we can’t understand the world to be “babyful” and use the demands of care to build a universal solidarity rejecting the atomisation that is thrust upon us by both the nuclear family and the neoliberal state.
Charman’s book makes a claim for mothering as a political action, and motherhood as a political state that challenges the narratives of competition and othering that permeate our politics and our world. To mother and to be mothered are, for Charman, potentially universal disrupters of the status quo that can reveal oppressions and combat alienation.
Similar stories
RICHARD SHILLCOCK examines an enjoyable, but philosophically conventional book, and urges Marxists to employ their capacity to embrace the totality in any explanation
MARTIN HALL welcomes a study of Britain’s relationship with the EU that sheds light on the way euroscepticism moved from the margins to the centre
MANJEET RIDON relishes a novel that explores the guilty repressions – and sexual awakenings – of a post-war Dutch bourgeois family
RON JACOBS welcomes a book that tells the story of the far right in Greece from the perspective of migrants