The practice of maternity entitlements, although in rudimentary forms, has been documented from the late nineteenth century in colonial India. They were often a result of the concern over the prevalent high maternal and child mortality, which in the colonial imagination, stemmed from the indigenous health practices and the ignorance of the natives. The remedial measures were sought in the introduction of maternity welfare, which included ‘pregnant leave’ to plantation workers, maternity hospitals, emphasis on women doctors; etc. The legislative attempts to introduce maternity benefits, however, were started only in the late 1920s, especially as a repercussion of the Maternity Protection Convention of 1919 and the process was accelerated after the Royal Commission on Labour (1929-31). This was also a period, when India was undergoing tremendous administrative changes, with the introduction of diarchy in 1919 that shifted the arenas of public health and industries to the hands of the Indian legislators, which might have induced these developments. Trade unions and women’s organisations also developed significant interest in the conditions of women's labour in this period and advocated for various maternity entitlements including paid maternity leave for industrial workers. They tended to associate motherhood with larger goals like nation-building and imagined maternity benefits as instrumental for that purpose. This paper traces the history of legislating maternity benefits in this period and argues that the genesis of these legislations lies at the juncture of improving the conditions of maternal and child health, and the dreams of building a healthy and prosperous nation.

Inspired by Anthias (2020) and Erel & Reynolds (2018), my presentation is about hybrid motherhood shaped by migrant mothers' negotiations between, on the one hand, two ideals of motherhood, one from their old homeland and the other from their new homeland, and on the other hand, the actual conditions of life and the actual needs of the children that affect their priority in the new homeland. The presentation is based on a study of mothers who have been residing in Sweden for several years and have a background in a post-Soviet country in Central Asia and the Caucasian region (including the Russian Federation).

While the transition to parenthood is well researched, less is known about later stages of life. However, becoming a mother or father does not only have short-term effects. Instead, the birth of a child sets the course for future, and has long-term gender differentiating consequences: child-related care practices as well as the distribution of care and paid work tasks interweave the life courses of mothers and children. Though, over time tasks, roles, and self-perceptions (have to) change.

Against this background, we conducted a comparative, interpretative analysis of interviews with mothers who reflect in the so-called empty nest upon their prior life as parent. This reveals differences in three respects: (1) how they make sense of the lived temporality of motherhood in relation to dynamic care needs over their life course, (2) how they deal with the experienced fluctuation and pluralism of motherhood linked to the ageing of children and the decreasing need to ‘mother’, and (3) how they position themselves in relation to the ideals and images of ‘good motherhood’ with which they are confronted through discourses and in everyday life. Homogenous and static ideas of motherhood, an essentialisation of motherhood, an ignorance of historical and biographical change and stereotypical ideas of grieving mothers in the empty nest appear to be dominant. The mothers interviewed resist these negative and one-dimensional images, realise a good post-active-motherhood-life and actualise new, age-appropriate ways of mothering.

The research analyzes 27 news articles from media outlets in Brazil, United States and the UK regarding a new phenomenon that has been gaining increasing attention: maternal burnout.

Initially, it provides a historical overview on how burnout has evolved from being a workplace illness, recognized by the WHO, to depict maternal exhaustion. Then, its two main objectives are presented.

The first aims to present how maternal burnout is portrayed by the media. There is a near-uniform view in most publications, with few exceptions, drawing attention to a "new pathology". The coverage however has many contradictions, such as the dual approach of treating burnout as a serious illness but, at the same time, suggesting treatments like morning walks and relaxing baths.

The second objective analyzes why the stories virtually ignore the causes of maternal burnout – the lack of public policies to support child-rearing, such as universal daycare and other rights denied to mothers, especially black and marginalized ones.

This reserch's importance lies in the fact that media coverage influences public perception of maternal burnout and how government, society and companies respond to it. Such coverage shift the burden onto mothers, holding them responsible while absolving other actors such as the government. It also reinforces ideas like the myth of maternal love and motherhood as an institution. In addition to Elisabeth Badinter and Adrienne Rich, theories by Patricia Hill Collins and Latin American feminist thinkers are also integrated.

Muslim mothers experience triple-quadruple jeopardy. Their intersecting identities include several prevalently oppressed groups. As women they remain marginalized, as Muslims they are religious minority group members in the west, and the majority are members of ethnic (Arab) and or racialized minority groups of color (African American). They earn less than non-visible minority/mothers, they are tied to various cultural, religious norms that can be both oppressive and empowering However, Muslim Mothers as they are oppressed, they also enact autonomy and resistance. In this paper I will explore the triple-quadruple jeopardy of Muslim Mothers specifically in the context of normative motherhood what O’Reilly (2021) termed as “ten dictates of normative motherhood: essentialization, privatization, individualization, naturalization, normalization, depoliticalization”., biologicalization, expertization, intensification, and idealization. Mothers who can fill ‘all’ the requirements, they are perfect/good mothers’ and who cannot simply because they are “young, queer, single, racialized, trans, nonbinary” and/or religious mothers they are ‘de facto bad mothers. I will explore how Muslim Mothers are regulated and oppressed by normative motherhood and how they resist it to enact empowered mothering by resisting the ideas of Muslim mothering which culturally constructed on Normative motherhood standards. They do that by wearing the mask of ‘nurturing, altruistic, patient, devoted, loving, and selfless’ mothers In this paper I will highlight that the religion Islam and cultural expectations of Muslim mothering are two separate entities and how knowing the difference between two can avoid perpetuating prejudice and biased information about Islam and Muslim communities.

Gender studies and feminist political philosophy have always prioritised the issue of motherhood, also rejecting its patriarchal narratives (Rich): having always felt threatened by motherhood (given its inaccessibility to men), patriarchy has put the power to give birth under control, prescribing how “good mothers” must behave (not doing the same for fathers) (Botti).

In this scenario, surrogacy introduces the possibility of a “new motherhood”, separating pregnancy from legal motherhood. Is surrogacy a female-empowering work that frees women from the patriarchal control, making them able to sell their gestational services as men can sell sperm (Shalev), or does it risk perpetuating the patriarchal control over motherhood, depotentiating the uncommodifiable maternal relationship characterising pregnancy (Muraro)? This proposal aims at investigating this issue, trying to show that the patriarchal control is exercised both by forcing a woman to be the newborn’s mother and take care of him/her without a redistribution of care tasks in the family (thus forbidding her to work) and by “removing” the peculiar relationship characterising pregnancy, thus neutralising the differences between the sexes in becoming parents. In case of selection, after having introduced the feminist critiques to the patriarchal control over motherhood, the proposal will discuss the various feminist positions on surrogacy, also dealing with what makes a woman a mother, whether pregnancy or social parenthood.

Rich (1977). Of Woman Born. New York: Bantam books.

Botti (2007). Madri cattive. Milano: Il Saggiatore

Shalev (1989). Birth power. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Muraro (1991). L’ordine simbolico della madre. Roma: Editori Riuniti.

In "Matricentric Feminism: A Feminism for Mothers," Andrea O'Reilly lays the groundwork for an evolving and adaptable definition of matricentric feminism. O'Reilly points out the need for mothers to have their own school of feminism that encompasses and adds to the previous branches of feminism that have evolved until now (17). "Practicing Matricentric Feminist Mothering," by Fiona Joy Green, adds an additional layer to this movement by exploring what matricentric feminism looks like when it is put into practice. In this conference paper, I would like to explore how graphic memoir authors are reflecting on the tensions between motherhood and feminism and using their art and language to provide examples of the praxis of matricentric feminist mothering. Good Talk, by Mira Jacob, Kid Gloves, by Lucy Knisley, and Dear Scarlet, by Teresa Wong, explore issues surrounding perinatal mood disorders, the treatment of women during and after pregnancy, and the challenges of raising children to be critical thinkers while also trying to keep them safe in a complicated world. I argue that these authors are part of a growing movement of writers using the graphic novel form to advance these concepts.

At the close of the nineteenth century, France bore witness to a burgeoning discourse on women’s bodies, sexuality, and motherhood. Those theories aimed to naturalize women’s maternal instincts and thus constricting their identities to that of mothers. The Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso contributed to this discourse by theorizing the naturalness of motherhood, thereby reinforcing the notion that women were inherently biologically predisposed to be mothers. French naturalist fiction appropriated those discourses in their representation of women and motherhood by putting biological and social determinism to the forefront of women’s destinies. In her novel, Victoire la Rouge, the feminist author Georges de Peyrebrune tells the story of Victoire, a farm maid, and her three illegitimate pregnancies. Influenced by both the naturalist worldview and her feminist convictions, Peyrebrune’s representation of motherhood responds to contemporary discourses that attempt to naturalise maternal roles. Using irony, the author criticizes on society’s idealization of virginity, while Victoire, as comes to see her fertility as a curse rather than the blessing natalist discourses developed. Peyrebrune employs infanticide to radically question the idea of the born mother and denounce the society that pushes women to such extremities. This novel’s historical context bears striking similarities to present-day essentialist and conservative narratives on maternity, and Peyrebrune’s work serves as a compelling example of early feminist resistance. This paper will explore the author’s subversion of fin-de-siècle natalist theories, which sought to prescribe motherhood to women, and instead highlights the profound influence of social forces on women’s lives.

Experience and Exploration: Mother Anyway and MotherNet

In our paper we wish to reflect on achievements and future possibilities for research connected to the interdisciplinary project "Mother Anyway: Literary, Medical and Media Narratives" (Uppsala University, 2017-2020) and the network "MotherNet" (2021-2024). The Uppsala project originated in our conviction that the highly visible themes of motherhood and mothering in contemporary Scandinavian literature, life writing and public debate needed scholarly attention. Literary representations of mother-child relationships, new (and challenging) family constellations and gender identities; narratives of post-partum depression, bibliotherapy, cultural scripts around breast-feeding and mothering - the project covered or initiated research within a wide range of subjects. Much remains to be examined, such as the many autobiographical novels on motherhood which have been published in Sweden in recent years. The cross-disciplinary cooperation between literary and medical sholars can also be expanded in new ways.

The international collaboration "MotherNet" has covered broad areas within the field of Motherhood studies. The cross-disciplinary approach created fruitful opportunities for innovative thinking and collaboration between generations of researchers, as well as challenges related to different methodological and theoretical approaches. In our paper we wish to describe some of the roads taken by the two projects, and furthermore suggest possible expansions and future challenges and goals for Motherhood studies.

