Research Will Explore Women Drawn into Politics Through Motherhood

A new study being launched by a University of Worcester historian will seek to learn more about how women have been drawn into politics and activism due to motherhood.

Dr Anna Muggeridge in the Worcestershire Archives in The Hive

Dr Anna Muggeridge has been awarded more than £500,000 in funding from UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) as part of its Future Leaders Fellowship programme to undertake this research.

The 'Voices of Motherhood' project will look at the ways in which women have been politicised by their experiences of fertility, pregnancy, birth and caring for children through infancy and early childhood from the start of the First World War in 1914 through to the present day.

"Issues surrounding women's experiences of motherhood are very much in the news at the moment like never before," said Dr Muggeridge. "From women choosing not to have children because of the climate emergency; to experiences of birth trauma during childbirth, to access to childcare-motherhood is a key political issue today. But this has a long history, and I want to explore this in this research."

Dr Muggeridge will capture case studies of maternal activism from across the UK on certain issues, key events or campaigns. One such campaign was for pain relief in childbirth in the interwar years, spearheaded by Lucy Baldwin, wife of then Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin.

The study will draw on existing historical records connected to maternity and motherhood, and also collect oral histories from people covering the last 60 years. She will be working with the George Marshall Medical Museum in Worcester on elements of the research.

Dr Muggeridge hopes to break new ground. She said: "Motherhood has generally been looked at within histories of welfare, or perhaps medical histories. What I'm doing differently is looking at not the history of particular medical advances that allowed us to do things like IVF or genetic screening, but how having access or not having access to those kinds of things served to politicise women. Previous work has tended to focus on shorter time periods or perhaps just one particular place. I want to broaden that out and look at change and continuity over time."

The project will look at the different ways in which women took action on a local or national level.

"Historically, a lot of the ways in which women are politicised by motherhood happen very locally," said Dr Muggeridge. "So you might get women who perhaps have never been on a protest before, or never done anything political, are suddenly told that their local maternity hospital is going to be closed. Women find themselves joining protests to prevent that. Or they might find themselves setting up a charitable organisation which offers support around really challenging issues, like miscarriage. I'm interested in the ways in which these experiences politicised women, and whether and how they continued to be involved in politics.

"I also want to look at areas where women have campaigned against something - where people, including women, have used motherhood, to justify why women can't do something, so to look also at where women have used motherhood more regressively.

"My research will also explore really big historical events, like the world wars or the rise of the women's liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and how these major historical events were impacting on women's lives in specific areas."

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