Mothers are fed up.
We’re tired of bearing the brunt of a broken culture that doesn’t care about children or families. We are done with thinkpieces that talk about household labor inequity in the passive voice, as if it’s not something men are doing to women; with a medical system where mothers are dying from racism and misogyny; with a sexist backlash that treats women and mothers as subhuman; and with a feminist movement that pays more attention to celebrities than it does to mothers. This generation of mothers wants relationships to be sources of liberation and joy—but like our foremothers, too many of us have found that relationships with men are a primary driver of oppression. We are sick of being told the abuse is our fault, and that if we communicated better, advocated better, or became more worthy, things would change.
The personal has always been political.
That’s especially true when you become a mother.
This movement isn’t just about motherhood or mothers, though. It’s about misogyny, and the systems it intersects with—racism, childism, ableism, classism, and more. The same misogyny that oppresses mothers is often weaponized against childless women—by, for example, telling them they are incomplete without a child, or refusing to honor their reproductive choices. If you care about women, feminism, children, and building a better world, my work is for you—even, and perhaps even especially, if you are not a mother. Because one important measure of character is the extent to which we care about issues that don’t affect us.
Motherhood is political. Mom guilt exists to convince us that motherhood is hard because of our individual failings, not because of a broken culture that foists all of the work it doesn’t want to do onto mothers. Patriarchy wants us to blame ourselves, or to turn on one another, rather than demand that men step up and politicians listen. Mothers matter. And a feminism that ignores us is not feminism at all.