Reconceiving Citizenship: The Challenge of Mothers as Political Activists

Introduction: Mothers, Politics, and the Citizenship Question

In this significant 2000 paper published in Feminist Theory, Australian sociologist Kerreen Reiger tackles one of feminism’s most vexing questions: how to theorize the political activism of mothers in ways that neither essentialize maternal identity nor dismiss the distinctive contributions of mothers’ movements to democratic participation. Drawing on her extensive involvement with the Maternity Coalition and her scholarship on childbirth politics, Reiger argues that mothers organizing around maternity care issues offer a powerful challenge to traditional liberal conceptions of citizenship.

The paper emerges at a crucial moment in feminist theory, when debates about difference, identity, and citizenship were particularly intense. Against the backdrop of 1990s “politics of difference,” Reiger’s work intervenes in longstanding tensions between mainstream feminism’s emphasis on women’s equality in the public sphere and maternal feminists’ insistence on the political significance of care, embodiment, and reproductive experiences.

The Problem of Maternal Activism in Feminist Theory

Reiger begins by acknowledging the ambivalent relationship between the women’s movement and mothers’ organizations. Mainstream second-wave feminism often viewed maternal identity with suspicion, seeing it as a potential trap that confined women to traditional gender roles and the private sphere. The feminist slogan “the personal is political” aimed to expose how domestic arrangements served patriarchal interests, but sometimes this critique extended to dismissing mothers’ own political organizing around maternity issues.

This ambivalence created a paradox: while feminist theory championed women’s political participation, it sometimes failed to recognize mothers’ activism—particularly around childbirth, breastfeeding, and childcare—as legitimately feminist or political. Maternal activism was seen as too focused on “women’s issues” in ways that reinforced gender essentialism rather than challenging it.

Reiger argues that this dismissal reflects limitations in how citizenship itself has been conceptualized. Traditional liberal citizenship theory assumes an autonomous, rational individual free from bodily needs and care responsibilities—a model that implicitly excludes the maternal body and care relations. If citizenship is understood solely through participation in formal political institutions and market relations, then mothers’ organizing around embodied experiences and care work appears peripheral to “real” politics.

Australian Maternity Reform Movements as Case Study

Reiger grounds her theoretical arguments in the concrete experience of Australian maternity reform movements, particularly the Maternity Coalition, which she helped found. These movements emerged in response to the increasing medicalization of childbirth in post-war decades, when hospitals became the dominant site for birth and medical professionals consolidated control over maternity care.

Mothers organized to challenge this medicalization, advocating for greater autonomy in birth decisions, access to midwifery care, family-centered birth practices, and humanized hospital policies. This activism took various forms: consumer advocacy groups, childbirth education organizations, breastfeeding support networks, and policy reform campaigns. While often dismissed as “single-issue” politics or mere consumer advocacy, Reiger argues these movements enacted sophisticated forms of democratic participation that challenged medical authority, institutional power, and gendered divisions between public and private.

What makes this activism theoretically significant is how it mobilizes maternal experience and identity while simultaneously making broader claims about healthcare rights, bodily autonomy, community participation, and democratic accountability. Mothers claimed authority not despite their maternal status but through it, insisting that embodied knowledge of pregnancy, birth, and infant care provided valid grounds for challenging expert authority and demanding institutional change.

Reconceiving Citizenship: From Liberal Individualism to Relational Care

The heart of Reiger’s argument is that maternal activism requires reconceiving citizenship itself. Traditional liberal citizenship rests on several problematic assumptions:

The Abstract Individual: Liberal theory posits citizens as autonomous individuals abstracted from particular bodies, relationships, and contexts. This model implicitly assumes the masculine subject unencumbered by pregnancy, childbirth, or primary care responsibilities.

Public/Private Divide: Citizenship is understood primarily through participation in the public sphere—voting, political deliberation, market activity—while care work and domestic life are relegated to the private sphere and excluded from political consideration.

Rights-Based Framework: Liberal citizenship emphasizes individual rights and freedoms, often neglecting questions of care, interdependence, and collective responsibility.

Rational Deliberation: Political participation is imagined as rational dialogue among equals, minimizing the role of embodied experience, emotion, and situated knowledge.

Against this model, maternal activism suggests an alternative conception of citizenship grounded in:

Embodied Experience: Maternal activists claim political authority through embodied knowledge of pregnancy, birth, and caregiving. Rather than transcending bodily particularity, they insist embodied experience provides crucial insights for democratic deliberation about healthcare, social policy, and community well-being.

Care Relations: Citizenship is reconceived as fundamentally relational, emerging through care relationships and responsibilities rather than abstract individualism. The interdependence of mother and infant, the networks of support surrounding childbirth, and the collective dimensions of reproduction all challenge atomistic models of political subjectivity.

