According to the World Bank, violence against women, both in public and intimate spaces, is associated with more deaths and severe disabilities than cancer, malaria or war combined, and violence perpetrated by an intimate partner has more severe health consequences for women than experiences of natural disasters or physical or sexual assault by a stranger (PSO, 2012). However, violence against mothers is often overlooked by research. The use of violent techniques such as contraceptive sabotage, forced pregnancy, control of women's resources to meet their own and their children's needs, monitoring of mother-child time together, regulation of parenting methods used by mothers, manipulation of communication with children, violation of maternal authority, destruction of authority, and pitting children against their mothers, together with physical violence, undermine mothers as agents. The focus of social services on violence against women is linked to the well-being of children and family preservation. Violence against mothers and their mothering is not seen as a problem of unequal relations between the sexes, a form of discrimination, a violation of human rights resulting from culturally formed attitudes based on biological sex, but rather as a problem of women's shortcomings as mothers - a lack of maternal instinct, responsibility, and mothering skills.

The aim of this article is to highlight the differences between violence against women and violence against mothers in the context of theoretical perspectives on women. To reveal the relationship between theoretical perspectives on violence against women and theories of motherhood as an institution and mothering as an experience.

Studies of motherhood in literature have certainly begun to acknowledge representations of mothers in non-nuclear families. However, despite literary analyses of different single mothers and the stigmatisation they face, almost nowhere is there reference to the figure of the Solo Mother By Choice (SMBC). In recent years, becoming a SMBC is an increasingly popular path to motherhood, and the SMBC has begun to gain the public’s attention due to the rise in SMBC memoirs in both English and French. Thus far, however, there is no analysis of this narrative viewpoint on motherhood. This paper is part of a project which seeks to rectify this. The rise in SMBC memoir occurs in parallel with changes in the law around donor conception and solo motherhood in both the UK (2022) and France (2021). Yet, how is such a mother imagined and (self-)defined in contemporary society? What challenges does she face in terms of policy and healthcare policy, and in terms of social discrimination? This paper explores how SMBC in the UK and France navigate the aforementioned challenges through life-writing. It applies a dual critical framework of narrative medicine and studies of women’s life-writing as it investigates the ways in which women portray their lived experiences of solo IVF and birthing. In so doing, it adds to the growing call for research into the ways in which narrating embodied experience can open out spaces for discussion promoting equality and healing as well as political change, and it widens academic focus on non-normative families.

While the construction of idealised motherhood during the twentieth century has received historical analysis through the framework of class and gender, the nineteenth century has not received as much attention. Yet, the twentieth-century social landscape did not emerge in a vacuum; in fact, the preceding decades’ discourse informed the emergence of twentieth-century practices. Recent histories have highlighted that the Irish poor law, established in the 1830s and amended frequently throughout the century, was ‘complex’, ‘multifaceted’ and ‘marked by class and gender prejudices.’ By the turn of the century, growing debates surrounding the efficiency of the poor law resulted in a Commission on Poor Law Reform in Ireland (1906). Within this extensive report, workhouse board of guardians, medical superintendents and reform commissioners were interviewed on the mechanisms of their contemporary system of relief and questioned as to exactly how the system should be reformed. Throughout these minutes of evidence, various examples of unmarried mothers, and their reliance upon the workhouse appear frequently and were used by workhouse officials to highlight the inadequacies of the relief system. Therefore, a careful examination of this report highlights the way in which those who administered the system of relief interpreted the ‘deserving’ and ‘underserving’ recipients of such relief. Consequently, this paper will examine the role of the workhouse within the official discourse to demonstrate the impact these perspectives had upon the wider social construction of Irish motherhood. This paper argues that the perception of motherhood, especially for those in receipt of welfare, was deeply contingent.