This article is taken from the October 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

I know that on some level, I ought to be grateful. At least I’ve not been categorised as “one of those”. When vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance’s 2021 complaint that his country was being run by “childless cat ladies” recently resurfaced, I could rest assured that none of the insult applied to me. I don’t have cats, whereas I do have children. According to Vance’s worldview, the future should belong to me and mine. So why don’t I feel more flattered?

It is always slightly mortifying when a right-wing politician makes comments of this nature, at least if you are the kind of parent who does not wish to be co-opted into some phoney battle between breeders and the child-free. Who can forget Andrea Leadsom’s abortive Tory leadership campaign, in which she claimed that “as a mother” she possessed “a very real stake” in Britain’s future, unlike eventual winner Theresa May? The phrase “as a mother” has felt tainted since then, as though its only possible use could be to make bogus assertions of moral superiority. After all, what do mothers know that anyone else does not? It is very tempting to say “nothing at all”.

In response to Vance, many commentators have been keen to do just that. I, too, feel the pull of this parental “not in my name”. Vance’s declared concern that “our entire society has become sceptical and even hateful towards the idea of having kids” seems at odds with his own party’s unwillingness to offer practical support to mothers and children.

His real interest, it is therefore claimed, is in pushing a sinister pronatalist agenda. As Jacob Rosenberg writes in Mother Jones, Vance’s comments were “simply a cruder, meaner version of what is often presented as ‘family values’” — a set of regressive prejudices which no decent human being, parent or not, would wish to share. Not in our name, indeed.

I understand this, and yet there is a point at which apologising for beliefs you don’t hold becomes wearing. More than that, there’s a point at which the obligatory liberal outrage over right-wing pronatalism can start to feel opportunistic. It’s not that I don’t find pronatalist positions on reproduction cruel, misogynistic and divisive. It’s more a question of whether we should view this as an inevitable outcome of investing reproduction with unique significance. Given the Left’s issues with biological sex, life stages and the family, to behave as though this were the case seems convenient, to say the least.

It is true that fetishising parenthood often has little to do with helping parents, that parenthood or non-parenthood are not always choices, that a woman’s entire purpose in life is not to reproduce, that sometimes parents can be terrible people, and that the ability to have babies is not necessarily matched by any greater investment in the future. I can get behind all of these truths, yet they are so standard for “my side”, I find myself waiting for something more. If that’s not where we locate the social, emotional and political significance of parenthood — and more specifically, motherhood — then where? The answer seems to be “nowhere”. If you don’t want it to mean that, you ought to accept it meaning nothing.

As a mother, I have some issues with this.

“If feminism has empowered women,” wrote Sara Ruddick in 1983’s Maternal Thinking, “it has often done so by attacking the identification of women with maternity. Conversely, emphasising the maternity of women has proved an effective strategy of male supremacists.” This may be a simplification, but it has a basis in truth. Whilst there has been some serious feminist engagement with the significance of maternity, investing it with too much meaning, finding your experiences a little too special, tends to lead to accusations of conservatism, complicity in sexism or (worst of all) biological essentialism.

It can feel virtuous and liberating, even sisterly, to empty motherhood of all deeper meaning

Like many women before and after me, I had a fairly straightforward view of what my experience of “progressive” motherhood might be. I might have children, but it would not change me as a person. There was, I imagined, a fixed version of “me”, and I would be on my guard never to lose her, never to fall into what a pregnant Naomi Wolf called “a primordial soup of femaleness”. The practicalities of my life might alter, but I would not become hyper-feminine, closed-minded, dependent. The spectre of the tradwife loomed before me, long before tradwives were a thing.

In 1976 Adrienne Rich wrote of women “who identify themselves primarily as mothers” appearing “both threatening and repellent to those who do not”. Decades later, I convinced myself that good liberal motherhood required the cultivation of an unmaternal identity that proved I’d remained unmarked by breeding. I would downplay or deny any difference between my experience of parenthood and that of my male partner. I wouldn’t say “as a mother” because there is nothing I, as a mother, might know that anyone else could not. Any positive qualities I retained would be unrelated to anything that had happened in relation to having kids.

I was reminded of these ambitions when reading Caitlin Moran’s response to Vance’s comments. In a Times article titled “Don’t call the childless deranged, it’s mothers who can be awful”, she declared her aim “to firmly rebut Vance’s suggestion that motherhood makes women better citizens by confessing something I suspect many mothers will echo: I was never a worse human being in my life than when I was a mother”.

As a tongue-in-cheek attempt to ridicule delusions of maternal superiority, it is effective. But why play that game? Isn’t this what good, progressive mothers always do — make ourselves smaller, boil it all down to sleepless nights and rages, desperate to prove we’ve not fallen for the conservative mummy myth? Is that really how we show the “cat ladies” we’re on their side?

It can feel virtuous and liberating, even sisterly, to empty motherhood of all deeper meaning. As has been the case in recent years with the words “woman” and “female”, we note that a concept has been packed with unhelpful, untrue and oppressive associations, and the “progressive” response is to say, “Let’s make it mean anything and nothing at all.”

It is as though any attempt to pin down the life of it — the embodied, the emotional, the experiential — can only lead to ruin. It is easy to get so caught up in this, you may not notice what you are losing. But notice it we must — at least if we wish to find a genuine space for the maternal in politics. We deserve something better than this constant flight from caricature.

According to the trans writer Grace Lavery, “leaky boobs and the school run” represent “the revenge of feminist grievance against feminist pleasure”. It is a fine summation of the way in which the mother as archetype and as embodied, thinking human being stands in the way of the model of selfhood most beloved of the Left. She is cast as conservative — and conservatives are quick to claim her — but this is to confuse the rejection of one form of identity politics with the embrace of another.

On the contrary, motherhood, as concept and experience, constitutes a radical challenge to the identity politics of both Left and Right, because it is rooted in relationality. It is a reminder not just that sexed bodies matter, but that they are bound to vulnerability and dependency. Babies are not gestated in bags; there is not one person alive whose existence has never been wholly reliant on that of another. Modern identity politics wants individuality, unfettered self-realisation, total freedom. Motherhood gets in the way of this, not because conservative politicians imbue it with conservative “family values”, but because of what motherhood is.

The experiences of pregnancy, birth, nursing and raising children are not random, niche or insignificant. On the contrary, they can grant insights and shift priorities in ways that matter. This is not to claim such insights cannot be accessed via different routes, nor to propose that mothers possess some objectively “superior” knowledge to other humans. It is simply to say that maternal experiences are not nothing.

Whenever we fall over ourselves to insist that motherhood leaves us untouched in any serious political or emotional sense, we downplay what we feel and what we know. When J.D. Vance claims motherhood “changes your perspective in a pretty profound way”, I doubt he is thinking of the same changes I am. As a basic statement, though, it is absolutely correct.

We can be angry at the idea that mothers are more caring or principled voters. At the same time, it ought to be possible to say maternity, and sometimes fatherhood, has implications that those on both sides of the political spectrum are often keen to ignore. It ought to be possible to find ways to express this in non-hierarchical terms. It ought to be possible to write or say “as a mother” without cringing or feeling mean.

To be clear, I haven’t managed the latter myself. Still, as a mother, I can only do my best.