A Powerful Movement Puts Mothers at the Helm of Social Change

By Courtney E. Martin, AlterNet. Posted August 8, 2008.

The public image of motherhood has certainly gotten a political makeover in the past decade or so. What started with all that punditry about "soccer moms" and "security moms" as the voters du jour in the 2000 and 2004 elections got real with the March for Women's Lives, during which radical moms pushed strollers alongside the dykes on bikes. Then Code Pink emerged as an anti-war force led in large part by angry moms.

Today all the buzz is about "mommybloggers," an unfortunate name for an explosion in women writing online about not just diaper brands and nanny worries but public policy, military spending and a million other topics. A new anthology edited by one such "mommyblogger," Shari MacDonald Strong, is just out on Seal Press, appropriately titled The Maternal Is Political: Women Writers at the Intersection of Motherhood and Social Change. It documents this fascinating shift -- from June Cleaver to Cindy Sheehan -- through essays by some of our time's greatest writers and politicians, including Anna Quindlen, Anne Lamott, Barbara Kingsolver, Nancy Pelosi and others.

AlterNet caught up with Shari MacDonald Strong between family vacations and laptop explosions to find out what this radical mom learned from putting together such an exquisitely written and deeply felt collection.

Courtney E. Martin: The mothers' movement is referred to frequently in these beautiful essays. For those who aren't familiar, can you define exactly what the mothers' movement really is?

Shari MacDonald Strong: I don't know anyone who can, actually. That's one of the biggest challenges facing the movement.

Does a mothers' movement exist? Absolutely. The phrase refers to the fact that over the last decade in the U.S. there has been an increasingly active and passionate effort on the part of mother-centric political groups, and on the part of mothers as individuals and as a broad political demographic, to increase awareness about the importance of mothers' work and to fight for legislation and representation that accurately reflects the needs, values and priorities of mothers in our society. This movement is impossible to define, however, because there is no single political leader, no self-proclaimed "Leader of the Moms," who is calling the shots; there is no one political organization that is dictating exactly what the needs, values and priorities must be for mothers in our society.

As movements go, the mothers' movement is a complex one -- one that is bringing about vital change on many different fronts at once. It's not as targeted as, say, the suffrage or civil rights movements. Countless moms are fighting together to bring about change in such areas as paid sick leave, health care coverage for all children, paid family leave -- something provided by every developed nation in the world except the U.S. -- the provision of quality childcare, equal pay for equal work particularly as it relates to mothers.

At the same time, many other mothers view different issues as being just as important as, or even more important than, these. The mothers' movement assumes that mothers are intelligent and passionate and discerning enough to decide for themselves what is for them the top priority and what they are willing -- especially amid the unending demands for clean laundry, hot meals, etc. -- to expend the energy, and put in the time, to fight for.

CEM: In the introduction you write, "Mothers carry a heavy enough burden without being told we need to do more in the political realm." It reminded me of the Marxist idea that the proletariat -- the working class -- was somehow going to have the energy to rise up and start a revolution, when really, they were totally exhausted after a long day's work. Is the mothers' movement one more example of women taking on too much of the burden?

SMS: Absolutely, it is. And at the same time, who else is going to do it? We've been waiting a long time, for example, for our government to "get" -- and to do something about -- the fact that women still don't get paid equally for the same work as men. Mothers make even fewer pennies on the dollar than single women do, and for the same work -- and single moms make the least of all. Who's going to fight the battle to change this picture, if not moms? Who else is going to notice the problem? It goes back to that old Women's Studies 101 issue of power: It's not just that people with power don't want to give it up; they're often quite clueless about what life is like for those with less.

See more stories tagged with: feminism, motherhood, motherhood movement, mommybloggers, maternal is political

Courtney E. Martin is the author of Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body. You can read more about her work at www.courtneyemartin.com.

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