‘I want to be a mother but not right now’: women negotiating the pressures of motherhood under Armenia’s far-right

This article examines the rise of the far-right in post-Soviet Armenia and its articulation of the ‘Motherhood Project’, an ideological framework that positions women’s primary social value in bearing and raising children amid protracted conflict with Azerbaijan. Drawing on interviews with three generational cohorts of women working in NGO settings, the study explores how the Motherhood Project shapes their everyday lives and the strategies they use to resist it. The findings reveal clear generational distinctions. Older participants, having fulfilled normative expectations of marriage and motherhood, are insulated from its pressures. Younger participants draw on everyday resistance practices that rework, rather than refuse, the ideology of the Motherhood Project; they embrace motherhood, while asserting greater control over its timing and conditions, as well as over partner choice and childcare options. Engagement in NGO spaces provides access to knowledge and support networks that enable participants to sustain these practices. Through these findings, the study advances analyses of women’s resistance under far-right, militarized conditions and bridges scholarship on everyday resistance and social movements by showing how NGO activism intersects with daily life negotiations.