Friday essay: why has philosophy ignored motherhood?

Over many seasons, I’ve observed a pair of masked lapwings hatch their chicks in a natural wetland close to my home. Nature did not prime these parents to care for their young. My lapwing neighbours would walk their downy chicks into the open and fly away when noisy miner birds approached. The weeks-old young were left to defend themselves from vicious, swooping attacks.

As I walked the wetland each day, I counted the young with a heavy heart: one day there were four, the next there would be two and a week later there were none.

In 2023, the first clutch of lapwing chicks survived into adolescence and I told everyone I knew.

I learned more about motherhood from witnessing these parenting failures – for example, the need to love, remain proximate, protect from predators and respond in instances of distress – than in anything I had encountered in all my years as a professional philosopher. Sure, I’d taught the standard arguments for and against abortion in ethics and given classes in bioethics on pregnancy management and maternal autonomy, but these topics had little to do with motherhood itself.

One of the reasons for this was that until I was readying myself for a child of my own, motherhood had not been salient to me as either a personal or philosophical question. The more significant reason was that motherhood – and the maternal body – rarely presented itself as a philosophical topic for exploration in the many classes and seminars I attended as a student and later, as an academic.

Yet in a tradition where life and health have spurred profound philosophical reflection – I have in mind Pascal’s migraines and Nietzsche’s breakdowns – how can the soul and body splitting event of childbirth be an unremarked upon subject of philosophy?

Since antiquity, women have written philosophical texts and discussed philosophical topics. But through a centuries-long process of erasure, their philosophical concerns and their contributions to the discipline have been ignored and later, forgotten.

From the time of Aristotle, women were seen as subordinate to men. In philosophy, too, the norms of reason, the nature of philosophical inquiry and the topics of investigation were defined in opposition to anything feminine.

It is little surprise, then, that writings about the intense psychological, emotional, and identity transformations that take place during gestational and postpartum motherhood were largely sidelined within the discipline.

Yet a few remarkable women overcame misogynistic epistemic and disciplinary barriers to produce work that was recognised as philosophy, including some writing touching on the maternal experience.

Maternal empowerment

For Lady Damaris Masham, raised among Platonists in Cambridge in the mid-17th century, motherhood was a significant topic of moral and political philosophy.

According to Masham, the education of women and the development of their rational abilities was key to discharging the moral responsibilities of motherhood. Only through receiving a sound education could women effectively mother their children.

More than this, the responsibility to parent, she argued, should fall to women since the task “cannot be perform’d but by Mothers only”. Though this sounds regressive to our ears, Regan Penaluna, a contemporary philosopher and journalist, suggests it was a radical argument for domestic matriarchy. For Masham, men could not be entrusted to such a significant domestic and civic responsibility. The stability of society depended on well-raised children.

In this way, Masham’s views are a positive contrast to many of her male contemporaries, who ignored mothers, argued the origin of children’s dysregulation could be traced to women, or turned women’s bodies into sites of fear and contestation. (One noteworthy counterexample is 17th-century French philosopher François Poulain de la Barre who writes sympathetically about mothers’ responsibilities, their pains, and their wisdom).

Masham would invert many of these stereotypically male ideas to show maternal empowerment was needed for all to live well in this life.

Her two philosophical works, Discourse Concerning the Love of God and Occasional Thoughts in Reference to a Vertuous or Christian Life, were published anonymously, though occasionally misattributed to John Locke. He, too, wrote on parental responsibility. Masham, whose reflections on parenting were more incisive and radical, was largely ignored until recent decades.

‘I fear for my health’

As for Masham, a key philosophical topic for the 18th-century philosopher, mathematician, and physicist Émilie du Châtelet was women’s autonomy and access to education. In a book titled the Discourse on Happiness, du Châtelet examined the conditions that enabled or precluded women’s happiness, given the opportunities they were often denied.

She argued education and the feelings this gave rise to played an outsized role in women’s capacity to achieve worldly satisfaction. Finished in the months before du Châtelet became unexpectedly pregnant, she writes in the Discourse,

only study remains to console [a woman] for all the exclusions and all the dependencies to which she finds herself condemned.

Condemned, it seems, is how du Châtelet felt. Pregnant with her fourth child at 42, du Châtelet’s physical and social conditions were an organising principal of her life at this time.