Rebel Mothers

Hello! In today’s episode of Rebel Mothers, we’re going to talk about the topic that is near and dear to the heart of this podcast - maternal activism. I serve on the board of an organization that centers this topic, the International Association for Maternal Action & Scholarship, and our vision is a world in which all mothers are supported by their families, communities, businesses, and governments via a cultural belief that mothering and mothers matter, and I think it’s important that we center mothers in conversations about activism

Today I’m going to provide an overview of what maternal activism is and how it’s evolved through history. We’ll take a detailed look at some specific examples of current issues that mothers are focused on in order to explore elements of successful maternal activism, including storytelling, community, agency and authority, and cooperation. We’ll also look at a not so successful example to see what went wrong.

So what is maternal activism? Let’s talk about this seeming contradiction, the fact that when we think of something “maternal” and then we think of “activism” on the face of it, they seem to be at odds.

There is a stereotype of mothers that says once we become mothers we become sort of removed from the world of political and social struggle. Right, there’s this sort of “madonna and child” image of motherhood where mothers are portrayed in the home and private sphere, sort of gazing lovingly at their adorable children, wholly invested in their upbringing. She’s on the PTA, she’s the soccer mom, she’s the mom who clips coupons and shops back-to-school deals, she cuts the crust off peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. She’s your stereotypical mom, who is nurturing and protective, but not threatening or offensive. She’s maternal.

Then when you hear the words activist, or political organizer, protestor, revolutionary - these words seem at odds with the portrayal we have of mothers who are quiet and sweet and at home thinking of their children. When I picture an activist, it’s someone marching in the streets, chanting something loudly, holding a sign in one hand with the other in a fist in the air. So at first glance, the words maternal activism might seem a little incompatible.

But mothers have been involved in nearly every single major social movement in the history of our country, including the suffrage movement, child labor laws, civil rights movement, protective legislation for women and so many more. And as we’re going to get into in this episode, this version of what a mom looks like that I described earlier draws heavily on a mass market pop culture tradition that has been run largely by white people. Black mothers, indigenous mothers, and other mothers of color have inextricably linked their motherhood with activism for decades without the broad recognition or public acceptance. But we’ll get into that shortly, I promise.

So when I say maternal activism, I’m talking about a form of activism that is focused on addressing various issues that impact mothers, children, and families within their communities and society at large. It represents a collective movement that is made up of predominantly women, who use their personal experiences, voices, and energy to drive social, political, and policy changes that aim to improve the lives of mothers and their children. You can think of it similar to different movements, like anti-racist activism, which is action that’s focused on advocating for equitable treatment of people of color, or indigenous activism that’s action focused on arguing for the rights and well-being of indigenous people. Maternal activism is a movement dedicated to advocating for mothers and issues that are important to mothers, although, as we’ll discuss later in the episode, it intersects with many other social justice issues in the world.

Maternal activists work to challenge and change policies, societal norms, and systems that perpetuate inequality, discrimination, and injustice against mothers and/or the issues that are important to them. Let’s take a look at some of the critical issues that maternal activism might cover. This list is not exhaustive, but a good starting point. Maternal activism can include advocating for maternal health, affordable childcare, paid family leave, reproductive rights, education, healthcare, and economic equality, like welfare. Maternal activism can also include addressing issues like guns in schools, abortion rights and reproductive justice, domestic violence, breastfeeding rights (which also has a very clever name of lactivism), LGBTQ parenting, climate change, and really any matter that affects mothers and children. These efforts are based on a belief that no mother should have to face difficult challenges when it comes to ensuring the health, safety, and prosperity of their families.

