Impossible motherhood: a health humanities reading of two monologues for women

Separated by a gap of 27 years, Anna Reynold’s Jordan (1992) and Gary Owen’s Iphigenia in Splott (2015) offer, on the surface, dramaturgically similar critiques of the impact of poverty on motherhood. Both plays are critically acclaimed monologues for women, which describe the death of a baby following inadequate interventions from health and/or social care services. This article examines the different theatrical contexts for these plays and offers a situated reading of the representation of maternal crisis in circumstances of social deprivation. When considered in parallel, Jordan and Iphigenia in Splott reveal the persistent vulnerability faced by low-income mothers and would-be mothers under conditions of Thatcherite and austerity governing. In the context of the health humanities, they reveal how austerity government shapes the lives of women through the scarcity of adequate maternal health and social care services. By placing Owen’s play in dialogue with the 1990s feminist monologue, I suggest that Owen posits a dramaturgical through-line between post-2008 austerity policies and the socio-political conditions that concerned second wave feminists. Iphigenia in Splott highlights the post-2008 crisis of care and demonstrates its continuity with forms of social marginalisation, housing precarity and ‘hollowing out’ introduced under Thatcher and thematised two decades earlier in Jordan .