This paper results from a sociological study on childbirth activism in different European contexts, that explores the emergence and the modes of action of social movements advocating for the humanization of childbirth and women’s rights in pregnancy and childbirth.

Starting from the analysis of the main characteristics of childbirth activism, this presentation will focus on the cases of southern European organizations, from Portugal and Spain, as well as on public campaigns promoted by the European Network of Childbirth Associations (ENCA). For such, we will mobilize empirical data resulting from a plural methodology, based on documentary analysis, interviews and participant observation in different settings.

As preliminary results, this analysis will show how childbirth activism is contributing to the construction of alternative conceptions of birth, challenging established paradigms. In its differences and similarities, childbirth activism assumes distinct features and abilities to adapt and promote changes, depending on the specificities of the contexts where it operates.

Two recent novels speculate about alternative realities for women as mothers. In When Women were Dragons (2022), Kelly Barnhill imagines an alternate history set in 1950s America where women asserted agency outside of the mothering role by becoming literal dragons and abandoning their families and responsibilities. Women such as sisters and nieces take on the role of mother, but also feel constrained by the responsibility of motherhood that has been thrust upon them, The novel ends hopefully when dragons and women form cooperative communities to care for each other. While Barnhill imagines a kind of maternal utopia, The School for Good Mothers (2022) by Jessamine Chen creates a dystopian future where women are punished for failing to be good mothers. In The School for Good Mothers, women who face losing custody of their children, are given the choice to attend a school to learn to become good mothers who are worthy to earn their children back. Featuring surveillance and robot children, the school is a no-win proposition, but desperation to be reunited with their children propels the mothers to continue in the school. This presentation interrogates anxieties around motherhood in society that these two novels reflect. While Chen explores the consequences of surveillance culture particularly for mothers from marginalized groups, Barnhill looks to the past to imagine an alternative, more hopeful result of second wave feminism, but to become free, women have to literally become something else.These novels reveal twenty-first century family and motherhood concerns by examining “bad” mothers.

The present paper examines the ecocritical capaciousness of the maternal imaginary of Canadian author David Huebert’s short story “Cruelty”. Propped up by the critical leverage of Greg Garrard’s and Catriona Sandilands’ theorizing of ferality as a conceptual slide in the biopolitical calculus of domesticity and wildness, I read the story’s maternal experience of pest invasion as reflective of the ethical contradictions of the female Anthropocene subject caught up in the vicissitudes of raising a child in conditions of ecological disturbance. Inherent in the narrative’s yoking of the mother to the material-affective dialectics of human/nonhuman, pest/exterminator, sanitation/corruption, pollution/purgation, and pleasure/pain is the legacy of heteropatriarchal (and thus anthropocentric) thought, which in arrogating to the mother the cultural value of Nature simultaneously binds her to associations with leaky orifices, bodily fluids, (sexual) filth, and the abject qualities of animal life. This ambiguity magnifies the ethical stakes of pest control in Huebert’s story: the structural homologies which highlight the shared vulnerability of human and animal bodies speak of the verminous side of the human-run global economy, on the one hand, and the feral displacement of the individual subject, on the other. Folded into this double register of motherhood, as Huebert shows us, is our ultimate uncertainty about the boundaries of home, self, and care.

Institutionalised motherhood demands of women a strong sense of maternal 'instinct' more than reason, absence of self more than self-fulfilment, and belonging to others more than self-creation. If a mother doesn't fit the ideal image portrayed by society, she runs the risk of becoming a "monstrous mother", whether metaphorically or, unfortunately, in some cases, in reality. This paper will adopt a double lens in relation to the examination of the figure of the monstrous mother within the French and Francophone context. In the first section, the study will identify and reveal the specificities of the concept of the monstrous mother across media and web texts. For this part of analysis we will use the Sketch Engine and Leipzig Corpora Collection corpora, whose databases contain texts from online sources.

We will try to show:

1. In what context is the monster mother most frequently discussed?

2. What are the culturally coded expectations of motherhood?

3. How do these potential expectations affect the behaviour of monster mothers?

In the second part of the study, we will focus on depictions of the monstrous mother in contemporary literature and film. We will try to tease out the main differences between the media and the artistic representations and demonstrate a culture of maternal blame in the former in contrast to an attempt to understand the deviant mother in the latter.

This study explores how lesbian mothers-to-be discuss in/equalities and their future motherhoods during their transition to first-time-parenthood in Sweden. The couples are situated in a context where gender equality discourse for long have dominated public narratives and political decisions about families. As such, debates and policy-makers have focused on the challenges of motherhood in relation to fatherhood and couple-inequalities as due to gender differences. Against this background, this study asks questions about how lesbian couples navigate their transition to first-time-motherhood. Drawing on interviews with 40 lesbian mothers-to-be, key issues from the gender equality discourse are explored, such as meanings of motherhood and within-couple in/equalities. The findings suggest that gender equality, as a hegemonic discourse and dominant narrative, shape what available interpretations there are for understanding coupledom and in/equalities, also among lesbian mothers-to-be. This discourse further facilitates an expectation that they, as two women, should act as true equals. The findings also suggest that sharing motherhood, which these women are about to do, might come with unexpected challenges from claiming the same role while not experiencing the same thing. These types of challenges are however not easily recognized due to the lack of available frameworks for understanding two-mother-families.

Maternalism—the elevation of women socially and politically through their role as mothers—has taken many forms historically and geographically. Maternalisms are regularly entrenched in wider political discourses, stereotypes, economics, and nation-state projects. As such, they are used broadly to promote gendered worldviews and (re)define social roles. Crucially in the west, maternalism has been one of the strongest discursive arenas for women’s political voice used by both “traditional” and “progressive” movements. While much scholarly and popular work on motherhood and its effects focuses on how women are impacted by stereotypes and discourses, my work focuses on how women leverage maternalist rhetoric to shore up their role as agentic political actors. This paper explicates the specific adaptations and uses of maternalism in digital cultures of extremism and reaction, what I have previously termed “Alt-Maternalism,” highlighting how such gendered propaganda is circulated and normalized into everyday politics with impacts on daily living and our social understanding of proper mothering roles. I draw on concepts including Angela McRobbie’s notion of post-feminism, Naomi Mezzy and Cornelia Pillard’s notion of new maternalism, as well as histories such as Elizabeth Gillespie McRae’s Mothers of Massive Resistance to show how groups such as Moms for Liberty make extremist, often white supremacist politics normative through their promotion of and participation in reactionary socio-political campaigns focused on schools and education (e.g., Anti-CRT / Anti-Trans) that are expanding through predominantly white networked, digital motherhood cultures.

During the implementation of the project 'Women, get to coding! Mapping educational initiatives in support of women" from 2020 onwards, I accompanied mothers through the process of transitioning to IT-related jobs. In the course of the research, I heard many times about being absolutely exhausted, feeling burnt out and being that "insufficient" woman who, although she loves her children and will do anything for them, "hates motherhood". These words came from the mouths of educated women who, in search of a better life and with no desire to replicate the scenario followed by their mothers, had migrated from small towns to larger conurbations. Thus, motherhood, treated as another project rather than a mission, acquired new 'levels' and 'skills' that one must possess in order not to fall out of this ultra-hard game. These difficulties were spread among the necessity inherent in the IT industry to learn and constantly position oneself as a valuable asset for potential employers, the logistics of everyday life, and the cultural factors that tell one not to duplicate one's mother's mistakes and to build an individualised "career map" corresponding to newly emerging professions. Conclusions from the research show that organisations and women's support networks dedicated to the IT industry, which by their actions build narratives about maternity-friendly workplaces, support the potential for change and women's agency, turned out to be allies in the process of negotiating roles and exchanging experiences in the game for new jobs for the respondents.

In a recent Apple ad, Octavia Spencer takes on the role of 'Mother Nature'. She is fierce and confrontational, questioning the company's leaders on their efforts to be more sustainable. This depiction is a fresh take on the longstanding Mother Nature figure.

This presentation will dig into this modern portrayal, asking a critical question - how has the Mother Nature archetype changed over time, and can it align with the diverse (in terms of gender expression, but also race) and dynamic realities of today’s world? I'll be using Aronofsky’s 2017 "Mother!" as a case study to explore these questions. The film, woven with themes of ecofeminism, portrays Mother Nature in ways that both interrogate and uphold archetypal narratives of motherhood.

I will juxtapose this with del Toro’s “The Murmuring,” a tale of maternal loss and trauma set on a remote island in Canada during the 1950s. The episode brings together motherhood and nature in ways that expand our understanding of both.

In discussing these contemporary portrayals, ecofeminist perspectives become instrumental in decoding the intricate relations between women and nature, providing a lens to understand the transformation of Mother Nature amidst evolving ecological and gender narratives. In light of ecofeminist theory, the presentation seeks to understand how narratives of power, resistance are embedded within contemporary portrayals of the Mother Nature figure. The complex maternal allegories in “Mother!” and the emotive narrative in “The Murmuring” are analyzed as part of an ongoing discourse where nature and femininity are contested, reclaimed, and redefined.

This article explores the experiences of Irish and Lithuanian mothers in creative work who detail challenges they face and the various strategies they develop to sustain creative work and care for their children. The study draws from 24 interviews which were carried out with mothers in both countries at various stages in their careers. Our study stresses the importance of national context in research on European creative workers, since national and localised differences feature little in creative industries literature. By assessing mothers in their national contexts, we argue that mothers may share overall experiences of juggling work and family life, of the requirement to solve childcare issues and of challenges they face while working in creative industries. However, crucially, key differences emerge in how Lithuanian and Irish mothers position their professional and maternal identities. Differences arise in the solutions that Lithuanian and Irish mothers use and in the extent to which challenges may be negated, particularly across generations. We relate each of these differences to the localised contexts in which the creative workers mother.

This presentation explores maternal ethics as portrayed in the Greek author Plutarch's Parallel Lives. By critically analyzing the historical examples of motherhood selected and represented in Lives, the study posits that Plutarch constructs a distinctive paradigm of the exceptional mother who transcends the conventional constraints imposed upon women in Classical and Hellenistic Greece. The presentation further argues that Plutarch’s pronounced emphasis on the maternal role in the cultivation and education of sons may not merely mirror but occasionally surpass the father's influence, ultimately determining the future trajectory of the state.