There’s another term you’ll sometimes hear, maternalism, it’s an older term, you’ll see it used in a lot of academic texts referring to women’s political movements in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries. I don’t usually use maternalism, because there are some cases where maternalism focuses on children’s needs while excluding mothers’ needs, which can create a limited sphere of influence for women, and maternalism has sometimes been used to describe mothers who seek the well-being of some children while harming others, for example all the white mothers who were viciously against racial integration of schools in the South. I’m actually working on a paper right now about mothers of the alt-right, and it’s fascinating and disturbing to see how frequently women employ this sort of “we’re doing this for the good of the children” rhetoric in order to promote racist or gender inequity idealogies. So “maternalism” carries with it a connotation that I consider at odds with my own personal definition of maternal activism, which is gender-inclusive, feminist, anti-racist, and global.

And in fact a lot of motherhood studies scholars who aren’t totally sure about the effectiveness of using a maternal lens because of how it may reinforce stereotypical beliefs that mothers are the ones who are primarily responsible for their children, and in fact some believe that calling it maternal activism downplays or lessens its effectiveness. Right, it’s like “oh, that’s just something the moms are doing, isn’t that cute, look at them pretending they’re activists.” And I see that, I wish it weren’t that way, but I can tell you that when I tell people I study motherhood I definitely get a sense that many people don’t take that as a serious subject. Some people propose focusing instead on care work, drawing attention to caring for children as a form of labor, regardless of who is doing the caring, whether it is a labor of love or not, whether it is paid or not, whether it takes place in the home or in the workplace, and whether it is performed for children, adults, or one’s own or others’ family members. This is definitely a helpful way of centering the needs of children without placing an undue emphasis on the mother.

So, knowing that maternal activism as a term is complex and nuanced and has a long, messy history that can include some ugly parts, why do I use it? Why am I talking about it as maternal activism, instead of just calling this episode “activism”?

Well, hopefully you can see when I put it like that, it sort of lessens the impact. Like I mentioned earlier, you can think of maternal activism as action that is focused on advocating for mothers, and issues that are important to mothers, similar to other types of focused activism, like environmental activism, disability rights activism, mental health advocacy, animal rights activism, and so on. Since my area of research and coaching and everything I put out into the world is centered around advocating for mothers, I want to keep using maternal activism as a way to keep this focus. If we call it care work activism, that takes the priority off the mother, and while there are some cases where that’s appropriate, my goal in my work is to CENTER mothers and their experiences. I approach it as a yes/and, not an either/or, I am centering mothers AND emphasizing action that is also environmentally conscious, anti-racist, supportive of workers rights, supportive of all children, and so on. My maternal activism doesn’t come at the expense of these initiatives, it’s rooted in partnership with them, while still keeping mothers as the central focus of my actions.

And I think it’s helpful to center the mother because for many women, it was the experience of motherhood that radicalized them to fight for social justice. This is certainly my experience. I’d always been a feminist but it wasn’t until I had kids that I really understood gender inequality in a very embodied way. Some of my earliest experiences of sort of, you know, “fighting the system” took place when I was pregnant and I was preparing myself to have a non medicated birth, getting myself ready to demand skin-to-skin contact with my newborn. And that’s pretty commonplace now, but not in 2009 when I was pregnant. I saw the pictures of 17 year old Travyon Martin on the news when he was shot and killed only a few months after my second son was born, and I saw the horrors of racial injustice through the eyes of a mother. I became an activist when I became a mother.

Another reason I want to talk about maternal activism is to raise awareness of the way our nuclear-family-focused, hyper individualistic society has positioned parenting as something that is private, something that only happens in the home between a mother and father. Andrea O’Reilly, a prominent motherhood studies scholar, said this in a 2020 interview: “Child-rearing is very individualized, very private, and even competitive, but that’s not the way children have been raised historically.” This way of parenting is only a decades-old phenomenon. Before, children were raised communally. Siblings, grandparents, and even friends would be there to care for a child. But After World War II, moms were pushed out of the workforce and back into domestic spheres as men returned, making home life “far more isolated and privatized.” Then came the ’90s, and with it the neoliberalism that championed a pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps mentality. It made way for what O’Reilly calls “helicopter parenting,” or a type of parenting that attempts to over-control and over-perfect. quote
“We live in a world that is precarious right now,” she says. “The parents, perhaps understandably, are so anxious that their child will be the one that makes it. They do all this hyper-parenting in the hopes of making their child successful in a world where it’s become so competitive and so individualized.” end quote

