The language gap: why English took until 1973 to name matrescence

English has had a word for becoming an adult since the early fifteenth century. It got a word for becoming a mother in 1973. The distance between those two dates is about five hundred and fifty years.

I worked in publishing before I had children. Words were the job. I spent nine years around people who argued about a comma for an hour, and when the thing happened to me that this website exists for, I had nothing to call it. Not a clumsy word. Not an old-fashioned word. Nothing.

It turns out the word existed. Matrescence had been sitting in the anthropological literature for nearly two decades before I was born. Nobody had ever said it to me, and the reason is more interesting than an oversight.

Adolescence was never invented

The first thing to get right is the thing almost everyone gets wrong, including a version of me from about six months ago.

G. Stanley Hall did not coin the word adolescence. The word is Middle English. It arrives in the early fifteenth century from Old French, and behind that from the Latin adolescentia, youth, out of adolescere, to grow up, which is ad plus alescere, to be nourished (Etymonline, retrieved 14 September 2026). It was five hundred years old and in ordinary use before any psychologist touched it.

What Hall did in 1904 was different, and bigger. He published Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education, in two volumes, with D. Appleton and Company in New York (Internet Archive catalog, retrieved 14 September 2026). He took a word that meant roughly "the young" and turned it into a developmental stage with a literature attached. He gave an existing word a job.

That distinction matters here more than anywhere, because it means English was not short of vocabulary in 1904. It had the noun. It needed somebody to argue that the thing the noun pointed at was a real passage with a shape, and once that argument was made the word was sitting there ready to carry it. I have made that comparison before in passing, when I wrote about the invisible revolution of early motherhood, and this is the piece where I go and check it.

There was no equivalent noun waiting for mothers. Not an obscure one, not an archaic one. The compartment was empty.

How fast a named thing travels

Google's Books Ngram Viewer counts how often a word appears across the English-language books Google has scanned. It measures print rather than speech, and it is only as good as its corpus. With that caveat, the shape is hard to misread.

In 1900, four years before Hall published, adolescence was already appearing at a settled and substantial rate. By 1930 it was running at roughly three times that level. The word did not arrive with Hall. It accelerated with him, from a base that was already there, and it kept climbing for the rest of the century.

Now put the other word beside it, on the same axis, from the same pull.

Matrescence at its highest recorded point, 2022, is still around ninety times rarer in published English than adolescence was in 1900, before Hall wrote a line about it. Measured against adolescence in 1930, a generation after Hall, it is rarer by a factor of roughly two hundred and seventy.

That is the gap, in one comparison. Not the gap between having a word and not having one. The gap between a word doing work and a word sitting on a shelf.

What 1973 actually looks like

Dana Raphael was a medical anthropologist. In 1973, Prentice-Hall published her book The Tender Gift: Breastfeeding, out of Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey (Internet Archive catalog, retrieved 14 September 2026). The sentence everybody quotes is this one:

Childbirth brings about a series of very dramatic changes in the new mother's physical being, in her emotional life, in her status within the group, even in her own female identity. I distinguish this period of transition from others by terming it matrescence to emphasize the mother and to focus on her new life style.

I want to be exact about where I am getting that. I am quoting it from matrescence.com, the site of Aurélie Athan at Teachers College, Columbia University, who is the scholar most responsible for the word being in circulation at all (retrieved 14 September 2026). I have not held the page. The 1973 scan sits in the Internet Archive under controlled lending, and the sentence reaches me the way it reaches everyone, through somebody else's copy of it.

The venue is the answer to the first question.

The word arrived inside a book about breastfeeding.

Not inside a book about women, or about identity, or about development. Raphael put the most important thing she had to say about mothers into the one book where a mother was already an acceptable subject, which was the book about what her body produced for somebody else. That is where the vocabulary had room. Athan's 2024 commentary notes that Raphael also popularized the word doula, so the same anthropologist is responsible for two of the few terms we have that treat a mother as a person being attended to rather than a service being delivered.

Two years later Raphael set the idea out properly, in a chapter called "Matrescence, Becoming a Mother, A 'New/Old' Rite de Passage", in Being Female: Reproduction, Power, and Change, a volume she edited herself, published by De Gruyter Mouton on the last day of 1975 (Crossref record, retrieved 14 September 2026).

So: the word in 1973, the argument in 1975. Both by the same woman, two years apart.

Nobody can agree on when it was born

Here is where my afternoon went sideways, and where I think the real evidence is.

I went looking for a clean citation and could not find one. Not because the sources are bad. Because the people using the word have never had a reason to check.

I read five peer-reviewed papers from the last three years, all of them using matrescence, all of them crediting Raphael. Here is what each one says and what its citation actually points at, with the dictionary entry added underneath them for comparison.

