The Triple Day Thesis: Theorising Motherhood as a Capability and a Capability Suppressor Within Martha Nussbaum’s Feminist Philosophical Capability Theory

ABSTRACT

The theorising of motherhood as a capability and a capability suppressor is critical to emancipatory discourse and practice within human development and to addressing through public policy, social injustice against women due to their role as mothers. I conceptualise motherhood as a combined reproductive capability that gives women the capability to function as mothers. Generally, by capability suppression, I mean features of a person’s present capability that are likely to limit other current or potential capabilities of that person to function – suppressive functioning – while those same features simultaneously play a fertile role in promoting the capabilities or functionings of others – fertile functioning. Maternal capability suppression is therefore the limitation of a mother’s capabilities to function due to the instrumental role of childrearing. A mother’s lack of freedom to engage in the triple day of self-reproduction due to maternal capability suppression explains the triple day problem. To address the triple day problem, the paper draws on Martha Nussbaum’s capability theory of social justice to develop and explain the specific tragic conflict of capability suppression inherent in motherhood. The paper further proposes motherhood compensation as a complement to Nussbaum’s fair-bargain approach of promoting childcare and economic options.

KEYWORDS:

• Motherhood
• triple day
• capability suppression
• Martha Nussbaum
• capabilities approach
• social justice

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The term “biological” used throughout this paper only refers to the physical childbearing process women must undergo to achieve the capability of motherhood for themselves or to assist in the achievement of such capability for other women. Even where adoption of children is concerned it is the physical process of childbearing that creates opportunities for adoptive parents to engage in the social sphere of nurturance and upbringing.

2 According to Robeyns (2003, 63), Sen stresses the importance of ‘‘reason to value’’ because we need to scrutinise motivations for valuing specific lifestyles and not simply value a certain life without reflecting upon it.

3 Exploitation within and outside the home is indisputably a source of capability failures. For example, the economic oppression of women and mothers due to the exploitation of reproductive labour in the home could influence women’s ability to pursue opportunities that could lead to certain desirable functionings. Also, exploitation in the labour market that results in overwork could squeeze the time that could be used to pursue desirable capabilities for human flourishing.

4 Robeyns (2016, 4–7) rejects the second, fourth and fifth elements of Nussbaum’s five basic elements – choice or freedom, public policy, entrenched social justice – and argues that they are not essential to the theorising of capabilities.

5 Robeyns (2016, 14–15) levels a critique against Nussbaum’s politically liberalist position on the ground that political liberalism and capabilitarianism are orthogonal issues and as such, combination may not be necessary. There is incoherence, Robeyns further explains, in Nussbaum’s politically liberalist capability theory since her central capabilities list is not only long but also some of the items within the list such as having opportunities for reproductive choice, e.g. abortion cannot form the object of an overlapping consensus.

6 See introduction to Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach (Nussbaum 2000) for a description of these circumstances.

7 See Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi (2000) on positive psychology.

8 I make a distinction between the new term, suppressive functioning or suppressive capability and the concept of corrosive disadvantage put forward by Wolff and de-Shalit (2007). Corrosive disadvantage occurs only when a fertile functioning or capability is absent. Suppressive functioning, however, results from the presence of a fertile functioning and within motherhood itself. Though, the end result from both corrosive disadvantage and suppressive functioning are the same, the cause is different for each.

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Notes on contributors

Elaine Agyemang Tontoh

Elaine Agyemang Tontoh is a maternal feminist theorist and a development economist. She earned her doctorate degree from the Department of Economics at the New School for Social Research. Her research advances an original thesis on the triple day of motherhood which seeks to address from a capabilities and Marxist-feminist perspective maternal capability suppression and maternal economic oppression. She is currently a Visiting Professor at the Department of Economics and Finance at St. John’s University’s Tobin College of Business.