So when moms organize communally for the rights of all mothers and children, it helps shatter the expectation that parenting happens behind closed doors. It brings mothering and carework into the front lines, demands that society sees children not individual possessions for parents to shape.
Specific examples of maternal activism

Ok! So let’s take a look at some specific examples of maternal activism, and from there we can discuss what makes them successful, and then I’ll look at one that was unsuccessful to learn from its mistakes

Let’s start with Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America.
Moms Demand Action For Gun Sense in America 468k

Guns are the leading cause of death for American teenagers and children. In 2021, 2,590 children ages 17 and under died from guns, which was a 50% increase from 2019, and there were more than 11,000 emergency-room visits for gunshot injuries. Boys account for 83% of gun deaths, and Black children and teens were roughly five times as likely as their White counterparts.

Which makes Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense, part of the Everytown for Gun Safety movement, a great example of contemporary maternal activism. Founded after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012 by Shannon Watts, a mother of five who was profoundly affected by the tragedy. In the face of the seemingly insurmountable issue of gun violence, Watts sought to mobilize mothers across the United States, and the movement now has chapters in every single US state.

One of the reasons I think Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense is successful that they really tap into the power of storytelling. Storytelling is a highly effective tool for maternal activism movements because it humanizes the issues and creates emotional connections. Personal narratives, especially those shared by mothers, have the power to resonate deeply with a broad audience. This, in turn, motivates individuals to take action, advocate for change, and support the causes championed by maternal activists. In essence, storytelling is a really powerful tool for turning abstract issues into compelling, relatable, and urgent concerns that drive social and policy change.

On their website, moms demand action.org, they have a section specifically devoted to telling stories, organized by stories from survivors affected by gun violence, and volunteers working to enact policy change regarding guns. Oh geez, you all, while I was doing research for this podcast I read a story written by the daughter of one of the teachers who was shot and killed at Columbine high school and I just started crying on the couch. Are these stories effective at resonating deeply with people, hell yeah. These stories resonate deeply with other parents and community members, illustrating the urgent need for action.

I am a subscriber to Jill Filipovic’s substack, and she recently published an interview she did with Shannon. One of the questions was highly pertinent to this topic, so I’ll read it here:

Jill asks: Tell us about the choice to frame your activism through the lens of motherhood. I'm really interested in this because on the one hand, groups like Mothers Against Drunk Driving have had huge successes, and leaning into the mom identity can imbue activist groups with a sense of moral authority. On the other hand, the idea that moral authority accrues from reproduction strikes me as a little reductive; plus moms -- who are often middle-aged women -- are routinely ignored and mocked. Where did the decision to lead with moms come from? Where have you seen power there? Where have there been perhaps unanticipated downsides?

