2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

The roles and identities of women as mothers have long been a concern to the workings of state power in many places and times. In South Africa, women’s maternal identities took on critical resonance as the capacious category of motherhood acted both as a primary site for the state to intervene in the production of good laboring citizens and as a resource for women of all races to engage with the state. Drawing upon cases from the 19^th, 20^th, and 21^st centuries, this panel asks how motherhood in various forms enabled women’s claim making and what the limits were of the category’s power. The panelists further explore how the actions of women whose maternal identities were cross-cut by other categories such as race, class, and their relationship to biological children, impacted the discourses of motherhood in circulation and the contours of motherhood as a social identity that various women could occupy. By doing so, this panel seeks to foster a conversation about the role of motherhood in negotiating the borderlines of women’s inclusion in the polity.