Lifegiver

Four words, and the term is doing structural work rather than descriptive work. Naming the role lifegiver rather than mother detaches it from the caregiver role, which the ordinary word runs together, and Marsh keeps the two separate throughout because they produce different circles of self. The lifegiver-self is the first circle, the one an infant is born into, and the caregiver-self is established immediately afterwards and is not the same thing. The earliest version of an interaction self is a shared animus between mother and infant during and after birth, and she points out that the mitochondrial DNA producing energy for every human cell comes entirely from the mother, with individuation of life forms occurring at birth. The word also carries her account of why male endo-idealism arose. Since life emanated from women, the filial key to immortality ran through them, and the persistent dread of that dependency is one source of the anxiety she identifies behind male endo-idealism. Creating anima banks in the female form was the rational first response and androtheism the later reversal. What the term does not do is confer status, which matters given the framework's treatment of the caregiver circle as a trap. Lifegivers and caregivers are named as facing a crisis in the present, and naming the role precisely is what allows the specific position to be discussed rather than absorbed into a general category of motherhood.

Feminist theory has long argued that motherhood conflates biological and social roles, with Adrienne Rich distinguishing the experience of mothering from the institution of motherhood and later work separating gestational, genetic and social parenthood, a distinction reproductive technology has made legally necessary. Anthropology distinguishes genitor from pater. Sara Ruddick's maternal thinking treats the caring work as a practice rather than a status. Marsh's split is close to these and made for a different purpose, since she needs the two roles separate not to clarify rights or recognition but because they occupy different circles of expansion and are trapped by different endogroups.