Confronting Postmaternal Thinking

Book excerpt: Public discourse maintains a deep cultural anxiety around expressions of maternalism and the application of maternal values to the society as a whole. In a policy context, postmaternalism is the priority given to women's claims as employees over their political claims as mothers. Julie Stephens moves beyond these policy definitions and advances a notion of postmaternal thinking to signal this growing unease with maternal forms of subjectivity and maternalist perspectives. In defining the contours of postmaternal thought, she details the elaborate processes of cultural forgetting that go hand.