Motherhood, in our Western culture, is full of contradictions. On the one hand, mothers perform an essential task: creating and nurturing new human life. On the other, the status of mothers is that of general servitude to the nuclear family, with no significant public voice or power.

Western culture, adopted across the world, is still largely structured in the mold that the male Greek philosophers created millennia ago. Roughly divided into a public sphere that is inhabited and controlled by men, and the family sphere which is inhabited by women and children; a “private world” that is under constant surveillance and control by the public sphere.

While feminism continually challenges this patriarchal social order, and women as a class have made enormous gains in the public sphere, motherhood is still an arena where patriarchal interests come into direct conflict with human needs and women’s humanity.

In this episode Elle talks to political scientist and author Mariam Tazi-Preve, whose research fields are politics and reproduction, motherhood, fatherhood, family and population policies, European welfare state, gender and political theory, and theory of civilization.

Mariam has written extensively about the history of motherhood in Western patriarchy, about the invention of marriage, and the development of the nuclear family. In this hour we will talk about these social structures and the impact they have had on women, men and children throughout our history.

Episode Links

Mariam Tazi-Preve website

Motherhood In Patriarchy

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Credits

Host: Elle Kamihira

Produced by Elle Kamihira

Audio Engineering by Jason Sheesley at Abridged Audio

Cover Art by Bee Johnson

Music by Beware of Darkness