Shannon: When I started Moms Demand Action, I was basing it on Mothers Against Drunk Driving, a nationwide, chapter-based organization of fed-up women that was incredibly culturally influential when I was growing up in the 1980s. These moms were saying, "Drinking and driving is killing our loved ones. Laws are the moral underpinning of our society. If we don't pass legislation making it illegal to drive under the influence, this won't stop happening." And in just under a decade, MADD managed to make it legally and culturally unacceptable to drink and drive. I also felt intuitively that women and mothers were the secret sauce to organizing, and I was correct: women are just incredibly dedicated, organized, relentless and efficient activists. I know this because we've also tried organizing men (shoutout to all of the men who wear Moms Demand Action shirts!). I understand that the idea of using motherhood seems anachronistic to some, but it's also pragmatic -- I hope this changes, but right now society views women and mothers as the caretakers of their families and communities. The reality is that women only hold about 25 percent of the 500,000 elected positions in this country -- we often don't have a seat at the table to make the policies that protect us and our loved ones. In addition, middle-aged women often feel derided or invisible. So the Moms Demand Action brand, which has worked to stay away from saccharine and sentimental stereotypes, emboldens women not just to become activists on a tough issue, but to stand up to armed gun extremists, push back on authority, and to run for office. Conservatives have successfully exploited and demagogued motherhood for decades, which is why we now have organizations like Moms for Liberty. Progressives need to take back the moral authority that goes along with motherhood. I can tell you that (mostly male) lawmakers are really terrified to see Moms Demand Action volunteers show up in their red shirts, or they're really grateful. I'm fine with either emotion because they both move the needle. All that said, none of my adult children are mothers, and I hope that by the time they are, they can just be activists as Americans because they have enough parity and power.

End quote

Now let’s look at another organization, the Black Mamas Matter Alliance
Black Mamas Matter 93.6k
The Black Mamas Matter Alliance (BMMA) is a Black women-led organization that centers Black mamas and birthing people to advocate, drive research, build power, and shift culture for Black maternal health, rights, and justice. BMMA was founded by Angela Aina, first generation daughter of Nigerian parents who credits her upbringing in a close-knit Nigerian community in Atlanta where she was really surrounded by all things fertility and pregnancy and loss.

BMMA was founded in 2018 and their vision is a world where Black mamas have the rights, respect, and resources to thrive before, during, and after pregnancy. BMMA has 4 core goals, to change policy to address black maternal health inequity, cultivate research by leveraging the knowledge that exists in black communities, advance care for black mamas, and shift the culture in order to reframe the conversation and amplify the voices of black mamas.

Black mothers in the united states face a lot of challenges, and the BMMA is a maternal activism organization that has emerged as a powerful force in advocating for the rights, well-being, and dignity of Black mothers. In a podcast interview from September 2023, Angela lists off some of the many serious issues facing black mothers today, starting with the history of doctors learning about gynecology and obstetrics from black enslaved women’s bodies and stealing knowledge and wisdom from black midwives, then turning around and creating this whole medical industrial complex that refused midwifery which is this ancient spiritual practice of bringing new life earthside, but they created credentials that required years of official education, which of course, black women weren’t allowed to get. The book Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction and the Meaning of Liberty By Dorothy Roberts is a really powerful story about some of these challenges too, including the dark side of birth control, where she exposes Margaret Sanger (founder of Planned Parenthood) as collaborating with eugenicists to promote birth control as a way to limit the birth rates of families of color.

So the Black Mamas Matter Alliance is doing really important work in the world by addressing the contemporary disparities in maternal mortality faced by Black women. They have made it a practice ot center the narratives of Black mothers, which humanizes the maternal health crisis and sheds light on the discrimination and bias that Black mothers often face.

One of BMMA's strengths lies in its ability to build a community of support and collaboration. They have formed partnerships with healthcare professionals, advocacy organizations, and community leaders who share their commitment to maternal justice. These partnerships create a network of solidarity that amplifies the collective voice of Black mothers and allies. The organization's annual Black Maternal Health Week, for instance, provides a platform for stakeholders to come together, share knowledge, and work towards solutions.

So BMMA is another powerful example of maternal activism by prioritizing the needs of Black mothers.
Wall of moms
Ok, so now let’s take a look at a recent, very public unsuccessful example of maternal activism, the Wall of Moms in Portland, Oregon. In the summer of 2020, after George Floyd was brutally murdered and called out for his mama, protests against racial injustice and police brutality broke out nationwide. In July, a mother in Portland, Bev Barnum, posted in her working moms facebook group calling for other moms to meet at a protest site on Saturday evening. She’d never protested before, but like many white moms that summer, she was horrified and shocked into action for the first time in her life. As many as 70 moms showed up and they became known as the “Wall of Moms.” They wore yellow shirts, linked arms and used their bodies as a physical barricade between Black Lives Matter protesters and federal agents.

