by Susana Hernandez-Toro
In this article, three women come together to explore what “mother, motherhood, and mothering” – terms that occupy a unique space in feminist discourse, as personal experiences and deeply political institutions (e.g. Zufferey & Buchanan, 2019) – mean within feminist futures. All three of us work in the field of futures – Author 1 and Author 2 in a strategy-design consultancy and Author 3 as a researcher and teacher at a university. Anchored in the Futures Triangle (Inayatullah, 2008) as a framework, we discuss how the weight of the past, the push of the present, and the pull of the future shape our views on these roles. Inspired by Milojević (2024, p.34), this framework was also chosen to explore collective feminist futures from individual voices to find tensions and commonalities with the concepts of “mother, motherhood, and mothering”. Following feminist calls, we write in the first person to reflect our embodied and situated knowledge (Haraway, 1988), shaped by our diverse life stages, lived experiences, different perspectives (being a mother, becoming a mother, and not being a mother), and cultural backgrounds. Embracing a methodology of collaborative writing (Wyatt et al., 2011), we aim to disrupt habitual patterns and foster greater plurality in academic work (Helin, 2020; Henderson & Black, 2018) and from the belief that mothering has the power to disrupt parts of our present system (Grettve, 2024, p.16). Our approach seeks a more personal form of writing that embraces vulnerability and takes creative risks (Helin, 2020).
Figure 1. The figure shows the Futures Triangle (Inayatullah, 2008) and the questions that guided the article’s discussion as a way to explore the conflict and opportunities for social change (Milojević, 2024, p.34) in the three dimensions of the triangle.
Push of the present: Challenges in the now
Motherhood is a role I, Author 2, have always envisioned for myself. In my early thirties, I deeply longed to become a mother, imagining it as an inevitable part of my future. But as time passed, I realized that some longings might remain unfulfilled. It wasn’t until my late thirties, at 36, that I became a mother—though, with two children at once, I quickly made up for lost time. Becoming a mother of two daughters, however, was far more than just a personal milestone; it connected me to an ecosystem of relationships, expectations, assumptions, and societal pressures that liberated and constrained me simultaneously.
The moment I became a mother, I stepped into a new realm shaped by external definitions of being a mother. These expectations are influenced by where you live, in my case, Denmark, your cultural background and family structures, and the societal norms surrounding you. In some parts of the world, motherhood is seen as a source of empowerment and choice, aided by technological advancements and evolving gender roles. In others, motherhood remains tightly bound by traditional expectations, political policies, and societal conservatism.
We live in a time where both progressive and conservative forces are redefining motherhood. On one hand, emerging technologies and new models of motherhood are stretching the boundaries of what it means to be a mother. These innovations empower women to navigate motherhood on their terms, allowing them to balance career ambitions, personal goals, and family life in new ways.
On the other hand, the future of motherhood is increasingly uncertain as we see the trend of declining fertility rates (OECD, 2024) and populations shrinking in many parts of the world. Countries like South Korea and Canada have responded with financial incentives to encourage families to have more children, while corporations have begun offering “baby bonuses” (Smith, 2020). Yet, these interventions feel like a manifestation of a much more significant societal shift. Motherhood, and by extension fertility, has become a battleground for political and ideological debates, with conservative policies seeking to limit women’s choices by reinforcing traditional roles.
The societal pressure surrounding motherhood also varies across generations. Younger generations, or especially the revival of the DINKs trend (Double Income, No Kids) (Kelly, 2024), where people are increasingly opting out of parenthood altogether, driven by concerns about overpopulation, sustainability, and the climate crisis. Meanwhile, ultra-conservative movements have given rise to the trend of “tradwives” (Freeman, 2020), women who embrace a return to traditional gender roles and motherhood as their primary identity. These contrasting visions of motherhood highlight the growing divide in how society views women’s roles.
As I look ahead, I wonder how gender roles will continue to evolve. Will we see more tech-enabled parenting that allows mothers (and fathers) greater flexibility? Will work-life integration finally become a reality that benefits everyone, mothers included? And perhaps most critically, will governments shift their focus toward community-based, collective care, supporting not just mothers but entire families instead of enacting policies that further limit women’s choices?
For my daughters, I imagine a world where motherhood is a choice, one rooted in empowerment, not limitation. A future where motherhood allows for vulnerability as a form of resilience. In this future, motherhood is defined not by societal expectations or outdated gender roles but by equity, community, and connection. In this future, a mother can nurture in ways that feel authentic, balanced, and deeply connected to the world.
Pull of the future: The aspirations for futures
As I stand at the brink of becoming a mother, I, Author 3, find myself pulled between identities that, at times, clash: the mother-to-be and the woman-academic.
These clashes surface frequently, most recently in a meeting where upcoming research projects were discussed. Someone casually remarked, “You probably have other, more important, things on your mind,” assuming that because I’m pregnant, I would step back from my professional responsibilities. It was an assumption that reduced my role to that of a future mother, erasing my desire and capacity to engage with my career. This is one of the many ways academia often overlooks the complexity of women’s identities, expecting us to fade into the background the moment we step into motherhood.
But this tension between my identity as a woman and my career as a researcher goes beyond my pregnancy. The very structures of academia often feel at odds with qualities typically associated with women and mothering. Academia rewards output, speed, and efficiency (Helin, 2020), valuing transactional interactions over care-full, meaningful connections.
Interactions become strategic – networking opportunities, publications, and grants – rather than spaces for personal growth, genuine support, and care-full relationships.