Community Participation: Maternal activism emphasizes direct participation in institutions and policies affecting mothers and children—hospitals, health services, childcare centers. This enacts citizenship as engaged community membership rather than distant voting or market consumption.

Situated Knowledge: Rather than universal rationality, maternal activists validate situated knowledge arising from specific experiences and social locations. This epistemological stance challenges hierarchies between expert and lay knowledge, professional and maternal authority.

The Politics of Care and Democratic Participation

Reiger’s analysis connects to broader feminist theorizing about care ethics and its implications for political theory. Feminist care ethicists like Joan Tronto and Virginia Held have argued that care—understood as attentiveness to needs, responsiveness to vulnerability, and responsibility for dependent others—should be central to political theory rather than peripheral to it.

Maternal activism exemplifies what care-centered citizenship might look like in practice. When mothers organize around maternity care quality, they make care relations visible as political matters requiring collective deliberation and institutional accountability. They challenge the relegation of care to the private sphere and demand public recognition of care work’s social necessity.

This has profound implications for democracy. If care is recognized as politically significant, then those who perform care work—disproportionately women and marginalized communities—must be included as full participants in decisions about care provision, resource allocation, and social priorities. Democratic institutions must be restructured to accommodate care responsibilities rather than assuming citizens without dependents.

Reiger’s Australian case studies show how maternal activists developed innovative forms of democratic participation: consumer representation in hospital policy-making, peer education networks, community-based advocacy, and collaborative relationships with sympathetic health professionals. These practices enacted participatory democracy that bridged professional-lay divides and empowered mothers as knowledgeable citizens.

Embodiment, Authority, and Medical Power

A crucial dimension of Reiger’s analysis concerns how maternal activism challenges medical authority and expert power. The medicalization of childbirth represented not just technical change but a shift in authority—from women and traditional birth attendants to male physicians and hospital institutions. This involved defining pregnancy and birth as medical conditions requiring expert management rather than normal life events within women’s autonomous control.

Maternal activists contested this medicalization by asserting alternative forms of authority grounded in embodied experience. Women’s knowledge of their own bodies, their lived experience of birth, and their practical wisdom about infant care were claimed as valid bases for challenging medical protocols and demanding care alternatives.

This epistemological challenge to medical expertise has broader significance for citizenship theory. It contests the assumption that valid political participation requires technical expertise or professional credentials. Instead, experiential knowledge—particularly embodied knowledge historically dismissed as merely subjective or anecdotal—is validated as democratically relevant.

Reiger is careful to distinguish this position from anti-intellectual populism or rejection of expertise. Maternal activists often allied with sympathetic midwives, supportive physicians, and feminist health researchers. The point was not to replace expertise with pure experience but to challenge hierarchical relationships between expert and lay knowledge, insisting on dialogue rather than unilateral professional authority.

Gender, Essentialism, and Strategic Maternal Identity

One challenge facing Reiger’s argument concerns essentialism: does celebrating maternal activism risk reinforcing biological determinism or traditional gender roles? This tension runs throughout feminist debates about motherhood and care.

Reiger addresses this by distinguishing strategic deployment of maternal identity from essentialist claims about women’s nature. Maternal activists mobilized maternal identity for political purposes—to claim authority, build solidarity, and justify participation—without necessarily endorsing biological determinism. They used the socially recognized category “mother” to make political claims while potentially transforming what motherhood means.

This strategic essentialism (to use Gayatri Spivak’s term) allows marginalized groups to organize around shared identity while remaining critical of how that identity is socially constructed. Mothers could claim “we know about birth because we give birth” while simultaneously challenging how maternity has been culturally defined and institutionally managed.

However, this strategy remains fraught. Maternal activism risks reinforcing gender essentialism if it suggests only mothers can speak about birth or that maternal identity automatically generates feminist consciousness. It may also exclude non-mothers, fathers, and those whose maternal experiences don’t fit normative patterns.

Reiger acknowledges these tensions without fully resolving them, suggesting they reflect real dilemmas in identity-based organizing rather than mere theoretical confusion. The question becomes how to mobilize maternal identity politically while remaining critical of essentialist meanings attached to motherhood.

Class, Race, and the Limits of Maternal Citizenship

While Reiger’s analysis offers important insights, it faces limitations regarding intersectionality and power differences among mothers. The Australian maternity reform movements she describes were predominantly white, middle-class organizations. Their demands for birth autonomy, midwifery care, and family-centered practices reflected particular class and cultural positions.

For working-class mothers, immigrant mothers, and Indigenous mothers, relationships to medical institutions and maternity care systems differ significantly. Access to basic maternal health services, rather than choice among care options, may be the pressing concern. Cultural practices around birth and childcare may not align with white middle-class natural childbirth ideologies.

