Introduction

This chapter investigates the effects of the reorganization of maternal care under austerity through the lens of depletion. The marketization of maternal care, socio-spatial urban inequalities and the cuts facing the third sector interacted as limiting structures that, I argue, constitute stratified forms of depletion. In contrast to the other two case studies that foreground workerbased activism, I show that third sector organizations, social enterprises and businesses that seek to improve mothers’ physical, psychological and social well-being play a significant role in shaping contemporary childcare struggles.

Most discussions of transformations of the organization of social reproduction have tended to neglect how civil society organizations currently provide ad hoc childcare and advocacy to parents living in the most deprived neighbourhoods. Through a comparative discussion of two groups of workers – one group employed in charities, social enterprises and local authorities to support disadvantaged parents, and another self-employed group who offer care services to women in wealthy and gentrifying areas of the city – I demonstrate how the deepening crisis of social reproduction in Bristol shapes the possibilities for building a citywide maternal workers’ movement.

Many of the maternal support workers I spoke with have politicized understandings of the sort of societies best able to sustain mothers. I argue that this maternal worker praxis explicitly confronts neoliberalism's tendency to individualize self-care. The ways that charitable funding prioritizes mothers’ individual well-being, as well as the spatial socio-economic inequalities in the city, strongly constrain the possibilities for broad-based organizing around childcare and maternal support work. In turn, it is the lack of civic infrastructure, common language and spatial divisions in the city that make it difficult for deep organizing for universal state-funded childcare and maternal support to emerge. While some interviewees and organizations desired more radical transformations to childcare and maternal work, there was little political infrastructure to build worker power, as much had been hollowed out by neoliberalism (Layton, 2010).

As well as showing the ways in which scholars of childcare struggles need to foreground the role of civil society and the women's NGO sector in their analyses, this chapter makes a theoretical contribution to discussions of depletion.