I dream of futures where being a woman and academia do not clash – futures where caregiving and intellectual pursuits go hand in hand and, in fact, nurture each other. In line with this aspiration, two of my female academic friends and I have started a working group titled ‘Response-able Design Futures’. At the core of this working group lies the idea of fostering a community that values different ways of growing together. We intentionally cultivate a relational and care-full space that adapts to the ebb and flow of personal and academic commitments. Unlike the rigid structures of academia, our community is driven by feminist principles, vulnerability, introspection, and a commitment to staying connected. The group is not only a way for us to support each other academically, but it also acts as a catalyst for fostering more conducive environments for other scholars and future generations of academics. We hope that through our interactions, we contribute to a different academic culture that embraces care and nurturing as a form of intellectual and personal labor, just as motherhood does.
In my aspiration of feminist futures, as a woman academic and mother-to-be, I strive for futures where this approach to academia would be the norm, enriching both personal and professional growth. We need to dismantle the idea that being a woman and becoming a mother means sacrificing one of them. In my vision, being a woman and mother enriches academic life, just as my academic work will enrich my mothering. Both are forms of care – care for knowledge, the next generation, and the future itself.
Weight of the past: The legacies we carry
I, Author 1, come as a South American white-presenting mestizo woman, living in the Global North, thinking about my mixed mothering ways of being as a result of my own and my ancestor’s past.
Tangled in my identity, I carry a contradiction, a dated pressure to be a mother, and the aboriginal power of the true mothering, the Pachamama, our mother earth in the Quechua and Aymara languages (NN). Spiritually powerful but politically weak, I lift the weight of the colonized mothering and get pushed forward by the matriarchal power of the earth. I feel myself transferring and resisting the past as the product of a contradiction, a mestiza. My identity is a result of centuries of tensions, definitions and redefinitions of gender, and never-ending fights over values.
When I was young, women around me would share stories of longing for a time of equality they never had, that may have never existed, through nostalgic conversations on pre-colonial existence that didn’t try to explain the truth but cope with an incongruous present. A tradition to make sense of a fractioned identity. I always remember a conversation like this one occurring in an old village in front of a Catholic church. A memory that feels like a fever dream, as a reminder of an institutionalized truth in opposition with an intangible one we carry through an oral tradition. Though this moment may have never happened, I bear this contradiction of institutional versus spiritual legacies, and though it’s been repressed and pushed out of history, they still speak to me from the heart, from an intimate connection with other beings. Mothering and care communicates to us in a similar way. History doesn’t typically explore how to care about using affection in our lives, but it is still here. It has survived every war and extinction and still braids itself in our humanity. This relates to the origin of the world Pacha, or the relation between space and time, an ascendent and spiral relationship that determines how we relate to the material and non-material world (Daza, 2017).
I am braided in a present dependent on my past, an aboriginal past to which I will attribute my future; I am entwined with my mothering self, a matriarchal, caring perspective that is as old as time. But, I am tangled in some patriarchal institutional beliefs that will probably stay with me as a product of my past, but I hope to de-mother from it.
Figure 2. The figure visualises the tensions each of us identified for our future. It intends to highlight the similarities in tensions we perceive, focusing on what we have in common after the prior exploration of our differences. Acknowledging the plurality of futures, we found some commonalities between personal feminist explorations of the future, such as the possibility of a patriarchal future, but the hope for gender equality (Milojević, 2024, p.75). In the figure, blue represents the tension between optimism/hope and pessimism/fear; red represents the tension between feminism and patriarchy and the tension between academia and mothering; purple represents the tension between the individual and the ecosystem, which holds within itself the tension between family and the individual; lastly, pink represents the tension between ambition and reality, and motherhood and career.
Having read, reflected, and woven our thoughts together, I, Author 3, notice a shared experience running through our stories: the constant pull of tension of being stretched between competing demands, expectations, and desires (Figure 2). And yet, in these very tensions, we also seem to find something powerful. In embracing these contradictions, we are not just coping; we are actively reshaping. We are not just reflecting on the tensions themselves but actively searching for ways of transcending them, building bridges that connect the seemingly opposite.
I, Author 1, think we often see tensions as divisions, extremes, like when thinking about the body and mind division, one of the bases for modernist thinking and, in many ways, patriarchal thinking (Escobar, 2017, p.81). But, when relating them through time, I see a balance, forces that connect us. Just as in our reflection on the Futures Triangle (Inayatullah, 2008), our fractionated identities also keep us together. Just as Author 3 would not be herself if she weren’t an academic and a future mother, tension is holding her together in the present, which reminds me of how futures research works. In a way, directions are drivers of our present; they prepare us for our future, so divisions don’t exist. In a way, they are just waiting to find each other, just like Author 3 will always be a thinker and a mother, and the mind and body can be one.
I, Author 2, recognize the tensions as opposites, from past and future, the individual and the community, and how the three of us reflect upon these tensions from different experiences. It also feels like time travel, where the tensions you, Author 3, mention remind me of a past before I became a mother, not knowing what the future would bring. Giving birth to a child will transform a woman forever as she becomes a mother. However, it is important to recognize that the future has not happened yet; there is agency in reshaping your vision of motherhood and creating ‘futures where caregiving and intellectual pursuits go hand in hand.’ Just like you, Author 1, need to let go, or in your words, ‘de-mother’ from. Recognizing or feeling these competing tensions can open ways to move towards intuitive motherhood that fits you.
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