O'Brien, Mary

Mary O'Brien is a feminist philosopher, activist, and founding member of the Feminist Party of Canada, whose iconoclastic work The Politics of Reproduction (1981) challenges Marxist and Hegelian theory to offer a dialectical and materialist view of reproduction. O'Brien's study takes issue with Marxist feminists focusing on production, domestic values, and surplus value. It also criticizes radical feminism for preaching women's liberation only through sexual revolution and artificial reproduction. A professional midwife turned philosopher, O'Brien finds that the concept of giving birth has been systematically excluded from philosophical conceptualization. Comparing this exclusion with the theoretical importance given to other biological occurrences such as death and sexual intercourse, O'Brien detects a sexist bias against birth. Thus, as she put it, her mission became to labor to “give birth to a new philosophy of birth.”

Born in Glasgow in 1926, O'Brien trained as a nurse and as a midwife before immigrating to Canada in 1957. In Toronto, O'Brien started a successful academic career as a professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education and contributing to the establishment of the Women's Studies Center. It is precisely the combination of practice (O'Brien's own experiences as a midwife in the working-class areas of Glasgow) and theory (her deep knowledge of Marxist materialism and Hegelian dialectics) that makes O'Brien's work so original and challenging. O'Brien was also an engaging public speaker, and her example was inspirational to many other feminist activists. Her work as public speaker is documented in the collection of speeches and essays, Reproducing the World (1989). O'Brien died in 1998.