However, this paper also uncovers a disconcerting dichotomy in Plutarch’s treatment of mothers of sons in contrast to mothers of daughters, the latter of whom are frequently relegated to the status of courtesans. It highlights Plutarch’s foundational ethics of motherhood, emphasizing the profound impact of mothers in shaping their sons, thereby inspiring heroic feats and fostering societal improvement. Although Plutarch acknowledges the deep bond between mothers and daughters elsewhere in his authorship, the Lives predominantly depict these relationships as mere economic transactions.

The novels of contemporary Goncourt prize-winning French writer Marie NDiaye contain many mothers. The reader is normally given access to their consciousness but that is never a comfortable place to be. It is hard to receive NDiaye’s mothers as attractive figures. They are inadequate or abusive, they prioritise their career over their child, and a desire to be free of the children to whom they have given birth, and to sometimes apparently actually become so, features in all the maternal narratives.

Woven into NDiaye’s representations of motherhood are its two extreme reference points, the perfection of the Madonna and the monstrosity of Medea. This paper explains how the ideal of the Madonna, first expressly invoked in her 2001 novel, Rosie Carpe, contains within itself the very tensions that lead to maternal failure. It goes on to explore her 2021 novel, La vengeance m’appartient, in which the Medea figure, present but often veiled in the earlier novels, is explicitly recreated and forensically investigated. In this novel the fears and fantasies of earlier mother figures are given concrete expression in the murder of a mother’s three children.

I argue that in her subtle deconstruction of these referential figures, NDiaye reveals how each is contained in the other and how, despite the reluctance of her texts to depict the traditional view of a mother, as loving, devoted and protective, NDiaye approaches a frighteningly real representation of the mother, in the act of mothering.

The paper focuses on representations of maternal experience in contemporary Latvian literature through analysis of Daina Tabūna's short story “Viena diena tavā dzīvē 11.09.2020” (One day in your life 11.09.2020, 2020) and Anna Auziņa's novel Mājoklis. Terēzes dienasgrāmata (The Dwelling. Teresa’s Diary, 2021). Tabūna's story, made up of concentrated notes depicting 24 hours in the life of a woman who has given birth to her first child, portrays the routinised, stifling everyday experience of taking care of another human being. Evoking the constant demands the infant makes on the mother and exposing the reciprocity of mother and the child, the story explores ambivalent maternal feelings of care, confusion, fatigue and affection. The protagonist of Auziņa's novel decides to have her third baby amidst the pain and suffering caused by the aging, illness and death of her parents. By focusing on the subjective and embodied experience of pregnancy and birth, Auziņa challenges the previous taboo of talking about the maternal body. Both texts are characterized by blurring of genres: turning to the autofictional mode, the authors fictionalize their own experiences of motherhood as affectively embodied. My goal is to examine these representations of motherhood within a broader context of recent literary research on matrifocal narratives (Rye et al. 2018, Podnieks 2020, Henriksson et al. 2023) and to shed light on the ways in which the texts, discussed in the paper, relate to cultural scripts about motherhood, but also critique and problematize them.

The current paper analyzes some of the connotations of maternity in the modern Romanian novel. The literary texts proposed for this study are Romanian novels written by two ideologically opposite women writers: Sofia Nădejde (who lived between 1856-1946), a feminist and socialist activist, and Hortensia Papadat Bengescu (who lived between 1876-1955), as one of the most appreciated authors who belonged to the established and influential literary group that marked the Romanian literary modernism during the Inter-war period. This paper will research on the role of maternity in the context of establishing the “new modern mother” in the Romanian novel. The replacement of the traditional mother with the urban bourgeois mother constitutes a major shift in the economy of social and familial relationships. Thus, I explore three important aspects of „modern motherhood”: maternity as a matrimonial transaction; domestic oppression and social pressure; and, lastly, the way women face involuntary maternity, abortion, and miscarriages. Depicting the rough experience of maternity as a particular case of women’s exploitation through imposed maternity and birth control exerted in a patriarchal society, as it is represented in Nădejde’s novel, is complementary to motherhood in a bourgeois society where maternity is objectified, as revealed in H.P. Bengescu’s novel, while women are merely an object of transaction meant to reinforce men’s social status and symbolic power. This study proposes to reflect on how both novels represent maternity as an experience which occurs outside of the women’s agency.

This talk explores the representation of ob/gyn violence in contemporary women’s writing in France, as well as the role of social media in shedding light on this sexist form of violence. From Camille Laurens to Julie Bonne, French writers have been representing traumatic experiences of childbirth; yet our readings often fail to highlight the systemic nature of these violent acts and the androcentric medical knowledge and patriarchal order that underpin them. By engaging with medical and legal discourse, this talk calls attention to the power of words, proposes a paradigmatic shift in literary criticism, and provides an example of the mobilization of stories and testimonies to train health professionals. Inspired by the field of narrative medicine and a recent experience with resident ob/gyn doctors at Vilnius Hospital, this presentation shows that words matter.

The present research investigates obstetric violence within Hungary's public healthcare system, focusing on women's experiences and narratives about giving birth. It explores the intersections of gender, ethnicity, and class hierarchies in these situations, as well as the influence of family dynamics, demographic processes, and institutional mediation. It employs qualitative methods - most importantly in-depth interviews - and focuses on Hungarian Roma and non-Roma women’s narratives to uncover disparities in their experiences.

In Hungary, official data on this issue is lacking, but a rising number of cesarean sections could serve as an indirect indicator of mistreatment. While grassroots movements have raised awareness, scientific research remains sparse. Alternative databases and initiatives offer valuable insights, but their lack of cohesion limits a comprehensive understanding. The present research underscores that routine procedures during childbirth can lead to negative or traumatic experiences, with narratives, resolutions, and visibility varying based on class and ethnicity. The research relies on and analyzes in-depth interviews with women who gave birth in the public health care system.

This research aims to expose hidden institutional mechanisms affecting women through individual narratives, shedding light on systemic oppression within healthcare. By including marginalized groups like the Roma population, it unveils social meanings and roots of trauma, contributing to a deeper understanding of obstetric violence in Hungary.

The Traveller community in Ireland experience significant health inequalities, compounded by, the social determinants of health including, poor accommodation conditions, poverty, racism and discrimination (AITHS, 2010). Maternal and perinatal outcomes for Traveller women are exceptionally poor as they experience higher parity, higher rates of miscarriage, stillbirth, perinatal death, and infant death as well as shorter intervals between pregnancies (Manning et al., 2016). Outcomes of pregnancies are also more risky for Traveller women and their babies - infant mortality is 3.5 times national rate and average birth weights are much lower (Pavee Point, 2018).

The Covid-19 pandemic created further challenges for Traveller women who were pregnant and in early motherhood. International data highlighted the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on minority ethnic groups, including Travellers and Roma. Specific rules were imposed on service users of the maternity system regarding how they engage with services throughout their pregnancy and how they give birth.

This paper presents the findings of research conducted in partnership with Pavee Point Traveller and Roma Centre, a leading national Traveller organisation, with Traveller women and Traveller community health workers in Ireland. The research explored the lived experiences of pregnancy and birth during the Covid-19 pandemic. The findings contribute to the timely discussion of maternity service provision during Covid-19 where there were significant changes to service provision and how women are engaged with. The research also highlights particular challenges and outlines key service barriers and issues which are still experienced by Traveller women and their partners post-pandemic.

This paper derives from the author’s work as a therapist in the area of pregnancy loss and infertility. It explores situations of involuntary childlessness, where a woman must confront the reality that she will not transition into motherhood, in terms of how this is ordinarily understood. It considers the processes involved in transfiguring situations of ‘emptiness’, into states of mind (and body) that might feel in some way generative and whole again. For some women, this may still include a sense of being a mother, where there have been experiences of pregnancy loss in which a deep connection was forged with a particular baby, or even the idea of a baby. For others, the deeply desired state of motherhood may feel entirely elusive or withheld. The therapeutic process offers a space within which emptiness and absence can be thought about, and the losses inherent within this, mourned and accommodated.

In the practice of drawing, the term ‘negative space’ refers to the gap between objects: we capture the likeness of something, by paying careful attention to what is ‘not there’. A similar kind of attention is necessary in the contexts of loss being discussed here, in order to delineate in therapy, the tender and private absences that can shape and define a life. This in turn can permit a fuller engagement in due course with other generative possibilities.

These processes will be illustrated via clinical vignettes, images and poetry that speak to ideas of absence and potential space.

The presentation discusses mother’s activism in authoritarian Russia. In particular, the presentation explores voices of women that are not conformed with the nationalist and patriotic construction of “motherhood” in contemporary Russia. Special attention is paid to Feminist Anti-War Resistance strategies confronting both patriarchy and the Russian aggression against Ukraine.

This paper investigates numerous instances of what might be perceived as localized maternal activism in Lithuania and aims to extrapolate the ideological picture of the mother who is seen as "worthy of care" by the state. The analysis includes grassroots initiatives led by retired mothers with many children, as well as campaigns advocating for home births, elective c-section deliveries, and free infertility treatment for single women. The paper engages with the feminist paradigm of the politics of care as an analytical tool, enabling an in-depth analysis of both the discursive content of these maternalist campaigns and nationalist responses to these initiatives. The paper suggests that institutional and public responses to maternalist initiatives are constructed around the dualistic nature of maternal citizenship and the child-centered initiatives are seen as more deserving of care compared to those focusing on women's "bodily citizenship" (Kulawik 2014).

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.

In Sweden in the twenty-first century, childlessness has emerged as a topic in literature across genres. These narratives take stories about non-motherhood, which are often invisible and abjected from mainstream society, and tell them in new and defiant ways. Moreover, this body of literature depicts a variety of ways of being a non-mother: through involuntary childlessness and infertility, through childlessness by choice, and through childlessness by circumstance. In this presentation, I explore a variety of literary representations of women without children in twenty-first-century Swedish literature. I discuss fiction, autofiction and personal essays that deal with childlessness and analyze how these representations reclaim the position of non-motherhood in various ways: by telling stories of failed fertility treatments, by embracing the abjected position of non-motherhood and claiming it as a livable life, and by using laughter and failure to turn things around and propose alternative ways of living. I bring together theories of abjection, laughter and failure to analyze stories that are usually expulsed from the public domain in order to uphold the fertility norm. I show how abjection, laughter and failure are employed in these narratives to reclaim the position of non-motherhood, to criticize dominant discourses and to imagine different futures.

