Up from the archives: Motherhood and Feminism Revisited, Brooklyn Donnelly thinks with Davies and Welch, 1986

The Davies and Welch article ‘Motherhood and Feminism: Are They Compatible? The Ambivalence of Mothering’ (1986) concludes that the onset of feelings of ambivalence is brought on not by motherhood itself, but by motherhood as it exists in connection to implicit beliefs about womanhood and motherhood, thereby implicitly calling for an untangling of motherhood from womanhood, as well as a line of feminist thought that acknowledges these distinctive troubles. In this article, I draw on the themes of the Davies and Welch article using the reproductive justice framework with the help of some contemporary research to justify the continuing relevance of the original work and to propose a new way of thinking about the original work.