The Wall of Moms garnered significant media attention and initially received praise for their efforts. But pretty quickly it became evident that the group was predominantly composed of white mothers, and longtime Black activists immediately questioned the centering of white moms and their bodies, and how just by showing up, they had somehow legitimized the protests. In an article called The Complicated Rise and Swift Fall of Portland’s Wall of Moms, Rachelle Dixon, a black lives matter chapter founder, is quoted as saying, “People who joined this group who weren’t Black joined it for the proximity to whiteness and their comfort level with that. As a new organizer you need to understand that there are things you don’t know and the reason why you want Black leadership is to show you where the minefields are. Because they are out there and you already stepped on them. And it’s not like your voice isn’t valuable but it’s that you came in on a conversation 400 years into the conversation and then the narrative changed.” end quote

Within days of the initial event, Bev said she had been in touch with Don’t Shoot PDX, and had received their blessing and the Wall of Moms would come under their umbrella. However, shortly afterward, Bev filed paperwork to turn Wall of Moms into a nonprofit, without any consent from some of the black women she’d tapped to lead. This…this was just really bad.

There were several weeks of complicated and messy back and forth, and eventually the group was renamed Moms United for Black Lives and Bev was let go of the organization. Because here’s the thing - even though Wall of Moms got all that media attention, their failure to not noly ensure the inclusion of Black and other marginalized mothers, but to center them and learn from their leadership, serves as a stark reminder that effective maternal activism requires an intersectional and inclusive approach.

Black mothers have always had to think about the survival of their children, and the Wall of Moms' lack of racial diversity raised important questions about the intersection of maternal activism, racial justice, and allyship. To be successful, maternal activism must be sensitive to and aware of the systemic racial disparities that affect mothers and families. This particular group tried to center white mothers in a fight for racial justice, and ultimately serves as an example of an unsuccessful maternal activism initiative. The Wall of Moms' experience is a reminder of the ongoing work needed to create truly impactful maternal activism that addresses the concerns of all mothers.

Ok, so I hope it was helpful to hear about a few successful, and one unsuccessful example of what maternal activism can look like.

I want to start to wrap up today’s episode, but I still have a lot of questions to continue asking - like, is it appropriate to center moms in maternal activism? Does that keep issues that are important to mothers at the forefront, or does that reinforce stereotypical beliefs that moms are just better at advocating for children than fathers are? I mean, it makes sense that mothers would want to advocate for issues that affect their children, but is the most effective way to do that by employing their role as a mother?

Because I think there’s a way that maternal activism is employed that uses the rhetoric of “mom” that evokes this maternal, compassionate, caring image to sort of further agendas that aren’t actually about mothers or children. I’m doing a deep dive into the group Moms of Liberty that says they are dedicated to fighting for the survival of America by unifying, educating and empowering parents to defend their parental rights at all levels of government. They are also the American conservative political organization that advocates against school curricula that mention LGBT rights, race and ethnicity, critical race theory, and discrimination. Multiple chapters have also campaigned to ban books that address gender and sexuality from school libraries.

But there’s probably enough there for a full future episode, so we’ll save that for later!

To wrap it up today, I encourage you to think about examples of maternal activism and how mothers have been fighting to improve their communities forever. For those interested in becoming involved, it is crucial to start by conducting research to assess if there are existing initiatives already working in the same area that have already established effective strategies for addressing issues. Pay special attention to initiatives led by mothers of color. By supporting and collaborating with such initiatives, you not only contribute to the cause but also demonstrate a commitment to diversity and inclusion within the maternal activism movement. Remember, unity and shared goals are powerful drivers of change, and joining forces with established organizations can amplify your efforts and create a more robust and equitable platform for addressing the issues that affect mothers and families.