In the late years graphic narratives about journeys to motherhood and maternal experience have populated the Spanish market. These narratives appear together with other forms of communication like blogs, maternal chronicles, novels, movies, or associations. However, the issue of non-motherhood is still under explored. No quiero ser mamá is a graphic novel that explores the process of deciding not to be a mother. The novel stands out as it shows the process as a subjective experience, drawing attention to the specific conjunctions of visual and verbal texts in autobiography (Gillian Whitlock 2006: 966), visually arranging the relationships of the protagonist with other people in social situations and spatial environments. Through these visual relationships we see how Irene Olmo conveys her struggle to conform with societal expectations of women and mothers by making us sense gaps between the protagonist’s femininity and motherhood norms. Olmo uses her graphic novel as a feminist tool to explore the choice of a voluntary childfree life as a response to social attitudes towards non-motherhood that have emerged from culturally sanctified religious ideologies. No quiero ser mama creates new discursive spaces in which the naturalization of motherhood can be challenged, the silence surrounding this experience can be broken, and non-motherhood can be imbued with the potential for enlightenment, community, self-realization, and exceptionality

My paper proposal is to explore non-motherhood and surrogacy in a century-old text, Miguel de Unamuno’s novella-play Dos madres (‘Two Mothers’), included in his work Tres novelas ejemplares y un prólogo (‘Three Exemplary Novels and a Prologue’, 1920). Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936) of the most recognised Spanish writers and philosophers. One of the main topics of his literary works is non-motherhood vs. motherhood. The Dos madres plot starts from the same core leitmotiv as the biblical passage it is inspired by, the story of Rachel and Jacob (Gn. 30: 1-6). There are three main characters: Raquel, don Juan and Berta. Raquel is a widow who could neither have a child with her husband nor with her younger lover, don Juan. Rachel is desperate to become a mother and makes a plan to achieve her goal. She encourages don Juan to marry a young woman, Berta—who is supposed to be fertile—and have a child with her but then give the child to Raquel, who will raise the baby as her own. Therefore, my paper will explore, through a literary text, non-motherhood and how the desire to become a mother is dealt with and given a solution via surrogacy. In addition, my paper will put on display how in Unamuno’s novella-play surrogacy is represented as something beyond a cure for infertility and produces new ways of imagining family formations.

Amandine Gay’s book-length personal essay, Une poupée en chocolat (2021), first and foremost treats the politics and violences of transracial adoption. Yet, alongside her critique of transracial adoption both within and beyond France, Gay also speaks of her own lack of desire to become a biological mother or to partake in traditional family-making, culminating in her seeking out voluntary sterilisation at the age of thirty-five. Her fight to get a hysterectomy – accounts of which are rarely explored by literature or personal writings, especially among cisgender women of ‘reproductive’ age – is a radical act of defiance and self-determination. For Gay, it is as much an act of self-care as it is a reclamation of her body from the sexist, racist paternalism which underpins medical discourses. In this chapter, I argue that Une poupée is a rageful reclaiming of autonomy, autocreation and agency for the (black) non-mother and transracial adoptee. By refusing the glorification of biological or normative kinship, Gay imputes new ways of understanding care, ethical kinship and love beyond the colonial and racialised logics of traditional family-making which have been ensured by the French republican model of assimilation and filiation (‘kinship’). I explore how Gay advances the importance of “othermothering” or ‘l’alloparentalité’ as part of an afrofeminist ethics and tradition. I turn to examine the role of creativity as a form of autocreation and transmission in Gay’s work, understanding it as a radical way in which agency can be reclaimed and restored for the marginal, ‘non-mothering’ subject.

Women’s experiences of non-motherhood were not analysed in Lithuania until recently. Women in Lithuania as in other Eastern European countries experience the pressure of pro-natalist society to have children (Gedvilaite et. al. 2020). Their decisions whether and when to have children are often not free, as they are influenced by circumstances and internalized cultural beliefs (Meyers 2001). In will present analysis of narratives of 12 reproductive-age women (29-47 years old), interviewed by the author in 2017. The findings show that most interviewed women hadn’t questioned the reproductive temporality (Halberstam 2005) and heteronormative life path – becoming an adult, creating a family (by marriage), and having children. Even though for most of the women, family meant more than the nuclear family. They valued extended family networks, which provided emotional and practical support. Despite the partners ' income, employment was crucial to women’s feelings of current and future financial and emotional security. Still, the qualitative interviews demonstrated that reproduction was central to women’s lives. Only a few women felt comfortable with not having children. This indicates that pressure for motherhood remains strong, and experiences of non-motherhood don’t hold sufficient weight to demonstrate an alternative path for a happy life.

Motherhood and the normative expectations associated with it changed dramatically in many parts of the Western world in the late 20th century. In this context, the ideology of intensive mothering, introduced by American sociologist Sharon Hays in 1996, stands out as a hegemonic discourse of contemporary mothering in the West. Intensive mothering is based on child-centered attitudes, casting the mother as the primary caregiver with the responsibility to provide expert-guided and labor-intensive care for the child. This ideology emphasizes the need for mothers to be constantly available, especially during the early stages of the child's development, and to meet the child's physiological, emotional, and cognitive needs.

However, researchers note that the demands placed on mothers and the contemporary standards of mothering, which advocate for time- and resource-intensive child-rearing, are challenging to achieve. This is particularly true for single or socio-economically disadvantaged mothers. Studies have found that the strain of trying to meet these normative expectations has a detrimental impact on mothers' well-being. Moreover, the ideology of intensive mothering and the social norms it promotes are closely linked to problems of gender inequality and women's participation in the labor market. It can also influence fertility decisions.

In my presentation, I will discuss the peculiarities of the intensive mothering discourse and explain why this ideology could be seen as oppressive to mothers. Additionally, I will share relevant examples from an in-depth interview with a middle-class Lithuanian mother of three young children, revealing the internalized standards of the intensive mothering ideology.

Intensive motherhood has been identified as the dominant parenting standard across economically advanced countries that has spread across different socioeconomic and ethnic groups. However, more knowledge is needed to understand its actual variations and how they adapt to sociocultural conditions in different countries. We examine the different forms intensive motherhood takes in Czechia, which (similarly to other post-socialist European countries) experienced gendered refamilialisation after 1989 that brought policies that undermine women’s employment and impose care responsibilities on women. Drawing on a constructivist grounded theory-based analysis of semi-structured interviews with mothers living in Czechia, we argue that different, even contradictory, parenting styles fulfil the characteristics of intensive motherhood. We identify four distinct repertoires of intensive motherhood: contact , high-performance, free-range, and protective mothering. They differ in that they emphasize the transmission and development of different types of capital (health, emotional, educational, safety). Still, all of them fulfil the characteristics of intensive motherhood: they all are child-centred, emotionally absorbing, labour-intensive, financially expensive, expert-guided, supported by the expansion of paid services and goods for children, and they all contribute to social status safeguarding and the reproduction of inequalities. By showing how practices and ideologies of intensive motherhood vary, remain exclusionary and adapt to the sociocultural context of a given country, we also contribute to the debate of how intensive motherhood may differ within and across countries.

Children’s minority language competences are not always attained, even though they are usually valued and desired by the parents. A lack of minority language skills in children can cause various strong emotions in minority parents. Parental emotional well-being likely plays an important, but still rather overlooked role in minority language transmission. While the emotional dimension of minority language transmission appears in many studies, it is usually not foregrounded and not explicitly addressed.

In this paper, we aim to shed some light on the link between the Lithuanian cultural motherhood script and non-harmonious bilingualism. Drawing on critical motherhood theory, we analysed 5 semi-structured in-depth interviews with first generation Lithuanian migrant women from inter-ethnic families living in Europe. All the informants wanted to transmit their language, but, in their view, they were not successful and felt bad about it.

A part of the women’s pain is induced by the dominant national discourse on the preservation of the Lithuanian language and culture. This responsibility is chiefly assigned to Lithuanian migrant mothers. The Lithuanian motherhood script, which requires that “good” mothers must pass over Lithuanian language to their children unproblematically and to a high degree, impacts negatively on the women’s well-being and also hinder their language transmission efforts leading to even more suffering. The prevailing discourse that works as an external pressure and is internalised can in fact be counterproductive for minority language maintenance. We will also look at how mothers' difficult emotions are actively managed and regulated and what coping stategies are applied.

In this paper I present a section of emerging findings from my doctoral research, which involved in-depth interviews with 20 mothers who had been subjected to violent and abusive behaviours from their children. Specifically, I explore the ways in which the mothering identities of those experiencing Child-to-Mother Abuse (CMA) were not only impacted by the abuse but also targeted and, for many, permanently altered as a result of the responses received from those around them.

References to the archetype of the ‘good mother’ were prevalent throughout mothers’ accounts of their abuse and appeared to also inform the lens through which statutory services viewed the issue of CMA. For mothers and the professionals surrounding them, the abuse of a mother by her child directly contradicted normative expectations of what it means to be a ‘good mother’. The narrative that mothers are responsible for their child’s behaviour resulted in both deep feelings of shame for victim-survivors, and also in a professional culture that framed CMA as a consequence of insufficient and inappropriate mothering. Mothers were not only blamed for their abuse, but many also reported having their mothering identity de-legitimised by the silencing of their voices, and in extreme cases, the stripping of their maternal rights. From the accounts of mothers presented in this paper it is evident that the issue of CMA, and the way that professionals respond to it, is not just a form of violence against women, but a direct attack on their motherhood.

