The word that should have changed everything in 1973

When women first hear the word matrescence, they almost always have the same two responses. In that order.

First. Relief. The visceral, slightly infuriating relief of a person who has been trying to describe an experience without language for it, and has finally been handed exactly the right word.

Second. Fury. Because the word was coined in 1973. And here they are, only finding it now.

This is the story of why.

The anthropologist who named it

Her name was Dana Raphael. American medical anthropologist, student of Margaret Mead at Columbia University, co-founder of the Human Lactation Center. Born 1926. Died 2016. The kind of woman who looked at how her culture treated new mothers and concluded the whole thing needed rebuilding from scratch.

She had struggled to breastfeed her own first baby, and she noticed something. Breastfeeding was normal and supported in most cultures around the world. In the West, it was abandoned and unsupported. She began travelling. She studied more than 250 cultures.^[1]

And what she found, everywhere she looked, was the same thing.

Every culture had rituals, rules, and protected periods for the new mother. Not just for the birth. For the transformation that came after. Periods ranging from a week to two years, during which the mother was cocooned and tended to. During which the community’s explicit job was to make sure she could concentrate entirely on becoming who she was becoming.

Then she looked at the West.

Nothing.

She coined the word matrescence, from the Latin mater and the suffix used for a process of becoming, in her 1973 book The Tender Gift. Breastfeeding.^[1] She also coined the word doula in the same tradition. Two words that together gave maternal care a language it did not previously have.

She published the book. She gave the transition its name. The world moved on to other things.

For a deeper look at what the rest of the world still has and the West lost, read The way Western culture treats new mothers is not normal. This post is about the word itself. Why it took fifty years to reach you.

Why the world ignored her

Here is where the story gets less charming.

In 1973, the psychological and emotional experience of women in their reproductive years was not a research priority. That is the diplomatic way to say it. The actual truth is that women’s health, and the mother’s experience specifically, was systematically sidelined by the medical and scientific establishment.

Women metabolise medications differently. Women’s hearts attack differently. Women’s pain presents differently. And women’s experiences of the most significant biological events of their lives, including pregnancy, birth, and the postpartum period, were largely absent from the research record that medicine was built on.

There is something more specific at play, too. Raphael’s insight was fundamentally about the mother, not the baby. And the entire architecture of perinatal medicine, then and to a significant degree now, is organised around the outcome of the infant. The mother, in this framework, is infrastructure. Her experience is a secondary variable. Her transformation is not the point.

Raphael was arguing the opposite. That the mother was the point. That her transformation was not incidental to the baby’s wellbeing but central to it.

That argument took fifty years to reach the mainstream. The neuroscience, the brain imaging, the matrescence research of the last decade. All of it is essentially confirming, in peer-reviewed journals and MRI scanners, what Dana Raphael wrote in 1973 from observation and anthropological study.

She was right. She was just ahead of a world that was not ready to listen.

The chain of women who carried it forward

Raphael’s work sat largely unnoticed for two decades. Then, in the 1990s, developmental psychiatrist Daniel Stern picked up where she had left off. He identified what he called the motherhood constellation. A completely new psychological organisation that emerges when a woman becomes a mother. New preoccupations. New priorities. A fundamental restructuring of the self.^[6]

His books were taken seriously in psychiatry circles. And once again, they failed to cross over. The mothers who most needed the language were not reading developmental psychiatry journals. They were at home, on the floor, wondering what was wrong with them.

Then in 2008, a clinical psychologist named Dr Aurélie Athan, doing her doctoral training at Teachers College, Columbia, went looking for a framework that could describe the healthy transition to motherhood without pathologising it. She could not find one. Every existing model described mothers through the lens of risk, illness, or their impact on children. Almost never in terms of their own strengths, growth, or thriving.

She found Raphael’s work. She recognised immediately what she was looking at.

Athan spent the next decade rebuilding matrescence as a framework fit for the twenty-first century. In 2010 she engineered a four-word public-health slogan, matrescence, like adolescence, deliberately designed to travel. Simple enough to repeat at a dinner party. Precise enough to shift a paradigm.

In 2015 she made the formal academic argument, in Feminism & Psychology, proposing the revival of the term and arguing that positioning matrescence as a distinct developmental stage could legitimise motherhood within the scientific community.^[3] She envisioned the kind of interdisciplinary roundtable adolescence research had built over decades, arguing matrescence deserved the same.

In October 2016, she presented the full framework at the Women’s Mental Health Consortium in New York.

In the audience, taking notes, was a reproductive psychiatrist named Dr Alexandra Sacks.

Six months later, on Mother’s Day 2017, Sacks published The Birth of a Mother in the New York Times.^[4] It became the most-read piece of the year in the Well Family section. She followed it with a TED talk that reached more than a million viewers.^[5] A book with Dr Catherine Birndorf came in 2019.

The matrescence TED talk

If you have searched for a matrescence TED talk, this is the one. In 2018 Sacks gave a talk called A new way to think about the transition to motherhood.^[5] It is short, clear and worth watching. She explains matrescence through the comparison Athan built: like adolescence, it is a transition, not an illness.

The talk did something the academic papers could not. It handed the word to more than a million viewers, most of them nowhere near an academic journal.

For most women alive today, this was the moment the word matrescence finally reached them.

It is worth being precise about this. Sacks did not independently rediscover matrescence. She was in the room when Athan presented it. The line from Raphael to Athan to Sacks to the world is a direct one, and each person built on the last. The word travelled the same way ideas always travel. Through a chain of people who refused to let it disappear.

In 2023, British journalist Lucy Jones published Matrescence. On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Motherhood.^[7] The first full-length popular science book on the subject. Longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction. It put matrescence on bedside tables and in hospital bags. For a growing number of new mothers, this is now the first place the word reaches them at all.

Fifty years in five minutes

What it means that you know this now

Here is what I want you to take from this story, beyond the righteous fury, which is valid and I fully endorse.

The reason matrescence was ignored for fifty years is the same reason you did not know what was happening to you after you gave birth. The same reason nobody told you about the hormone crash, the brain rewiring, the identity restructuring. The same reason you were handed a six-week check and sent on your way.

The experience of becoming a mother, the woman’s experience rather than the baby’s outcome, was not considered worth studying, naming, funding, or transmitting.

Dana Raphael knew that was wrong in 1973. She drew a deliberate parallel to adolescence, implying that matrescence, like adolescence, was a natural but challenging phase of development that society had a responsibility to recognise and support. She wrote that the amount of time it takes to become a mother needs study.

It took fifty years for the scientific community to agree with her.

But here is the thing about naming something. Women who discover the concept of matrescence describe the same response, over and over. Relief. The relief of a person who has been trying to describe an experience without language for it, and has finally been handed exactly the right word. Something that had been formless and nameless, and therefore theirs alone to carry, now has a shape and a name and decades of research behind it.

You are going through matrescence. Dana Raphael named it fifty years ago. Aurélie Athan rebuilt the framework. Alexandra Sacks brought it to the world. Lucy Jones wrote the book.

And now it is yours.

Pass it on.