The crucial importance of gender and reproduction to all aspects of modernity, and their absence from social, political and economic analysis combine to produce a dilemma of two halves. On the one hand, feminists have raised the profile of reproduction within accounts of social organization and political economy against influential analysts’ neglect of the great divide through which childcare and housework, the basic infrastructures of modern life, became private, ‘uneconomic’ activities. The freeing of the autonomous modern individual from the bondage of kinship thus had no such enfranchising effect on those members of society destined to become wives or mothers: these roles became more not less restrictive. On the other hand, feminists have worked to separate ‘women’ from their perennial association with reproductive labour and biology. Although historically linked in ongoing struggles over reproductive rights, the most important connection between feminism and reproduction should be in overturning the reductive and deterministic associations between women, pregnancy and childbirth. ‘Reproduction’ will need to be after ‘women’, just as ‘women’s’ role in ‘reproduction’ will need to be reinvented in order for either to become fully valued and visible as vital components of any social community or polity.