Source	Date it gives	What the citation resolves to
Athan, Frontiers in Psychiatry, 2024	"first introduced in the 1970s"	The 1975 chapter, pages 65 to 71
Friedhoff and colleagues, 2025	"the 1970s"	The 1975 chapter
Ghadimi, 2025	"the 1970s"	Athan's 2024 commentary, not Raphael
Trinko, Sarewitz and Athan, 2025	"in 1973"	The 1975 chapter
Mazumdar and Kour, BMC Women's Health, 2026	"Coined ... in 1973"	The 1975 chapter, pages 65 to 72
Dictionary.com	"the 1970s"	No citation given

Read the fourth row twice. One sentence asserts 1973 and hands you 1975 as the evidence for it. And in the third row the chain of custody breaks completely: the paper credits Raphael for the word and cites somebody else's commentary, so the original text has dropped out of the reference list altogether.

Nobody involved is careless. It is simply that a citation only gets audited when somebody needs it to be right, and for fifty years nobody did.

The page numbers disagree too. Crossref gives the chapter as pages 65 to 72. Athan's reference list and Friedhoff's both print 65 to 71. In one reference the range has collapsed altogether and been reformatted into a volume number that does not exist.

I find this more persuasive than any of the frequency data. You can measure neglect by counting, and I will in a moment. But a word whose own birth certificate the literature cannot agree on is a word that nobody has ever had to defend.

Both dates are true, and that is the tidiest resolution I can offer. The word is in the 1973 book. The argument is in the 1975 chapter. Scholarly convention cites the place where the case was made. That is why so much of the record reads 1975, and why Athan hedges to "the 1970s" rather than picking.

Forty years of nothing

The counting is unambiguous, and three separate indexes agree.

Europe PMC, which covers biomedical and life-sciences literature, returns no indexed publication mentioning matrescence between 1973 and 2005. Four between 2006 and 2017. Ninety between 2018 and today (searched 14 September 2026).

Crossref, which is broader and takes in the humanities, holds 129 records. The earliest is Raphael's own 1975 chapter. The next one is from 2001, a paper in Religious Education called "Becoming a Mother: Matrescence as Spiritual Formation" (searched 14 September 2026).

Twenty-six years. One woman names a universal human passage, and the scholarly record contains nothing at all about it until the twenty-first century.

The print data tracks the same silence. Matrescence is essentially flat from the mid-seventies to the middle of the last decade, forty years of a nearly horizontal line, and then rises steeply from around 2018.

The field says so itself, when you ask it directly. Athan calls Raphael's chapter "pioneering yet overlooked". Trinko and colleagues write that matrescence "has remained largely overlooked in mainstream psychological theories and allied perinatal health disciplines since it was first introduced". That is a discipline describing its own forty-year blank.

The part I cannot source

I would like to tell you exactly why the gap existed, and I am not going to pretend I can. What follows is my reading of the shape of it, not anybody's finding.

The word had to arrive inside a breastfeeding book. Whatever else was true in 1973, that tells you where a mother was permitted to be the subject of a sentence. Everything around her was studied closely. Her milk, her stitches, her baby's weight, her baby's sleep. The woman doing the becoming was the one part of the arrangement nobody had a research question about, and you do not build vocabulary for something you are not asking questions about.

What runs the other way is that once the name was finally picked up, the research followed fast. In 2023 Trends in Cognitive Sciences, a major review journal, published "Matrescence: lifetime impact of motherhood on cognition and the brain". The word is in the title of a neuroscience review. That is what a usable name does. It gives a body of work somewhere to accumulate.

One more thing I looked for and did not find. I wanted to tell you that some other language has a word English lacks, because that is the story I expected. I could not source it. What I did find is that Mazumdar and Kour's 2026 study of mothers in urban India reaches for the English neologism throughout and offers no local term in its place. I am not claiming no such word exists anywhere. I went looking and came back with nothing, which is a weaker finding and an honest one.

A word can exist and still not be available

The revival is recent enough that you can date it in single events.

Athan's site says she began reviving and reinterpreting Raphael's concept in 2008, which is her own account of her own work. Mazumdar and Kour date her contribution to 2016. Even that disagrees. Alexandra Sacks gave a TED talk in May 2018 called "A new way to think about the transition to motherhood", which has now been played more than 2.4 million times. Lucy Jones published On Matrescence with Penguin in 2023, which is the copy that ended up on my kitchen table with the spine broken.

Fifty years and change from the word to the readership.

This is the distinction I would keep if I could only keep one. A word existing in a 1973 monograph is not the same as a word being available. Available means it is in the room when you need it. It means somebody says it to you at a six-week check, or your sister uses it, or it is the second result rather than the four-hundredth. For fifty years matrescence existed and was not available to a single woman who was not an anthropologist, and the two states are almost impossible to tell apart from inside. If you cannot reach a word, it is not there.

