The Interplay of Patriarchy, Capitalism, and Motherhood Across Cultures

Motherhood is often celebrated as a deeply personal, natural experience. But scratch beneath the surface and you find that the way societies define, regulate, and value motherhood is shaped by two powerful forces: patriarchy and capitalism. These systems do not merely influence cultural attitudes towards mothers – they actively control the maternal body, extract enormous economic value from unpaid care work, and restrict women’s reproductive choices. This interplay operates differently across cultures, yet produces strikingly similar patterns of oppression.

How patriarchy defines and controls motherhood 🔗

Patriarchy, at its core, is a system in which men hold primary power in social, political, and domestic life. Within this framework, motherhood is not simply a choice or a biological event – it becomes a duty, an identity, and often the only socially acceptable role for women. The patriarchal ideology of motherhood serves as a dominant lens that shapes how societies think about and treat mothers. This ideology positions women primarily as reproducers and caregivers, reducing their worth to their ability to bear and raise children.

Feminist scholar Dorothy E. Roberts has argued that patriarchy plays a central role in the social construction of motherhood and that it turns motherhood into a tool for subordinating women. When motherhood becomes an enforced identity rather than a freely chosen path, it limits women’s participation in public life, restricts their economic independence, and confines them to the domestic sphere.

In many communities, this takes very concrete forms. Marriage norms dictate when a woman should become a mother. Family expectations determine how many children she should have. Social pressure shames women who choose not to have children or who parent in unconventional ways. The maternal body becomes something to be monitored, regulated, and disciplined – not by the woman herself, but by the patriarchal structures around her.

The maternal body as a site of discipline 🔗

One of the most powerful feminist critiques of patriarchal motherhood comes from Jana Sawicki, who drew on Michel Foucault’s theories of power and discipline to examine how the maternal body is controlled. In her influential work Disciplining Foucault: Feminism, Power, and the Body (1991), Sawicki explored how modern institutions – medical establishments, legal systems, cultural norms – function as disciplinary technologies that regulate women’s reproductive lives. She examined how new reproductive technologies, far from simply liberating women, can also become instruments of surveillance and control over the maternal body.

Sawicki’s Foucauldian approach reveals something important: the control over mothers is not always exercised through brute force or obvious coercion. It often operates through subtle mechanisms – medical advice that dictates how a woman should behave during pregnancy, cultural narratives that define what makes a “good mother,” legal frameworks that regulate reproductive choices. These disciplinary mechanisms are so deeply embedded in everyday life that they often go unnoticed, yet they profoundly shape how women experience motherhood.

Consider, for instance, the intense scrutiny pregnant women face regarding their diet, exercise, emotional state, and even their appearance. While some of this attention may be well-intentioned, it reflects a broader pattern of treating the maternal body as public property – something that society has a right to monitor and control. This phenomenon is not limited to any single culture; it manifests across societies, though in different forms.

Capitalism and the exploitation of maternal labour 🔗

If patriarchy defines who should be a mother and how, capitalism determines the economic value – or lack thereof – assigned to maternal work. One of the most significant feminist contributions to this discussion comes from Eva Feder Kittay, whose groundbreaking book Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality and Dependency (1999) exposed how care work, particularly the work of mothering, is systematically devalued by both economic systems and political theory.

Kittay argued that mainstream theories of justice – like John Rawls’s influential framework – assume a society of equal and autonomous individuals. This assumption completely ignores the reality of human dependency. Children, elderly people, persons with disabilities, and those who are ill all depend on caregivers, and those caregivers are overwhelmingly women. By failing to account for this dependency, political and economic systems render the enormous labour of caregiving invisible. Kittay advocated for recognising care as a fundamental social good and called for a fairer distribution of dependency work – one based on skills and inclination rather than gender, race, or class.

Under capitalism, the separation between “productive” labour (work done for wages in the market) and “reproductive” labour (the unpaid work of bearing, raising, and caring for family members) becomes sharply defined. Productive labour is valued, compensated, and respected. Reproductive labour – cooking, cleaning, nurturing, teaching children, managing households – is treated as a natural extension of womanhood, something women are expected to do out of love rather than as a form of real work.