In “Resurgence of the Monstrous Feminine,” Hannah Williams argues that “we retreat to fantasy when we want to escape from what we cannot change.” While in both novels there is a retreat to a fantasy of a better world, interestingly as The New Wilderness imagines new and empowered mothering in life post-climate change, Clean Air serves to reify the normative motherhood of yesteryear. In contrast, the mother Bea of The New Wilderness enacts maternal authenticity and agency to challenge the institution of normative motherhood and achieve empowered mothering. Thus, while Clean Air presents normative motherhood as both natural and inevitable in a post-apocalyptic world, The New Wilderness imagines a mother outlaw who escapes from the normative motherhood of the destroyed old world to achieve maternal authenticity and agency in empowered mothering.

In its considerations of how normative motherhood is both reified and resisted in two climate change novels, this paper will expose and articulate the pain the hegemonic institution of normative motherhood inflicts on mothers as well as consider how this institution may be destabilized through empowered mothering. Thus, I read the two novels as not only cautionary narratives about climate change but also as necessary interventions in how new worlds are being imagined for mothers. And how each novel, in either its reification of or resistance to normative motherhood, exposes and articulates the pains of mothers to prompt action and change.

From a personal examination of the liminal in the mundane focusing on acts of “mothering” I carve out the emancipatory potential of performance art in (re)designing everyday processes. I see performance art as having the potential to create spaces for reflecting and reshaping everyday actions and to advance micro-sociological processes and changes across political and social norms.

The everyday is “what we are first of all, and most often: […] awake, asleep, in the street, in private existence” (Blanchot, 1987:12). By the year 2019 I had expanded this description with the term “breastfeeding”. I did go through a long period of clusterfeeding, which meant to breastfeed nearly all day long, at the same time following other mundane activities like cleaning, showering, cooking, working. I suffered from mammalities, baby blues and the lack of personal space. I found myself trapped. I didn’t like it and there would have been alternative ways of feeding our child. So why did I do it anyhow? Contrary to performance art, liminal experiences of the everyday tend to Invisibility. Performing motherhood unleashes processes of healing and display. It is part of my practice-based PhD, in which I explore, among other things, how performative tactics can motivate critical reflection on everyday actions and work against idealized and detrimental imaginations of mothers, women and female artists.

The German terminology “stillen” highlines the potential of calming the newborn. And while the newborn is calmed, it is the mother that objects. For all the others, that are still trapped.

Background

The literature review shows that the norms and the representations surrounding motherhood have considerably changed in recent years. The 2019 European directives, which aimed for greater equality between parents in childcare, have contributed to questioning the representations, social roles, and practices surrounding parenthood. However, today, it is still often mothers who take parental leave and withdraw (even partially) from the labor market to look after their children.

Methods

Twenty-one focus groups were conducted in autumn 2022, with 128 individuals, (men, and women, with and without children), to capture the diversity of representations surrounding motherhood in French-speaking Belgium today.

Results

There is no easy answer to the question of what a mother is. It appears that parenthood is a complicated thing to define and that this definition changes according to family situation, economic situation, age (of the mother but also of the children), level of education, and situation of the partner.

A woman who stays at home to look after her children can be considered both a good mother and a bad one. The same applies to working mothers (either full-time or part-time).

Conclusion

Although some behaviors can be associated with the figure of good motherhood and others with bad motherhood, the boundaries between these figures are not clear-cut. This presentation aims to understand and draw these figures of 'good' and 'bad' mothers and to show the interconnection between them and the conflicting norms of motherhood, which are good illustrations of motherhood's complexity.

In recent decades, trauma has become a common subject of exploration within a variety of literary genres. A common feature in trauma fiction is the focus placed on traditional family, sometimes as a source of traumatic experience, sometimes as a site of crucial social support during a victim’s healing process. This paper will focus on two novels from the United States and Sweden, Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones and Sara Stridsberg’s The Antarctica of Love, in order to demonstrate two different literary approaches to motherhood in the aftermath of traumatic sexual violence.

Sebold and Stridsberg both approach this subject through a shared fantastic premise: the narrators are girls or women who turn into ghosts after having been raped and murdered by strangers. Sebold’s protagonist is a teenage girl who spends her spectral afterlife violently longing for her mother’s return to the suburban nuclear family which she left after her daughter’s death. Stridsberg’s protagonist is repeatedly drawn back to Earth not only by a wish to be consoled by her distant mother, but also by her fear of having passed on a traumatic family inheritance to her own daughter. Both novels urge us to ask questions about the role of the mother-daughter relationship as a site of interpersonal support after traumatic experiences. Can intergenerational bonds persist after death? What may supportive relationships between mothers and daughters look like in a world plagued by gendered violence?

Background: Medical humanities is an interdisciplinary field of study that explores the intersection of medicine, healthcare, and the humanities. It seeks to understand the human experience of illness, health, and healthcare by drawing on insights from literature, philosophy, history, ethics, art, cultural studies, and other humanities disciplines.

Aim and methods: We aimed to unite different researchers from medicine, psychology, philosophy, and philology for an interdisciplinary approach to mothers' subjective experiences after preterm birth. Methodologically, our study combines empirical and theoretical/cultural/literary research to explore the lived experience of giving birth to and being a mother to a premature baby. This study has three distinct stages. The first stage consists of a prospective longitudinal study, which maps out the psychological and emotional experiences of such mothers and shall be done through medical questionnaires. The second stage comprises repeated (x2) semi-structured interviews where the mothers will describe their experiences of being mothers to preterm babies from their subjective perspective. Finally, the third stage concerns auto-ethnographic research into contemporary literary and filmic representations of preterm motherhood to see whether they correspond to the actual experiences (conceptualised based on the findings of the first two stages).

In conclusion, to our knowledge, it would be the first time combining medical questionnaires and interpretative phenomenological analysis investigating the subjective experiences of mothers of preterm babies from the medical humanities perspective to identify the most common postpartum risks in psychosocial well-being and to provide later help and support.

Child removal is an extreme action caused by the parental inability to take care of the child, abuse and neglect, addictions. This paper focuses on mothers with intellectual disability, whose children were removed. These mothers’ alleged inability to take care of a child contradicts to the image of a “good mother” and deviates from the norms of femininity. The paper uses the motives of the judge (Solomon) and the defendant (Medea), symbolizing mothers who are different and society with its oppressive institutional structure.

The aim of this paper is to explore experiences of mothers with intellectual disabilities whose children were removed with an emphasis on oppressive social, institutional and personal circumstances that led to the loss of their parental rights.

The semi-structural retrospective interview method was chosen for this empirical study. 13 mothers with intellectual disabilities who experienced removal of their children participated in the interviews.

We conclude, that the child protection system acts similarly to Solomon interfering into the decontextualized moment of their life: both judging and having the power to take the baby away. In a society akin to Solomon's era, the vital support lacking amidst the challenging circumstances faced by these mothers is one that acknowledges the unconventional and potentially unsettling portrayal of women with intellectual disabilities, much like the character of Medea. Thus, female-dominated social and health care systems fail to support mothers with intellectual disabilities, and then the male-dominated legal system crushes them by taking away their children, destroying their identity as mothers.

Indian feminist Jasodhara Bagchi asserted “Motherhood without the mother’s selfhood is not complete”. This study furthers the scholarship of matricentric feminist research in India by exploring mothering practices of a cohort of urban Indian mothers and how they are locating their feminist selves,thus challenging traditional mothering practices. There are gendered social structures which are prescriptive and meant to be followed and performed within familial roles to maintain social order of being a mother. However, as noted by Leela Dube, “It is within these limits that women question their situation, express resentment, use manipulative strategies, utilize their skills, turn deprivation and self-denial into sources of power, and attempt to carve out a living space”. A cohort of seven Indian heterosexual mothers of children below the age of ten years were engaged in unstructured interviews to unpack their lived experiences of mothering in today’s age in an urban landscape. Young children are more dependent on their mothers for daily functioning, which increases the amount of time and effort mothers put in to raise them. This dynamic creates a space in which mothers feel conflicted between providing the best nurturing environment for their children while trying to maintain a similar environment for themselves. Through this process of conflict and evolution, emerges a feminist mother. Three themes were identified from their narrations: recognizing one’s feminism and gaining agency; feminism for the future; and gender-neutral parenting. These along with the voices of the respondents are unpacked and discussed in the light of deconstructing patriarchy.

This paper analyses the ethics of motherhood in a socially distributed cognition framework, based on its depiction in two contemporary autotheoretical texts, Vanessa Springora’s Le consentement (The Consent, 2020) and Shumona Sinha’s L’autre nom du bonheur était français (The Other Name of Happiness Was French, 2022). In Lauren Fournier’s terminology (2022), Springora and Sinha’s texts are autotheories, commingling autobiographical insights and philosophical considerations to explore topics of social and political relevance in a project rooted in and verging on activist practices. While Springora questions the notion of consent in the Parisian society of the 1980s based on her early adolescence experience of an intimate relationship with a famous writer in his 50s, Sinha draws on her own experience of migration, translingualism and writing to address issues such as racism, xenophobia, interculturality, the place of feminism in the contemporary world and the political dynamics of today’s societies. Drawing on Martha Nussbaum’s ethical criticism, this paper proposes a multilayered understanding of the apparently marginal role that the writers’ mothers play in these texts, examining both its clinical and its social implications. These texts show that although mothers as subjects were absent from philosophical discussions until the 1980s and limited to the status of objects of prescriptive morality, it is important to demystify motherhood and build frameworks in which mothers are not exempt from their status of moral agents whose actions shape not only the intramental landscapes of their children, but also become embedded in the functioning of the society around them.

In the light of the recently-coined concepts of “autotheory” (Fournier 2022) and “transbiography” (Mistreanu 2021 and 2022; Freyermuth 2023), this paper investigates the author’s intention to construct, deconstruct or destroy the figure of the mother. Our approach is based on a comparative method drawing mainly on autotheorethical and transbiographical writing and fosucing on the relationship between literature, film, and photography (Lazar 2021).

Proclaiming that she had "too many mothers", Nelly Arcan depicts the interplay between the mother’s presence and her absence, describing the maternal figure as a worm ("une larve"). On a similar note, the French writer Emma Marsante illustrates in her first book the same strange ("étrange") mother, distant from her child, "cette maman-là est du bois dormant dont on fait les mortes". Likewise, the artist Sophie Calle's creations commingle literature, life and visual arts. In her Autobiographies, Calle uses both photography and writing, being at the same time the narrator and the subject of her work, in which the presence-absence of the maternity occupies a central place. Maternity also permeates her other artistic projects, for instance in Rachel, Monique (2006), the author holds artistic funerals to her mother, while Voir la mer (2015) is based on the assonance, in French, between the words "mer" (sea) and "mère" (mother). Motherhood, life-writing and autobiographic creations will thus be discussed through the prism of contemporary literature and art, focusing on the figure of the mother in de(con)struction as a means of exploring the boundaries between literature, reality and visual representations.

