A Universal Right to Motherhood

Abstract

The idea of a universal right to motherhood is the result of the reflections carried out within the Italian feminist collective Diversamente Occupate (Differently employed), who started an analysis about motherhood. "˜Motherhood"™ is here to be intended not just as being mothers but, in a broader sense, as a time out of the boundaries of production: a time for regeneration, for creativity, for politics. This paper aims to contribute to the large debate about changes in the labor market in Italy and in Europe. It is a political proposal which tries to act within the interstices of the labor market to basically refuse its organization, which is marked by fragmentation of work places, times and conditions and by the increasingly use of information technologies. As a political posture, it also refuses the common narrative around labor market, that is, the work-at-all-cost and the rhetoric of self-employment, which aims to compensate the inadequacy of a dismantled welfare.