Modern Motherhood and Women's Dual Identities: Rewriting the Sexual Contract. Petra Bueskens, New York: Routledge, 2018 (ISBN 978-1-138-67742-5)

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 – 2022 highlights, once again, the many preexisting inequalities and sources of oppression cutting across and throughout our societies. Petra Bueskens ’ s Modern Motherhood and Women ’ s Dual Identities: Rewriting the Sexual Contract examines the foundations and manifestations of one of these fractures, that is, the continued oppression of women. Although written before the global pandemic, Bueskens ’ s analysis helps us to understand both the theoretical and structural roots of women ’ s oppression in modern societies and in doing so sheds light on why the pandemic hit women so hard. So hard that UN Women concluded in 2020 that “ while everyone is facing unprecedented challenges, women are bearing the brunt of the economic and social fallout of COVID-19 ” (UN Women 2020). Moreover, Bueskens claims to offer insight into one possible pathway for disrupting this continuing oppression and for rewriting the sexual contract that underwrites that oppression. Bueskens traces the theoretical and structural roots of women ’ s oppression in modern society to a “ conundrum of duality ” (91). It is through this duality that liberalism and capitalism promise women freedom while capturing them in gender roles and institutions enforcing those roles and their continued subordination. In Bueskens ’ s words, this conundrum produced conditions in which “ women ’ s freedom as individuals simultaneously produced their constraints as mothers and wives ” (91). In this way, Bueskens returns us to the rallying cry of the second wave of feminist activists and theorists: “ the personal is political. ” She demonstrates the essential relevance of this assertion for understanding women ’ s oppression today and also points to the immense unfinished work that remains if women ’ s oppression is to be, or can be, addressed within liberal or capitalist societies. Bueskens focuses on Carole Pateman