Navigating the boundaries between woman and mother, this study addresses the role of women as mothers in literature written in Western Europe by authors with an immigrant background, examining how in the works analysed depictions of motherhood intersect with societal expectations within African socio-cultural milieux. The views of Adrianne Rich and Obioma Nnaemeka in particular are used to draw a distinction between motherhood as a social institution and mothering as a profoundly introspective feeling. While the former is a product of patriarchal societal structures, the latter relates to the feelings and experiences of a mother towards her own child(ren).

Grounded on the presumptions made above, this study sets out to investigate the ways in which modern fiction written by women of African descent demystifies the idea that mothers are inherently maternal. In more detail, it is shown how the novels The Belly of the Atlantic written by the French-Senegalese, Fatou Diome, and Imagine This, published by the British-Nigerian, Sade Adeniran, question African gendered expectations and demonstrate that motherhood is more of a mindset than an innate trait. Through a comparative approach, this study thus highlights how French and English-speaking female writers delve into sensitive issues such as unwelcome pregnancy, child abandonment, and alienation to dismantle idealised views of maternal figures and roles.

This presentation results from the project ABRIL MATER: Motherhood and Childbirth before and after the Revolution – a research that seeks to understand the impact of the social and political transformations catalyzed by the Revolution of 1974 on the representations and experiences of motherhood in Portugal.

A distinctive feature of this research lies in the historically rich and complex period it addresses, offering a unique opportunity to understand women's perceptions and experiences related to motherhood during this specific juncture. Furthermore, the project comprehensively examines the evolution of healthcare and public policies related to motherhood in Portugal during and after the April Revolution, drawing on testimonies from women who became mothers and raised their children during that period.

In this presentation we will share particularities of the ongoing fieldwork, highlighting the serendipitous nature of our empirical research, which encompasses, in addition to the collection of testimonies, a diversity of archival resources, including personal records, public archives, audiovisual materials and press documentation .

Finally, this presentation will already offer a snapshot of the preliminary findings of our project, highlighting the adaptability and resilience of maternal perspectives during times of significant social transformation, such as those that preceded and followed the 25th April Revolution.

This paper analyses the experiences and social perceptions of abortion that can be heard in the testimonies – and silences – of women who lived in Soviet Lithuania during the 1950s-70s. This paper aims to probe thehistoriographical argument that abortion was normalised and socially accepted in the Soviet context: to what extent was abortion normalised in the historically Catholic republic of Lithuania after its re-legalisation in 1955? What methodologies have informed and which, if any, proved this assumption? Through an examination of published diaries, memoirs, abortion-related fiction, and oral history interviews, I argue that scholars have misinterpreted the ubiquity of abortion in the Soviet context as a cultural normalisation of the practice as a result of an over-reliance upon masculine accounts of abortion, and research limited in focus to the metropole, both geographically and politically. Evidence suggests that attitudes towards abortion in Lithuania were shaped by enduring Catholic anti-abortion narratives intertwined with senses of Lithuanian nationalism. I propose that while abortion was common, choosing to terminate a pregnancy remained an embarrassing and painful procedure with adverse physical, psychological, and social consequences. The perceptions of abortion also speak of how the particular social environment of Soviet Lithuania of the 1950s-70s interpreted broader concepts of family planning, motherhood, and reproductive choice, and how their understanding evolved throughout those decades.

In recent decades, there has been a notable surge in single parenthood in Europe. Nearly 85% of single parents are single mothers. Most single mothers assumed custody over their children following separation from a partner, and most research have focused on this group of single mothers. Studies on women who start motherhood while not cohabiting with a partner regardless of marital status (single mothers at childbirth), are largely lacking or focus only on disadvantaged young women who conceived unintentionally.

In Belgium, where abortion is legal and medically assisted reproduction for single women is accessible, single motherhood at childbirth could be a result of women exercising their right to be a parent. The decision to be a single mother is also influenced by socioeconomic status (SES) and availability of childrearing support (i.e., through the woman’s parents).

In this research, I will estimate the prevalence and describe the changing face of single motherhood at childbirth in Belgium from 1995 to 2015, using register data. I will show that this type of motherhood is increasing, and that more women who are highly educated and in older ages (aged 35+) are becoming single mothers at childbirth in recent years. These numbers are not reflected in official statistics that only differentiate births to married and unmarried women. Then I will conduct event history analysis to estimate the probability of being a single mother at first birth for women aged 14 to 49 (reproductive age), taking into account the effect of SES and proximity to parents.

Born in Berlin and A Letter to Rosa are artistic projects carried out by Polish visual artist Joanna Rajkowska in Berlin in 2012. They were motivated by Rajkowska’s pregnancy and giving birth to her daughter Rosa and meant to address the trauma stemming from the Nazi occupation of Poland during World War II. During her pregnancy and labor, the artist created visual and narrative analogies between her experience and the topography and history of Berlin. She visited or intended to visit historically traumatic places, such as the Stasi prison, the Olympic Stadium where Leni Riefenstahl filmed Olympic divers in 1936 and a swamp at the edge of Teufelssee [Devil’s Lake], bordering with Teufelsberg [Devil’s Mountain] made from the rubble of the post-war Berlin. Rajkowska hoped that giving birth in Berlin, a gift that she offered to the city from which destruction had come, she would be able to achieve reconciliation and redemption. Born in Berlin and A Letter to Rosa generated much debate in academic and artistic circles, both in Germany and in Poland, and Rajkowska was accused of instrumentalizing her daughter in the name of art. To this day, the projects are among the most controversial pieces created in Poland that address war-related topics. At the same time, they are among the boldest and most unsettling artistic works that extrapolate from the intimate to the collective and use the maternal experience to artistically challenge the transgenerational transfer of trauma that still rates high numbers in Poland.

Although motherhood is a very common topic in art, the representation of birth is scarce. The omission corresponds to the opinions of many Western philosophies who are eager to “learn how to die” rather than address birth as a subject for philosophy. Birth is an uncanny topic that was propounded by feminist art in the 60ies in order to acknowledge maternal subjectivity and autonomy. Likewise, putting forward the experience of birth entails engagement with embodiment, materiality, and affect – the issues that for long have been ignored or downplayed, but in the last decades have attracted attention in humanities, social sciences, and art.

In my presentation, I would like to share a few works of contemporary art in Latvia that were created in recent years and address the question of birth. I will talk about works by artists Eva Vēvere, Elīna Brasliņa, and Vika Eksta. In these representations of birth, we can trace a spectrum of aesthetics that comprise documentation techniques and phenomenological accounts, embroidery, and found objects. Likewise, the notions of power and even sublimity of birth are entwined with feelings of despair, patience, disgust, and alienation. While thinking through these artworks, I will attend to their affective materialities and investigate their potential implications for body and gender politics in Latvia.

In 1967, Spanish writer and illustrator Núria Pompeia published her graphic album Maternasis, where she illustrated a woman’s experience of pregnancy in a new and critical way. In the book, she reflects on ambivalent feelings and emotions related to pregnancy and birth – none of which was a part of discourse surrounding women in Francoist regime, where motherhood was an idealized topic – although without using any words. About 50 years later, Norwegian illustrator Inga H Sætre and film director Yngvild Sve Flikke, pick up the same theme in their movie Ninjababy, where they let an imaginary animated doodle with a bandit mask represent a young woman’s ambivalent feelings towards her pregnancy. Despite different political contexts, time and space, that separate these two pieces of art, they both represent anxiety and doubt related to pregnancy and motherhood, and question more traditional positive perceptions of them. In our paper, we analyze these two representations of pregnancy, womanhood and (non-) motherhood from a critical feminist perspective, focusing on the differences and similarities across time and space, and the power of silence in their illustrations.

The presentation will focus on the ways three family generations discuss and interpret their mothers‘ experiences of difficult past periods, including deportations, partisan war, collectivization and encounters with the security structures. The empirical data for an interpretive analysis come from 16 Lithuanian family conversations about the soviet past. Grandparents and parents share their memories whereas grandchildren – generation after a transformative change ­– is asked to re-narrate their grandparents‘ life stories. The ways different family generations portray their mothers and grandmothers‘ experiences and interpret their role in difficult past periods add to our knowledge on interaction between the state- and family level memory. Furthermore, the ways they make sense of the mother‘s role (including mothers themselves) in harsh historical circumstances add to understanding of the current interpretive framework that applies to gender roles in general.

Breastfeeding on screen is a rare matter. The avoidance of this mundane act of motherhood finds parallel in the Catholic iconography from the 16^th century onwards. The nursing Madonna, Madonna lactans in the Latin tradition or Galaktotrophousa in the Orthodox one, refers to a pictorial representation that emerged in the early 14th century, depicting the Virgin Mary nursing the infant Christ. This iconography represented a regular part of maternity and was therefore used in both public and private worship. Images of the Virgin Mary nursing the infant Christ were considered the most popular type of Marian iconography during the Renaissance. At least one hundred and fifty-three images of this iconography were produced in Italy alone in the 14th and 15th centuries. Images of the nursing Madonna were also popular throughout Europe. In the 16th century, however, this pictorial tradition was abandoned. The political, religious and social conflicts of the century forced radical changes in Christian iconography, and in particular in the iconographic type of the nursing Madonna. This subversion was so profound that by the end of the 16th century she was considered lascivious and unfit for pious devotion. Drawing on sixteenth-century theoretical works, iconographic analysis, and the theoretical shift in Catholic iconography that particularly exhorted the avoidance of the nursing Madonna iconographic type, this paper questions why images of breastfeeding are still avoided in modern media.

A long-established discourse of being a mother as intrinsic to the definition of fulfilled womanhood often leads to the perceptions of non-maternal femininities as abnormal, failed, and/or monstrous (Bell 2019; Björklund 2023; de Boer 2019). While research shows that women may perceive motherhood as tied to the “fundamental losses of identity,” and attach positive values to being childfree (Myers 2017, 796), popular culture often contributes to the stigmatizing image of non-mothers as cold-hearted, unfulfilled, expendable, and/or traumatised (Archetti 2019; Stasiewicz-Bieńkowska 2013).

