Motherhood is not a mood.
It’s a biological event. A psychological expansion. A professional inflection point.
And for generations, women have been expected to navigate it without language.
There is a word.
Matrescence.
First named by anthropologist Dana Raphael, matrescence describes the physical, emotional, hormonal, and identity shift of becoming a mother — a developmental transition as significant as adolescence.
That comparison? We owe it to Aurelie Athan, who brought Raphael’s work back into contemporary discourse and coined the now world-shifting frame: matrescence is like adolescence. A phrase that recalibrates everything — from how we design workplaces to how we fund maternal health.
Her scholarship has been foundational in moving this word from academic writing into public consciousness. (And she’ll be featured in the upcoming documentary Matrescence Documentary — still in production.)
And let’s be clear: this movement did not appear overnight.
There is an extraordinarily rich lineage of women who have been researching, writing, and advocating for matrescence awareness for decades.
Jessie Harrold — author of Mothershift (Shambhala Publications) and Mother Becoming (Demeter Press, released this month).
Amy Taylor-Kabbaz
Lucy Jones
Dr. Sophie Brock
Nikki McCahon
Women who have treated this transition not as sentiment, but as scholarship. Not as content, but as infrastructure.
Credit to The Peanut App for pushing this conversation further into the mainstream and insisting the word belongs in our shared vocabulary.
Because when a transformation isn’t named, it isn’t measured.
If it isn’t measured, it isn’t funded.
If it isn’t funded, systems don’t adapt.
And when systems don’t adapt, women absorb the cost.
At Built For This, we look at the structural layer beneath women’s lives — work design, capital allocation, leadership pathways. You cannot understand women’s economic trajectories without understanding matrescence.
This isn’t soft language.
It’s workforce design.
It’s health policy.
It’s long-term talent retention strategy.
Honouring the women who built this intellectual foundation matters. Progress without attribution is erasure.
Matrescence deserves a dictionary entry.
It deserves funding lines.
It deserves institutional design.
Name it. Fund it. Design for it.
That’s the business of womanhood.
And we’re built for this.
#makematrescencemainstream #thebusinessofwomanhood #builtforthis
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