The unpaid economy of mothering 🔗

This devaluation of maternal labour has real consequences. Mothers who stay home to care for children receive no wages, no pension contributions, and no formal economic recognition. Mothers who enter the workforce face the well-documented “motherhood penalty” – reduced wages, fewer promotions, and workplace discrimination. The choices available to mothers under capitalism are, in many ways, a false choice. As Marxist feminist Silvia Federici has extensively argued, capitalism relies on the unpaid reproductive labour of women to sustain its workforce. Without someone cooking meals, raising the next generation of workers, and caring for the sick and elderly, the entire economic system would collapse. Yet this foundational labour is neither compensated nor acknowledged.

Federici’s work, particularly Caliban and the Witch (2004), traces how the rise of capitalism in Europe was accompanied by the systematic enclosure of women within the domestic sphere. The witch hunts, she argued, were partly a mechanism for disciplining women’s bodies and establishing male control over female reproductive capacity – a control that capitalism needed in order to ensure the steady production of labour power.

Cross-cultural dimensions of maternal oppression 🔗

While patriarchy and capitalism are global forces, their specific effects on motherhood vary significantly across cultures. Understanding these variations is essential to grasping the full scope of how the maternal body is regulated and exploited.

The Indian context 🔗

In India, motherhood is deeply intertwined with notions of sacrifice, devotion, and moral duty. The cultural ideal of the self-sacrificing mother – who endures all hardship for her family – is deeply embedded in religious narratives, popular media, and everyday social expectations. This “maternormative” discourse assumes that all women naturally desire motherhood and that it should be their primary pursuit. Women who resist this narrative – whether by choosing to remain childless, pursuing careers, or parenting in non-traditional ways – often face intense social stigma.

In rural communities, the control over the maternal body can be even more direct. Families and communities may enforce specific expectations around childbirth practices, breastfeeding norms, postnatal care, and the number of children a woman should bear. The preference for male children in many regions adds another layer of oppression, as women face pressure to continue bearing children until a son is born, regardless of the physical and emotional toll.

The intersection of caste, class, and gender creates additional complexities. Dalit and Adivasi women, for example, face not only patriarchal control over their reproductive lives but also caste-based discrimination that limits their access to healthcare, nutrition, and economic resources during pregnancy and childbirth.

Western industrialised societies 🔗

In Western contexts, the ideology of “intensive mothering” – a term coined by sociologist Sharon Hays – places enormous pressure on mothers to be completely devoted to their children while simultaneously maintaining a successful career. As Barbara Katz Rothman has argued, the ideologies of patriarchy, technology, and capitalism all converge to shape prevailing notions of mothering in ways that vary by race and class.

The neoliberal version of this pressure creates the archetype of the “supermum” – a woman who is expected to be a selfless caregiver, a productive employee, and a physically attractive individual, all at the same time. As one feminist analysis put it, women face pressure on two fronts: the patriarchal expectation of selfless mothering and the capitalist demand for professional success. The result is widespread frustration, guilt, and anxiety among mothers who find it impossible to meet both sets of expectations simultaneously.

African and postcolonial contexts 🔗

In many African societies, motherhood holds a position of cultural honour and social power. However, this valorisation can also function as a form of essentialism that confines women to reproductive roles. The intersection of colonial legacies, capitalist exploitation, and indigenous patriarchal structures creates unique challenges for mothers navigating multiple systems of oppression simultaneously. Dorothy Roberts’s work on race and reproduction has highlighted how Black mothers, in particular, have faced state control over their reproductive lives – from forced sterilisations to the criminalisation of pregnancy.

Feminist scholar Alison Jaggar on alienation and the maternal body 🔗

Another important voice in this discussion is that of feminist philosopher Alison Jaggar, who brought Marxist concepts into conversation with feminist theory. Jaggar pointed out that just as the worker under capitalism is alienated from the products of their labour, women are alienated from three key domains of their existence: sexuality, motherhood, and intellectual life. In the context of motherhood specifically, Jaggar highlighted the extremely limited choices women exercise over when they have children, how many they have, and by what means they bear them.

Jaggar also emphasised that women’s biology does not produce identical experiences of motherhood across time and cultures. The social and material environment – access to healthcare, availability of contraception, economic conditions, cultural norms – profoundly shapes how biology is experienced. Something as simple as the availability of bottle feeding, she noted, can alter the definition of motherhood and the expectations placed on mothers.

The collusion of patriarchy and capitalism 🔗

What makes the oppression of mothers so persistent is the way patriarchy and capitalism reinforce each other. Patriarchy provides the cultural justification for confining women to caregiving roles – the idea that women are “naturally” nurturing, self-sacrificing, and suited to domestic work. Capitalism then exploits this arrangement by extracting enormous value from women’s unpaid labour while offering nothing in return.

This collusion operates in several ways. First, by defining care work as a natural feminine instinct rather than as skilled labour, both systems ensure that it remains unpaid. Second, by limiting women’s access to education, employment, and economic resources, they create conditions of dependency that trap women in caregiving roles. Third, by idealising motherhood as sacred and selfless, they make it socially unacceptable for women to demand compensation or support for their work.

Adrienne Rich, in her influential work Of Woman Born (1976), made an important distinction between the experience of motherhood and the institution of motherhood. The experience – the emotional, physical, and relational dimensions of being a mother – can be rich and meaningful. But the institution – the patriarchal framework that controls and defines motherhood – is a system of oppression. Rich argued that the goal of feminism should not be to reject motherhood itself but to free it from patriarchal control.

Reproductive technologies and new forms of control 🔗

The advent of modern reproductive technologies – IVF, surrogacy, prenatal testing, genetic screening – has introduced new dimensions to the control of the maternal body. While these technologies can expand women’s reproductive choices, they can also become tools of exploitation, particularly when shaped by capitalist and patriarchal interests.

Surrogacy, for instance, raises profound questions about the commodification of the maternal body. In countries where commercial surrogacy has been practised, it is overwhelmingly poor women who serve as surrogates for wealthier clients. This arrangement turns pregnancy itself into a marketable service, with the surrogate mother’s body becoming a means of production in the most literal sense. Federici has pointed to the normalisation of surrogacy as evidence of how capitalism commodifies human bodies and reproductive capacities.

Prenatal sex determination, banned in India under the Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques (PCPNDT) Act, 1994, reveals how reproductive technologies can be deployed in the service of patriarchal preferences. The widespread practice of sex-selective abortions – driven by a preference for sons – demonstrates how technology, patriarchy, and economic considerations intersect to control both the maternal body and the outcomes of reproduction.

Toward a more just understanding of motherhood 🔗

Feminist scholars have proposed several pathways for dismantling the patriarchal-capitalist control over motherhood. Kittay’s call for recognising care as a primary social good and redistributing dependency work more equitably remains one of the most compelling. Sawicki’s Foucauldian analysis encourages us to look beyond obvious forms of coercion and examine the subtle disciplinary mechanisms that regulate maternal bodies. Federici’s Marxist feminism demands that we confront the economic exploitation embedded in the current system.

At a practical level, this means advocating for policies that recognise and compensate care work – universal parental leave, affordable childcare, pension credits for caregiving years, and workplace protections for mothers. It also means challenging cultural narratives that romanticise maternal sacrifice while ignoring the structural conditions that make motherhood so difficult for so many women.

Most fundamentally, it requires recognising that motherhood is not a private, individual experience that exists outside the realm of politics and economics. It is deeply embedded in systems of power, and any meaningful change requires addressing those systems head-on.

What do you think? Can motherhood ever be truly liberated from patriarchal and capitalist frameworks, or are these systems too deeply embedded in our cultural DNA to be dismantled? And in a rapidly changing world where reproductive technologies are advancing faster than social policy, how do we ensure that these tools expand women’s freedom rather than creating new forms of control over the maternal body?

References

1. https://sk.sagepub.com/reference/motherhood/n535.xml
2. https://www.routledge.com/Disciplining-Foucault-Feminism-Power-and-the-Body/Sawicki/p/book/9780415901888
3. https://www.routledge.com/Loves-Labor-Essays-on-Women-Equality-and-Dependency/Kittay/p/book/9781138089921
4. https://ethicsofcare.org/eva-fedar-kittay/
5. https://vanguardthinktank.org/on-the-relation-between-the-patriarchy-and-capitalism-a-marxist-feminist-approach
6. https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1751-9020.2011.00415.x
7. https://revistaidees.cat/en/maternitats-desobedients/
8. https://egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/40704/1/Unit-1.pdf
9. https://www.indiacode.nic.in/handle/123456789/1816?locale=en