Over many seasons, I’ve observed a pair of masked lapwings hatch their chicks in a natural wetland close to my home. Nature did not prime these parents to care for their young. My lapwing neighbours would walk their downy chicks into the open and fly away when noisy miner birds approached. The weeks-old young were left to defend themselves from vicious, swooping attacks.

As I walked the wetland each day, I counted the young with a heavy heart: one day there were four, the next there would be two and a week later there were none.

In 2023, the first clutch of lapwing chicks survived into adolescence and I told everyone I knew.

I learned more about motherhood from witnessing these parenting failures – for example, the need to love, remain proximate, protect from predators and respond in instances of distress – than in anything I had encountered in all my years as a professional philosopher. Sure, I’d taught the standard arguments for and against abortion in ethics and given classes in bioethics on pregnancy management and maternal autonomy, but these topics had little to do with motherhood itself.

One of the reasons for this was that until I was readying myself for a child of my own, motherhood had not been salient to me as either a personal or philosophical question. The more significant reason was that motherhood – and the maternal body – rarely presented itself as a philosophical topic for exploration in the many classes and seminars I attended as a student and later, as an academic.

Yet in a tradition where life and health have spurred profound philosophical reflection – I have in mind Pascal’s migraines and Nietzsche’s breakdowns – how can the soul and body splitting event of childbirth be an unremarked upon subject of philosophy?

Since antiquity, women have written philosophical texts and discussed philosophical topics. But through a centuries-long process of erasure, their philosophical concerns and their contributions to the discipline have been ignored and later, forgotten.

From the time of Aristotle, women were seen as subordinate to men. In philosophy, too, the norms of reason, the nature of philosophical inquiry and the topics of investigation were defined in opposition to anything feminine.

It is little surprise, then, that writings about the intense psychological, emotional, and identity transformations that take place during gestational and postpartum motherhood were largely sidelined within the discipline.

Yet a few remarkable women overcame misogynistic epistemic and disciplinary barriers to produce work that was recognised as philosophy, including some writing touching on the maternal experience.

For Lady Damaris Masham, raised among Platonists in Cambridge in the mid-17th century, motherhood was a significant topic of moral and political philosophy.

According to Masham, the education of women and the development of their rational abilities was key to discharging the moral responsibilities of motherhood. Only through receiving a sound education could women effectively mother their children.

More than this, the responsibility to parent, she argued, should fall to women since the task “cannot be perform’d but by Mothers only”. Though this sounds regressive to our ears, Regan Penaluna, a contemporary philosopher and journalist, suggests it was a radical argument for domestic matriarchy. For Masham, men could not be entrusted to such a significant domestic and civic responsibility. The stability of society depended on........

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