This project explores the representations of childless and childfree women in contemporary fantasy fiction. As a driving force behind enchanted love bonds or a price for acquiring extraordinary powers, female fertility is a recurrent trope in the fantasy, with maternal identity and reproductive body occasionally narrated as fundamental for a happy ending. This presentation focuses on the transmedial storyworld of The Witcher, originating from the literary series by Andrzej Sapkowski. Featuring an array of heroines who do not have children, and brimming with the narratives of female reproductive challenges and choices, The Witcher engages on multiple levels with the ongoing conversations on non/motherhood. This presentation will primarily examine the characters of Yennefer and Milva—an infertile enchantress desiring to be a mother and a warrioress who sees childbearing as a loss; their storylines speaking to the synergies of non/motherhood, body, agency, and the cultural negotiations of the gendered self.

The image of Mother Ireland, where the landscape of Ireland is imagined as a reproductive female, is deeply enmeshed in the conceptualisation of the maternal care in Ireland, where the primary domestic caregiver has been idealised as a desexualised, self-sacrificing woman. In this paper I discuss how "Mother Ireland" is being subverted, as its failures in representing motherhood become apparent through art. In Inis t’Oirr: Aran Dance (1985), feminist artist Pauline Cummins reimagines Mother Ireland through expressions of non-reproductive maternal sexual desire. More recently, discomfort around sexual reproduction has resulted in more devastating consequences through the 2018 “CervicalCheck Scandal,” as medical doctors failed to inform hundreds of women of false negative cervical smear tests, resulting in 208 women developing cervical cancer. Laura O’Connor's art works responding to this scandal present the female body as fragmented into the Irish landscape, in response to the “whole-system failure” of Irish gynaecological care. Finally, I consider the short play “Dear Ireland, you’ll hardly notice my absence” (2020) by Rosaleen McDonagh, which presents the exclusions that Traveller mothers face in Ireland, as Ireland’s ethnic minority. In this analysis, I discuss the subversion of maternal stereotypes in Ireland while arguing that the persistence of convention has caused denial and avoidance in order to uphold impossible idealizations of motherhood, resulting in systemic failures of care. Such an approach emphasizes how mothering is a collective and not individual endeavour, as these alternative representations create other ways for thinking of maternal caregiving within the Irish context.

“Do you think Mammy’s alright?”- A interdisciplinary exploration of themes of Irish Motherhood in Anne Enright’s The Green Road.

Roisin Freeney and Orlagh Woods

This paper places the three distinct depictions of motherhood in Anne Enright’s The Green Road (2015) in a historical and cultural context to expose how the social construction of Irish motherhood can shape the perceptions of mothers across generations. Enright’s novel spans forty years in the lives of the Madigan family of West Clare, and centres on the experience of the matriarch, Rosaleen Madigan, who has summoned her offspring home for Christmas with the news that she is selling the family home. The construction of motherhood in Irish culture has a very particular legacy, placed, as it was, at the helm of a post-colonial, nation building project that was extremely Catholic and conservative. Enright adapts Shakespeare’s King Lear, a play with notoriously vexed understandings of gender, sexuality, and the body. By putting Shakespeare in dialogue with the Irish Mammy, Enright interrogates the limiting archetypes that are destructively cast onto women and considers what happens when a woman seeks an articulation of self beyond these conventions. This paper draws on two distinct fields of literary criticism and cultural sociology to explore the Enright’s nuanced representation(s) of Irish motherhood. This is an important endeavour as the voice of the Irish Mother is one that has been muted in Irish culture and she has been constantly defined, represented and even impersonated by male entertainers and artists.

Gestation, childbirth, and the horror genre have often gone hand in hand, as seen in popular films and novels such as Rosemary’s Baby, The Brood, and Alien. The inherent unknowability and invisibility of the fetus growing inside the pregnant body as well as the sometimes animalistic and unpredictable changes the pregnant body goes through in the process of gestation gives ripe opportunity for narrative speculations in corruption, contamination, and morally subversive iterations of the otherwise naturalized and romanticized processes of gestation and childbirth.

In this paper, I will discuss two horror novels depicting pregnancy and childbirth, Doris Lessing’s 1988 novel The Fifth Child and Naomi Booth’s 2017 novel Sealed. I will consider how they each draw on horror tropes such as suspense and explicit gore to represent the strangeness and unknowability of pregnancy in written form and consider how the lack of visual references in the textual form of the novel works to support this sense of horror. In a comparative analysis, I will consider how each novel, by virtue of its historical and geographical context, imagines the relationship between the inside and the outside of the pregnant body in terms of where the potential danger is situated and how it moves through the body. Finally, I will consider how these novels, and the broader trend of horror-depictions of pregnancy and childbirth imagine and negotiate the choice to have children or not to have children in our contemporary society as well as the gendered work of gestation, childbirth, and care.

The rewriting of ancient myths has a profound historical lineage. Authors from antiquity onwards transformed and supplemented mythical narratives, offering their own variations on mythical characters. These narratives predominantly bore a masculine imprint, both in terms of the authors' gender and the worldviews they espoused. However, in the 20th century, with emergence of second wave of feminism, drastic changes took place.

Women authors started to focus on rewriting myths to rehabilitate women, liberating them from the constraints of a male-dominated world and allowing them to narrate their stories and experiences from their point of view. As a result, masculine perspectives and ideas about women were reimagined, also constructing the modern woman and her attitudes towards the mythical situation.

This paper will examine the character of Clytemnestra, known already from Homer's epics as the unfaithful wife and husband`s murderer, but later in reception reimagined primarily as the mother who has lost her children due to a man`s ambition and eventually met her demise at the hands of her own son.

Contemporary literature of the 21st century continues to engage in the rewriting of ancient myths. Framed within the purview of feminism, this paper offers an analysis of the 2023 novel “Clytemnestra” by Costanza Casati (1995– ), scrutinizing the evolving portrayal of Clytemnestra's character. It explores the nuances of her image, evaluating the extent to which it departs from or aligns with antiquity's depictions, specifically how Clytemnestra`s role as a mother is reconceptualized in 21st-century feminism.

The presentation is based on the research which attempts to combine the studies of motherhood and literary urban studies (Finch 2021: Literary Urban Studies and How to Practice It, Routledge; Ameel 2022: The Routledge Companion to Literary Urban Studies) for to investigate how urban space and places participate in the representation of motherhood in contemporary Lithuanian women's poetry, in the work of Lina Buivydavičiūtė, Jurgita Jasponytė, and Giedrė Kazlauskaitė.

Feminist literary criticism raised the issue of a city in women’s writing in 1980-ies (e.g., Squier 1984: Women Writers and the City, The Un. of Tennessee Press) and criticized a city as "a place made by men and for men" (Sizemore 1992: "Masculine and Feminin Cities", in: Frontiers: A Journal for Women Studies, vol. 13). However, the question of motherhood was not considered in this context, though the issues of maternity in relation to a city changes the perception of urban space much more radically than in women's literature in general. The mother's relationship with a city is passed through the filter of the child's interests which limit, separate, isolate her from usual everyday communication. Texts which reflect mothering testify to the emergence of new urban practices or their regimes, dictated by the daily routines of mothers. The purpose of the paper is to draw the poetic map of Vilnius in regard to the issues of motherhood and to show the new meanings of urban space which evolve from this perspective.

This paper analyzes and discusses the career narratives of skilled migrant mothers. The sample consists of highly educated married women who have children and are in dual career relationships (that is, both partners in the relationship work in paid employment). Most of the women whose narratives are shared in this paper are from WEIRD (White, English-Speaking, Industrialised, Rich, Democracies) countries and all of them are now living in a WEIRD country (either the Republic of Ireland or the United States of America) and are native or fluent English speakers. While their professional roles and individual stories vary, they share a conflicting subjectivity in light of their parallel and blended role identities resulting in deep internal reflections and related agential actions that serve to facilitate their renegotiation of their careers. Career, in this paper, refers to the whole-life understanding of career which includes the work and non-work experiences that impact upon one’s work-related decision-making. The aim and research objective of this paper is to explore the lived agential behaviors and cognitive self-negotiations that these women internalize to combine working careers and motherhood in a foreign culture. Specifically, the research question asks, how do women rationalize and behave agentially when combining working careers and motherhood in a foreign culture? In keeping with Foucault’s description of problematization, the paper problematizes practices that confer conceptualizations of good mother/good worker, with the focus is on the subjective moral reflections of the women in the sample.

This paper will present data of quantitative and qualitative research about mothers’ experiences to reconcile family duties and work in Lithuania. Much of research on work-life balance is focused on analysis of opportunities and conflicts faced by mothers to build professional career and care for their children. In this presentation I suggest applying the feminist theoretical frame on silencing discourses which help to disclose, as Liisa Husu, described “non-events’ practices in the work place. By applying this approach, the analysis of individual interviews of mothers reveals the institutional disempowering factors for women to exercise work-life balance. The targeted survey of young mothers, who recently returned to the work place after the child-care leave, shows the context that they face. The employers are reluctant to respond to women’s needs to balance work and care duties, ignore the professional needs of the mothers, and disregard the opportunities for promotion of the young mothers. Individual interviews with the mothers conducted in 2023, and focus groups in 2020 suggest in depth inquiry into organizational structural factors (leadership, organizational hierarchies, information and communication with employees) and beliefs system (attitudes, gender stereotypes). As a result, it shows the dynamics of power relations, disbalance and patriarchal care pattern that negatively affect young working mothers to reconcile work and child-care duties. Data analysis suggests that either they are stuck in the same position for years or they look for other employment opportunities to fulfill their professional aspirations

In Germany, the prevalent employment model, often referred to as the 'career-killer,' remains part-time work despite its well-documented adverse effects on career progression, pension contributions, and the subsequent risk of later-life poverty. Approximately 66 percent of working mothers opt for part-time, ranking second among the EU-27 member states. Beyond variations based on age and children, significant disparities arise from various sociodemographic factors. While extensive statistical data is available on maternal employment, qualitative research has yielded limited insights as why to mothers choose particular employment models and how these choices intersect with family policy regulations. This contribution is a subset of a comprehensive doctoral research project focusing on maternal educational aspirations. It draws upon a sample of 17 narrative interviews, comprising eight mothers born in Germany and nine born abroad. The results of the interviews show that the choice of an employment model is heavily influenced by factors like income, household structure, language skills, and cultural norms. Some mothers perceive part-time and mini-job options as a privilege, since financial security is provided by their partner. In contrast, single mothers may see part-time work as their only viable option. Moreover, factors like language skills and education are key to determining the availability of choices in the first place. Depending on cultural influences, access to education can be hindered for women, significantly limiting employment opportunities. In sum, mothers perceive part-time employment based on their life circumstances: as a privilege, a necessity, or even a yet-unachieved ambition.

