How Does 'Call Your Daughter Home' Explore Motherhood Themes?

The novel 'Call Your Daughter Home' digs deep into the raw, messy reality of motherhood through three very different women. Gertrude, a poor white mother in 1920s South Carolina, shows how desperation can twist love—she kills her abusive husband to protect her kids, becoming both their savior and their burden. Annie, a wealthy plantation owner’s wife, grapples with the emptiness of performative motherhood; her polished exterior hides grief over a dead child and a strained relationship with her surviving daughter. The most striking is Retta, a Black midwife who’s mothered countless children but lost her own. Her quiet strength reveals how motherhood isn’t always biological—it’s the act of showing up, even when society denies you the title. The book doesn’t romanticize; it shows mothers as flawed, fierce, and sometimes failures, bound by love but crushed by circumstances.

'Call Your Daughter Home' paints motherhood as a battlefield where love wars with survival. Gertrude’s arc is the most visceral—her murder of her husband isn’t just crime; it’s a grotesque act of maternal sacrifice. She trades her soul for her children’s safety, and the novel forces us to ask: when protection becomes destruction, does it still count as love? Annie’s storyline contrasts sharply. Her privilege can’t shield her from maternal guilt—her distance from her daughter stems from unprocessed trauma, showing how grief can fossilize into emotional neglect.

Retta’s perspective adds layers. As a Black woman in the Jim Crow South, her ‘mothering’ extends beyond blood ties. She delivers babies for white women who’ll never see her as equal, yet her compassion persists. The book slyly critiques how race fractures motherhood—Annie’s loss is tragic, but Retta’s stolen motherhood (her child died after being sold) is historical violence. The soil itself feels maternal here—cotton fields that feed families also bury secrets, mirroring how mothers both nurture and obscure truths.

The novel’s brilliance lies in its refusal to judge. Gertrude’s violence, Annie’s coldness, Retta’s endurance—all are survival tactics. Motherhood here isn’t Hallmark-card devotion; it’s the brutal calculus of keeping children alive in a world rigged against them.

Deb Spera’s novel slams you with motherhood in all its contradictions. Gertrude isn’t just ‘poor’—she’s feral with love, chewing through dignity to feed her kids. When she smothers her husband, it’s not a crime scene; it’s her altar. Annie’s motherhood is performance art—pearls and perfect lunches masking how she’s drowning. Her daughter’s rebellion isn’t teen angst; it’s a mirror held up to her emotional absence.

Retta? She’s the heart. Her hands catch babies others discard, making her the book’s true mother figure. But the kicker is how Spera ties motherhood to land—Annie’s plantation is a ‘child’ she can’t control, Gertrude’s shack is a womb she can’t escape. The setting itself mothers or devours based on skin color.

What wrecked me was the quiet moments: Retta humming to a white baby she’ll never hold again, Gertrude’s daughter pocketing a rotten biscuit ‘for later.’ These women don’t get epiphanies—they get harder, sharper, like flint struck to spark survival. The book whispers: motherhood isn’t softness. It’s the grit in your teeth when the world comes for your kids.