This panel examines twentieth century women's political deployments of motherhood and care for children across three continents and three national contexts: China, Côte d'Ivoire, and the United States. Mei Li Inouye explores how the actress Jiang Qing, more famously known as Madame Mao, depoliticized the domestic sphere, thereby challenging the public motherhood campaigns of China's Federation of Women through her portrayal of several female heroines without husbands and children during China's socialist era. Elizabeth Jacob reads Ivoirian women's activism against the grain to understand how elite Ivoirian women used their status as wives and mothers for political ends, invoking an idea of African motherhood that viewed political activism and motherhood as complementary commitments. Justine Modica explores how child care labor activists in the United States centered representations of children in their movement for improved compensation, linking wages for workers with quality of care for children. These representations spoke to unresolved questions of whether care for young children ought to be better understood as education or communal mothering. Engaging feminist theorist Andrea O’Reilly’s articulation of motherhood as the “unfinished business of feminism,” all three papers examine the complicated entanglements between motherhood and care work as both political strategies and deeply felt social standpoints.

By examining public motherhood from a transnational perspective, this panel considers the multiple routes of global feminisms in the 20th century across divergent racial, economic, and cultural contexts. We highlight the ways women have alternately deployed and problematized their roles as mothers for political ends. Jiang Qing challenged maternal role conformity through her depictions of childless heroines in order to advance a new event of women who were defined by their own personhood and not just womanhood. By contrast, Ivoirian women insisted on the political import of their maternal roles as they made moral claims in community life. Child care labor activists made children the center of their activism, demanding that the state assume responsibility for labor that had once been largely the unwaged domain of mothers. Placing these three very different stories in conversation, we examine the ways public motherhood has elucidated the intertwined relationships between feminism, families, and state power.