Are you saying moms need to be liberated from their children?
No. Most moms don't want to be liberated from their kids. They just want more support, more resources, more recognition for their labour, more protections, etc.
What do mothers need to be "liberated"?
Firstly, women need to be able to opt into motherhood with full agency. That means:
> No social pressure.
> No guilt trips from parents about how much they want grandkids.
> No threats from elders or the culture about having no one to take care of them in their later years, or about their life not having meaning without having children.
> No state manipulation via abortion access or contraception access being taken away.
> No religious manipulation and coercion.
Secondly, mothers need to be equally educated about the systems of power that affect them. They need to understand feminism. Feminism, and especially motherhood feminism, has been privileged education until recently. Only academics understood the theories and terminologies that women are now learning through social media: "gaslighting", "invisible labour" and "emotional labour" (which are not the same thing but do cross over in a Venn diagram), "the mental load," "the second shift," and "weaponized incompetence."
Thirdly, anyone who wants to be a mother, who can reasonably provide the nurturing resources a child needs, should be able to, without sacrificing their own long-term well-being, and without short-term suffering. Being a mom is difficult. But it shouldn't produce suffering. Parenting requires temporary sacrifices, like sleep loss. But long-term sacrifices to well-being are borne disproportionately by mothers. Fathers, as a group, don't experience the same long-term sacrifices to the same degree as mothers. This sex-based parental inequity leads to other gendered injustices.
Mothers need:
• wages for all childcare workers, including stay-at-home mothers
affordable childcare
• on-site workplace childcare
• government-initiated child support sent to primary caregivers of children automatically, integrated with our tax offices, eliminating the administrative burden place upon the people least empowered and most exhausted
• accessible and affordable reproductive freedom
• enough funding to schools so that mothers are not relied upon to subsidize public education with their free labour
• living wages for all disabled people
• affordable health care
• healthy food for children—no food deserts in any community
• new housing development for lower-income families first
and more!
How is Undoing Motherhood a movement?
The goal is for "Undoing Motherhood"—the brand—to become a movement. But it's also describing what's already afoot. Motherhood is being undone in two different ways.
1. Mothers are breaking. We are cracking under the pressures of capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy, especially. We are coming undone. This movement has been happening around us and to us.
2. Feminist mothers are consciously, collectively undoing the cultural model of motherhood we've been told to worship. We're saying no. We're calling out the cruelties, inequities, and impossibilities of our dominant culture's model of motherhood of the past 40 years: Women are must maintain dual-income households, and be Martha Stewart in the home, and never miss a child's performance or competition after all the practices they've chauffeured their children to, and keep their marriages together, and maintain strong self-identities that don't embarrass their children, and always be practicing the parenting strategies and learnings of the future in real-time—all with increasingly less state and community support.
Conservative mothers are also consciously and collectively undoing this cultural model. But to them, the solution looks like returning to a more traditional, clearly defined role: one in which mothers stay home, family roles are binary and fewer per person, and responsibilities are predictable. And we get it: split focus is hard!
But this tradwife fantasy trend has reemerged because we don't listen to and believe women. If we did, we'd understand why women pushed so hard for equality in the workplace and we'd be pushing for wages for motherwork.
3. Children are protesting motherhood by way of going no-contact with their parents. Former ideas of fealty owed to mothers are giving way to a prioritization of individual well-being over inherited obligation.
From multiple directions, the motherhood identity we've known is being undone. Seems like a movement from this vantage point!
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