Mother State by Helen Charman; What Are Children For? by Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman review – the body political

“Motherhood is a political state,” declares the poet and Cambridge academic Helen Charman at the beginning of Mother State, her provocative and wide-ranging study of “motherhood” in all its iterations, and its relationship to the wider social context in Britain and Northern Ireland over the past 50 years. “Nurture, care, the creation of human life… have more to do with power, status and the distribution of resources, both by mothers and for them, than we like to admit.” It’s a version of “the personal is political” slogan beloved of second-wave feminism, which she dissects here before going on to examine the multiple ways in which mothers have collectively organised in support of broader political causes that affect the social structures within which they are raising children.

She revisits the heyday of the 1980s women’s peace camps at Greenham Common, and shows that, even at the time, feminists were arguing over the centring of maternal anxiety as a driver for anti-nuclear activism. Another chapter, titled Mother Ireland, looks at the history of women’s involvement in Northern Irish political struggles since the 1970s, on either side of the divide, and how mothers, as both combatants and peacemakers, were also battling “the gendered expectations of their own communities”.

The purpose of acknowledging and questioning the inherently political nature of motherhood, which encompasses the physical acts of conception, gestation and birth as well as the domestic labour of child-rearing, is to take “the first concrete step towards liberating mothers from their current position, where so much is expected of them and so little provided”. This is obviously not, as Charman comprehensively demonstrates, a new aim; disputes over the enactment of motherhood and its relation to the individual, family and community, as well as to patriarchal and capitalist systems, have always been at the heart of feminist thought, and intrinsic to policymaking across the period covered by the book.

It’s no coincidence that this era also maps the rise and fall of the British welfare state, and in particular the NHS; “the maternal body as a symbol, after all, is not so different from the most naively fantastical idea of a welfare system”, Charman writes. It’s a symbol that’s close to home: the book opens with the author caring for her own mother after a botched knee operation that was meant to repair the damage incurred over four decades working as a physiotherapist for the NHS. The care-giving state has let her mother down, and in a coda, Charman expresses concern that she too has let her mother down by not becoming a biological mother herself: “In theory, I’d like to give her a baby – a grandchild. She wants one, for sure.” Part of her argument throughout has been to show the many ways in which the work of “mothering” is not limited to biological reproduction, and she asks: “Hasn’t her mothering of me… been repurposed in my own relationships with the babies in my life?”

Mother State is a lively, engaging and significant overview of recent history, scholarly in tone, though not forbiddingly so (Charman references Buffy the Vampire Slayer alongside Judith Butler), even if its conclusions remain – by her own admission – somewhat vague, leaving her to fall back on rhetorical questions dense with metaphor: “Can we turn the psychic echo of the baby crying in the nursery into a sound that knits us together?”

The ambivalence over biological motherhood among many millennial women that Charman touches on is at the heart of What Are Children For?, co-authored by US journalists Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman and prompted by their frequent conversations on their own uncertainty. They, too, acknowledge the explicitly political nature of the issue; since the repeal of Roe v Wade, the lack of access to safe abortion in many US states means that pregnancy is potentially a life-threatening condition, creating a further deterrent on top of the obvious material factors of cost-of-living and career disruption. They are also conscious that the topic of declining fertility rates “has been so thoroughly co-opted by the far right” that many feminists are loath to tackle it, choosing instead to see falling birthrates as a sign of positive social change.

Wiseman writes candidly in her introduction about the difficulty of reconciling the personal and political: “When it came to my own so-called family planning, I didn’t feel like an agent of the march of history, or its victim – I felt confused.” Drawing on interviews with women across the US, as well as contemporary literature, reportage and psychoanalysis, Berg and Wiseman attempt to map motherhood on to a bigger picture, though the dominant issue here is the climate crisis. This, too, is fraught with complexity; while women who choose to prioritise their careers over having children are routinely damned as selfish, citing environmental concerns provides a morally acceptable cloak for ambivalence.

Though both authors began their exploration in a state of childless uncertainty, by the end of the book Berg has a daughter and Wiseman is going through IVF. But as Berg writes in her conclusion, perhaps uncertainty is necessarily intrinsic to the business of motherhood: “To have children is to allow yourself to stand in a relationship whose essence is not determined by the benefits it confers or the prices it exacts.”

So many of the issues covered in both these books were subjects of fierce debate when I became a mother 22 years ago. The fact that women are still fighting the same battles is a wearying reminder of how contingent any victories have been, and how essential it is to keep expanding these conversations because, as all the writers point out, finding better solutions should not be the sole responsibility of women.

• Mother State: A Political History of Motherhood by Helen Charman is published by Allen Lane (£30). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

• What Are Children For? On Ambivalence and Choice by Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman is published by Oneworld (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply