The uterus has long doubled as a political tool. Summoned as a metaphor—for emptiness, for deficiency, for obligation—it has conflated a body part with womanhood, and used the logic of maternal sacrifice to limit women’s lives. Mental stimulation, some 19th-century doctors argued, could harm their reproductive systems. Exercise could, too. We might laugh, today, at the transparency of such tactical ignorance, but our smugness would be premature. The uterus, idealized into a means of degradation, is precisely what the Supreme
“In our society, there seems a general rule that, the more obviously one’s work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it,” the late anthropologist and activist David Graeber wrote, in 2018. That sentence rattled around in my head for most of seasons one through four of the pandemic, and, once, on a winter night in 2020, when I was struggling to nurse my five-month-old, the bald fact of it made me crumple in tears.
Most mothers have never glued lashes to their daughters’ eyelids for pageants. They’ve never, as the moms on Toddlers & Tiaras have, gotten their children’s legs spray-tanned. They haven’t stood in the audience, cuing their kids’ routines with kissy faces and arm sweeps, hollering, “Get it, girl!” and “Sparkle, baby!”
But they may have let their kids sit too long in front of the TV, faces slackened and minds empty. Allowed themselves to get flustered by their children’s obstinacy, throwing
Amanda Knox has opened up about her fears that ‘motherhood had been stolen from her’ following her wrongful murder conviction in Italy, saying she imagined ‘all the ways she could kill herself in her prison cell in the wake of her 26-year sentence.
The 34-year-old had already spent two years in prison when she was convicted of her British roommate Meredith Kercher’s 2007 murder in December 2009. After spending nearly four years behind bars, she was acquitted in 2011 and