Additionally, maternal citizenship claims might have different meanings for mothers whose citizenship is literally precarious—undocumented immigrants, refugees, Indigenous peoples whose sovereignty is unrecognized. The assumption of citizenship status itself requires interrogation.

Reiger’s framework would benefit from more attention to how race, class, colonialism, and migration shape both maternal experiences and citizenship claims. Maternal activism takes diverse forms depending on social location, and reconceiving citizenship must account for this diversity.

Implications for Feminist Political Theory

Reiger’s work makes several important contributions to feminist political theory. First, it demonstrates concretely how care-centered citizenship might be enacted through mothers’ political organizing. Rather than treating care ethics as abstract philosophy, Reiger shows how care concerns motivate real political mobilization and institutional change.

Second, it challenges feminist theory to take maternal activism seriously rather than dismissing it as insufficiently radical or reinforcing traditional gender roles. Recognizing mothers’ organizing as feminist politics requires expanding understandings of what counts as political struggle.

Third, it contributes to reconceptualizing citizenship itself, moving beyond liberal individualism toward models that recognize embodiment, care relations, and community participation as central to democratic life. This has implications for political theory generally, not just feminist theory.

Finally, it offers methodological insights about theorizing from practice. Reiger’s analysis emerges from engaged participation in the movements she studies, combining activist involvement with scholarly reflection. This methodology models how feminist theory can remain grounded in women’s lived experiences and political struggles.

Contemporary Relevance and Ongoing Debates

More than two decades after publication, Reiger’s arguments remain highly relevant. Maternal activism continues globally, from movements for birth justice and midwifery access to campaigns against obstetric violence and for paid family leave. The COVID-19 pandemic starkly revealed care work’s social necessity and the failures of systems that ignore care responsibilities.

Contemporary maternal activism increasingly centers intersectionality and racial justice. Black Maternal Health movements expose how racism produces maternal mortality disparities and demand healthcare transformation. Reproductive justice frameworks developed by women of color connect maternal health to broader questions of bodily autonomy, economic security, and community well-being.

The rise of social media has transformed maternal organizing, creating new spaces for mothers to share experiences, challenge medical authority, and build political networks. Online maternal activism can both expand participation beyond traditional organizations and risk reinforcing problematic aspects of intensive mothering ideologies.

Debates about surrogacy, assisted reproduction, and trans parenthood also complicate maternal citizenship claims. Who counts as a mother? How do diverse paths to parenthood shape relationships to care, embodiment, and political identity? These questions extend and challenge Reiger’s framework.

Care, Citizenship, and Democratic Futures

Reiger’s work points toward broader questions about democracy and social organization. If care is recognized as politically central rather than private matter, what institutional changes follow? How should healthcare, education, childcare, and social services be governed to reflect care’s importance? What would genuinely care-responsive democracy look like?

These questions extend beyond maternal activism to all care work—elder care, disability care, community care. They challenge not just citizenship theory but economic systems that depend on unpaid care labor while refusing to value it. Feminist arguments about care’s political significance ultimately demand transforming how we organize social reproduction and distribute care responsibilities.

Reiger’s emphasis on participatory democracy and community involvement offers one vision: care institutions governed through meaningful participation by care recipients and care workers, not just professional managers or distant bureaucrats. This would require democratizing healthcare, education, and social services in ways that empower those most affected by institutional decisions.

Conclusion: Toward Inclusive, Embodied Citizenship

“Reconceiving Citizenship: The Challenge of Mothers as Political Activists” makes a compelling case that maternal activism offers crucial insights for democratic theory and practice. By organizing around embodied experience, care relationships, and community participation, mothers challenge narrow liberal conceptions of citizenship and enact alternatives grounded in care ethics and participatory democracy.

Reiger demonstrates that taking mothers’ political organizing seriously requires reconceptualizing citizenship itself—moving from abstract individualism to recognition of embodiment, from public/private division to care’s political significance, from expert authority to situated knowledge. This reconception benefits not just mothers but all citizens, as it acknowledges the care relations and bodily vulnerabilities that characterize human existence.

The paper’s contributions extend beyond motherhood studies to feminist political theory broadly. It shows how identity-based organizing, while fraught with essentialist risks, can challenge exclusionary political institutions and generate new models of democratic participation. It demonstrates how attending to marginalized groups’ activism—in this case, mothers organizing around maternity care—can reveal limitations in mainstream political theory and point toward more inclusive alternatives.

For contemporary feminism navigating questions of care, embodiment, and political participation, Reiger’s work remains essential. It reminds us that reconceiving citizenship is not just theoretical exercise but practical political project, enacted through collective organizing around care, health, and community well-being. Maternal activism becomes not peripheral to feminist politics but exemplary of what care-centered democracy might look like—a vision urgently needed as we confront care crises, healthcare failures, and the ongoing devaluation of care work in contemporary societies.