Helen Charman is a Fellow and College Teaching Officer in English at Clare College, University of Cambridge. Her critical writing has also been published in the Guardian, The White Review, Another Gaze, and The Stinging Fly among others. As a poet, Charman was shortlisted for the White Review Poet's Prize in 2017 and for the 2019 Ivan Juritz Prize for Creative Experiment, and has published four poetry pamphlets, most recently In the Pleasure Dairy. Charman volunteers as a birth companion in Glasgow. Her first book, Mother State: A political history of motherhood, came out with Penguin/Allen Lane in 2024.
How does Firestone’s text read, three decades after it was first published, in a world where popular understanding of ‘mental health’ has fundamentally changed?
