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From mail-order robot moms, to trans moms, to poet moms, the archival picks below put the varied lives of mothers front and center, asking whether chestfeeding is “exhausting servitude” (as Simone de Beauvoir put it) and if stay-at-home moms should be given wages.
Today’s reading list also recognizes those women who wish they could be mothers but who have reproductive health issues that prevent them from conceiving. In the lead essay from our summer 2018 forum Once and Future Feminist, Merve Emre traces the history of assisted reproduction from the first artificial womb to contemporary IVF treatments, asking whether everyone with a uterus could be emancipated by such technologies and critiquing our obsession with the “natural.”
Fiction
When bees around the world exhibit a frightening new behavior, a researcher takes comfort in a familiar hive. Short Story
Fiction
Balancing work-life pressures is often considered the holy grail, but men can still opt out of these policies. To move the needle on gender inequality, the state needs to take more coercive action.
Fiction
Once I learned of the existence of mothers, I decided to order one for myself.
A mother is a mother, regardless of the latest information regarding her children.
Stay-at-home mothering is bad for mothers, their kids, and women’s equality.
Elisabether Badinter blames "naturalism" for all-consuming motherhood, but she leaves the real culprits off the hook.
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Philosopher William MacAskill contends that humanity’s long-term survival matters more than preventing short-term suffering and death. His arguments are shaky.
In her new book, Danish poet Olga Ravn writes with open love, pity, and compassion for her strange yet familiar creations.
Draconian individual punishment distracts from systemic change and reinforces the cruelest and most racist system of incarceration on the planet.
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