Contextualising Australian mothering and motherhood

While mothers, ideas about motherhood and practices of mothering have existed in every time period and culture, maternal studies as a distinct field has only emerged in the past few decades, symptomatic of the ways in which mothers are so often the taken-for-granted. This chapter charts the historical context within which Australian women have experienced mothering over the past century, explaining that alongside profound changes, significant continuities persist. Governments have consistently sought to use financial levers such as welfare payments and taxation policies to influence women’s choices in relation to fertility and employment; women’s reproductive decisions have continued to be constrained by moral judgements and cultural discourses; and the ‘optimal’ mother has been persistently defined as married, white, middle-class and heterosexual. Recording and interrogating these historical trends, a rich body of maternal studies literature has emerged at the interstices of a range of disciplines including anthropology, education, history, literary analysis, psychoanalysis, public policy, sociology and history. Chapter 1 outlines the contributions that each chapter in this volume makes to Australian maternal studies and teases out a unifying framework for the collection, drawing upon maternal and matricentric feminisms.