Introduction

This chapter1 outlines the theoretical framework for the book. My starting point is Patricia Hill Collins’ definition of black mothering as centring economic provisioning, othermothering and politicized mothering. The marginalization of this definition of mothering means that the maternal continues to be neglected in discussions of labour organizing and worker conscientization despite its long-established significance as a space of collective classed, gendered and racialized politicization. The consequences of this neglect are that the ties between how women have organized as mothers and as workers continue to be missed; these connections only appear once we start our analysis from the history of community organizing among working-class, migrant and racialized minority mothers. In turn, this means that the nursery needs to be foregrounded as a site of waged labour for women whose own mothering has historically been erased or subject to over-regulation. By connecting the community activism of women of colour and working-class mothers with childcare workers’ labour movements, I suggest how the concept of maternal worker addresses these limitations.

First, I outline how a social reproduction lens makes visible the devaluation of the unwaged maternal labour of lower-class and racialized minority mothers, and produces them as deficient and in need of disciplining. I then turn to studies of women's community organizing to show that the depletion of women's community activism and third sector over the last 40 years needs to be centred as the context for conceptualizing childcare movements. Contemporary and earlier literature on childcare struggles lacks conceptual frames to make sense of waged and unwaged childcare workers as a stratified workforce, including the ways in which home domestic care workers’ and nannies’ organizing have been absent from definitions of childcare work and childcare movements. I identify the concepts of stratified reproduction, depletion and intimate unions as central to building this framework, and show how they need to be brought together into a unified theory of the social relations of waged and unwaged maternal labour under neoliberalism. First, I turn to why the concept of social reproduction offers the best lens to understand 21st-century divisions between women.