None of the above is the definition, and if that is what you came for, the matrescence chapter holds it: what matrescence is and where it came from, and what changes for a woman the moment she is handed the word. For the books, including Jones, there is my assessment of the matrescence shelf.

What to carry

The gap was never fifty years of this being too hard to describe. Raphael described it in one sentence in 1973 and the sentence is still good.

It was fifty years of the description sitting somewhere nobody was looking, because the woman it described was not yet a thing anybody was studying. The silence was not about the difficulty of the experience. It was about who was assumed to be the subject.

Which means that when you could not find the words for this, you were not failing at language. You were reaching into a compartment that had been left empty on purpose, by people who were busy weighing the baby.

The word is there now. It took an unreasonable amount of time and it is still ninety times rarer than the word for the other great rearrangement of a human life. Use it anyway. Availability is just a lot of people saying a thing out loud, and that part is not somebody else's work.

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Where these come from

• Athan AM (Teachers College, Columbia University), "A critical need for the concept of matrescence in perinatal psychiatry", Frontiers in Psychiatry 2024;15:1364845 - retrieved 14 September 2026, europepmc.org
• Athan AM, matrescence.com, quoting Raphael D, The Tender Gift: Breastfeeding (1973) - retrieved 14 September 2026, matrescence.com
• Crossref, record for Raphael D, "Matrescence, Becoming a Mother, A 'New/Old' Rite de Passage", in Being Female: Reproduction, Power, and Change, De Gruyter Mouton, 31 December 1975, pp. 65-72, DOI 10.1515/9783110813128.65 - retrieved 14 September 2026, api.crossref.org
• Crossref, bibliographic search for "matrescence", 129 records, earliest Raphael 1975 and next Thomas 2001 - searched 14 September 2026, api.crossref.org
• Dictionary.com, "matrescence" - retrieved 14 September 2026, dictionary.com
• Europe PMC, publication counts for "matrescence" by year range, 1973-2005, 2006-2017 and 2018-2026 - searched 14 September 2026, ebi.ac.uk
• Friedhoff S, Byatt N, Palmer M, "Commentary: A critical need for the concept of matrescence in perinatal psychiatry", Frontiers in Psychiatry 2025;16:1601336 - retrieved 14 September 2026, europepmc.org
• Ghadimi TR, "Executive functioning in matrescence and implications for perinatal depression", Frontiers in Psychiatry 2025;16 - retrieved 14 September 2026, europepmc.org
• Google Books Ngram Viewer, "matrescence" and "adolescence", English corpus, 1800-2022, smoothing 3 - retrieved 14 September 2026, books.google.com
• Hall GS, Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education, two volumes, D. Appleton and Company, New York 1904, catalog record - retrieved 14 September 2026, archive.org
• Mazumdar K, Kour P, "Tracing the developmental arc of matrescence: a phenomenological study of urban Indian mothers", BMC Women's Health 2026;26 - retrieved 14 September 2026, europepmc.org
• Online Etymology Dictionary, "adolescence" - retrieved 14 September 2026, etymonline.com
• Orchard ER, Rutherford HJV, Holmes AJ, Jamadar SD, "Matrescence: lifetime impact of motherhood on cognition and the brain", Trends in Cognitive Sciences 2023;27(3):302-316 - retrieved 14 September 2026, api.crossref.org
• Raphael D, The tender gift: breastfeeding, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs NJ 1973, ISBN 0139024786, catalog record - retrieved 14 September 2026, archive.org
• Sacks A, "A new way to think about the transition to motherhood", TED Residency, May 2018 - retrieved 14 September 2026, https://www.ted.com/talks/alexandra_sacks_a_new_way_to_think_about_the_transition_to_motherhood (ted.com serves this page to browsers and refuses automated clients, so it is printed in full rather than linked)
• Trinko V, Sarewitz J, Athan A, "Improving maternal well-being: a matrescence education pilot study for new mothers", Maternal Health, Neonatology and Perinatology 2025 - retrieved 14 September 2026, europepmc.org

Two things I could not source, and so have not claimed. I could not open the 1973 text itself, so the acknowledgements page and the question of who first suggested the word to Raphael are left alone here. And I could not find a source naming another language with a native term for this, so I have not said there is one.

About the author

Willow Reed is a pen name. I use it openly and explain why on the about page. I am not a clinician, a therapist or a researcher. I went through matrescence, read the field afterward, and write down what I found. Nothing on this page is advice about your health, and anything that belongs to a doctor, a midwife or a psychologist should go to one. Corrections and disagreements are welcome through the contact page.