Modern welfare states ensure protection against the mother's inability to work due to childbirth. The measures of welfare states have different designs based on the criterion of entitlement, benefit adequacy, and duration of the payment of benefits in different countries. The different legal regulation is on the work-family responsibilities reconciliation as well. This research aims to analyze social policy's capacities to protect mothers after childbirth in Lithuania. The research is based on compensatory welfare and social investment perspectives (Gregory,2018; Alcock, 2016; Hemerick, 2017; Baldock et al., 2012). For the implementation of the aim of the research, the analysis of actual versions of legislation is provided. The legal measures are analyzed according to compensatory and social investment dimensions. Eurostat, Lithuanian statistics, and data on State Social insurance in Lithuania during the last five years are analyzed to identify how compensatory welfare reduces family and children poverty. The data from qualitative research implemented (19 participants) in 2020 are presented for evaluation of parental leave and work reconciliation, and the data from qualitative research implemented in 2018 (26 participants) are presented to know the role of the state and employer in supporting childcare and work responsibilities.

The language of motherhood has been formed by the institutional public discourse and by its construction of how mothers are expected to behave, which social values they should adhere to, and which duties and responsibilities are assigned to them. This has resulted in constructing mothers as primary caretakers who sacrifice their womanhood for the sake of being a perfect mother. With the spread of social networking, mothers have created online communities in which they do not only share mothering tricks and tips, but also construct the mother as a social actor with a distinctive social dialect. The objective of this paper is to analyze the sociolect of Czech mothers who are active on the Czech Facebook group called Protivný sprostý matky (Nasty mean mothers) that was created in January 2022 as a Facebook profile of a successful TV show broadcast on the online platform of the Czech Public TV. Framed by the feminist discourse analysis, the qualitative research of the posts and comments collected on this platform will discuss how Czech mothers and their choice of language related to mothering help to construct the identity of a mother in the Czech digital environment. It will search for how they refer to their maternal identity, how they negotiate their caretaking role and how they express their doubts and anxieties about failing the societal expectations of being a good mother.

The experiences of contemporary women/mothers conform to varying degrees to the pattern of behaviour expected by society. Their personal experiences are diverse and show the many faces of motherhood. In recent years, this problem has begun to be analysed by the social sciences (e.g. Parker 1995, Hays 1996, Messer 2013, Donath 2017, Garncarek 2019, 2020, 2022, Mustosmäki A., Sihto T. 2022, et al.), it is also taken up by contemporary cinema.

The presentation will attempt to show 'cinematic reflections' of contemporary difficult motherhood, which has recently been increasingly noticed and portrayed by Western cinema. The author of the presentation seeks to answer the question - how do selected films violate and deconstruct the patriarchal gender order in relation to motherhood (including essentialisation, naturalisation and idealisation of motherhood)? The speech will present the results of a qualitative analysis of selected film images: We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011), Daughter (2021). The theoretical basis of the conducted research was the gender approach in social research and T. Scheff's concept of guilt and shame.

The analysis of the material shows that motherhood is not a woman's natural vocation, nor is it a role that is carried out unreflectively, although such a message is served to women from an early age. The images analysed here revealed numerous differences between what society expects of mothers and the inner (not always realised) needs of women-mothers. They show mothers who regret motherhood and deconstruct the patriarchal gender order in relation to motherhood.

Lucy Fischer’s 1996 work Cinematernity sought to ‘recall the importance of the maternal register within cinematic discourse’ (31), most urgently addressing the need to liberate filmic representations of motherhood from the ‘confines of melodrama’ (6) to which they had traditionally been bound. No truer could this be the case for Québec’s film industry following the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, when media depicting the motherhood so central to understandings of a newly secular, provincial-as-national identity transformed from being merely melodramatic to, instead, experimental; imbued with radical feminism; and/or empowered by documentary approaches. As Québec emerged from its great darkness, so, too did its filmmakers: they adopted new genres to celebrate the polyvalence of maternity, drawing on the lived experiences of ambivalence, sexuality, and abandonment to humanise the women so burdened with the duty to build a national ideal – to no longer be the ‘saintly guardians of the home and family’ (Ule & Rener 1997: 231) who would formerly be labelled as melodramatic had they dared rebel. This paper examines the spaces and times occupied by mothers in three Québec films – De mère en fille (dir. Anne Claire Poirier, 1968), Les bons débarras (dir. Francis Mankiewicz, 1980), and Hommes à louer (dir. Rodrigue Jean, 2008) – to interrogate how the evolution of genre in screening motherhood in Québec fundamentally reimagined how national identity was constructed in the latter half of the 20^th century, whilst reflecting on the role mothers may play in shaping future understandings of the province.

In this paper, I explore transgressive, unsettled, and conflicted images of motherhood in domestic noir fiction. I argue that domestic noir has the capacity to represent complex female psychology by avoiding reductive character tropes such as the ‘villain’, and refuting what academic Eva Burke calls the ‘social obligation of female likeability’.

The image of a ‘bad’ mother remains culturally challenging unless she is perceived as belonging to an underprivileged socio-economic demographic – or mad. In this way, bad mothers become ‘othered’ and judged according to familiar social and cultural ideas. Focusing on the relationship between ‘madness’ and badness, I will ask; why should complex female psychology and emotions, including anger and aggressivity, be continually framed as ‘mad’, bad and dangerous, and what does this mean for fictional representations of motherhood?

Contemporary domestic noir fiction foregrounds what novelist Harriet Lane calls the ‘everyday horrors’ of dysfunctional ordinary life. These novels prioritise the potentially powerful figure of the antiheroine, often in the form of the unreliable, unlikeable narrator. Problems arise when this character is portrayed as unstable or psychopathological, as in bestsellers Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train, both of which explore ideas about madness in relation to motherhood. By contrast, novels including Her and Alys Always by Harriet Lane, What We Did by Christabel Kent, A Good Enough Mother by Bev Thomas, and Little Darlings by Melanie Golding explore the troubled psychologies of motherhood in female characters who are navigating moral and ethical challenges, as opposed to ‘madness’.

In her novel Lo spazio bianco (The White Space, 2008), Italian author Valeria Parrella tells the story of a new mother and of her tragic wait while her newborn child is in NICU, suspended between life and death. Parrella describes this liminal space as a ‘white space’, where the liminality is not just between the child’s survival and his probable death, but also between two identities: that of the woman before pregnancy and delivery, and that of the mother she is going to become. This shift in identity is problematic: when will the main character become a mother? Will she lose that status if the child passes away? And, most importantly, what happens to the woman and her perception of self while she is relegated in the ‘white space’? Similar questions have been addressed by Irish author Emilie Pine, both in some of the essays published in Notes to Self (2018) and in the novel Ruth and Pen (2022). By comparing the works by Parrella and Pine and their different representation of motherhood, and with the support of psychoanalytic literary theory, this paper explores the way in which female writers deal with the representation of self in relation to motherhood, and the way in which death (or the hypothesis of death) shapes it.

Culturally, new mothers are trained to treat "baby blues" and tiredness as part of 'becoming-mother'. When their physiological distress is interpreted as symptomatic of a mental disorder—most commonly as postpartum depression (PPD)—the focus often turns to women's bodies and not the social circumstances. Just as mental illnesses are treated as brain disorders—as if chemical imbalance alone can account for psychological distress—symptoms of post-natal depression in new mothers are regarded as a 'personal' problem. By relying solely on scientific explication and erasing women's voices from the scientific archive, the biomedical community inflicts 'epistemic injustice' (following Miranda Fricker) on women, calling into question their role as knowers of their bodies. By attending to the objective body, and not taking into account the lived body, such detached forms of knowledge-making fuel stereotypes about motherhood and the challenges associated with it, both within the medical community and society at large. Conversely, narratives of motherhood, written by new mothers in the first-person register, act as counter-narratives to the medical narrative. To show this, I will examine Teresa Wong's Dear Scarlet, a graphic memoir about postpartum depression. I wish to suggest that Wong's memoir functions as an archive of her affective, emotional and embodied experience of motherhood, in which she chronicles her struggle against cultural narratives and metaphors of a 'good mother'. By locating the text within the critical medical humanities, Wong's memoir can be seen as laying a critique against Western biomedicine by foregrounding questions related to authority, caregiving, medical ethics and gendered violence.

Historical fiction has long been a medium for feminist re-imaginings of women’s history. In Sweden, writers such as Kerstin Ekman and Sara Lidman have written about historical events from a female perspective, and gained a large following as well as critical acclaim for their work. These writers are well known and present in feminist research (Schottenius 1992, Bränström Öhman 2008, Brantly 2017, Grahn 2022). Other works of historical fiction, such as historical romance and other kinds of popular fiction, have gained less academic attention. However, it is one of the major ways in which women interact with the historical past (de Groot 2016).

This paper will explore maternal narratives in the works of Alice Lyttkens (1897—1991), an author who once was one of the most read in Sweden (Waern 1983, Heggestad 2009), but who is now largely forgotten. She wrote several book series of historical novels, mainly taking place during the 16^th and 17^th centuries. They all center around one or a few female characters, often in the same family. The study will comprise of quantitative analysis of six series of novels, focusing on a few motifs such as pregnancy, childbirth, and inheritance. What kind of historical past is Lyttkens depicting? How is motherhood presented, and how is it connected to women’s historical situation? Examining these texts together provides an insight to the use and representation of women’s history in popular fiction, spanning from the 1940s to the 1980s.