What is this "movement"
and how do I join?
GOAL #1: Changing our minds
By providing mothers with the language and ideas from academia that never make it into the broader culture, mothers have the vocabulary and understanding to redefine their identities, their lives, and their desired outcomes as mothers.
GOAL #2: Changing our lives
By offering mothers the community and tools they need to dismantle the causes of The Motherhood Pain Hexad—Shame, Isolation, Exhaustion, Trauma, Grief, Cost—they can redesign their mindsets, mom-friendships, their nuclear families, and their language.
GOAL #3: Changing our culture
By creating working groups of collaborative mothers from diverse perspectives who have shared vocabulary, values, and understanding, we change the world. We can support each other, strategize social impact initiatives and political advocacy, and fiercely protect each other.
How is Undoing Motherhood a movement?
Calling it a "movement" is both a declarative goal and a recognition of a burgeoning conversation (previously exclusive to academic spaces) that is happening on social media (mostly TikTok).
Some of us moms are coming to the same realizations at the same time, using the same language, even: "scapegoats," "oppression," "gaslighting". We're talking about "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." As women learn from social media the language of abuse and trauma, and as they learn feminist theory, they realize what academics have been saying for decades: motherhood is oppression. It's the apex of women's oppression.
Moms sharing their ideas on social media deserve to learn how their own intuitions and theories about their experiences are well-supported by academics. Academics deserve to have their research and brilliant theories reach the general public.
We need to turn this growing awareness into actual social change. Undoing Motherhood isn't about merely "changing the narrative." It's about tangibly changing the world. Mothers need cultural and policy changes yesterday.
We need:
- affordable childcare
- on-site workplace childcare
- wages for all childcare workers, including stay-at-home mothers
- 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
- new housing development for lower-income families first
- and more!
And this is to everyone's benefit! Because when we liberate moms from the currently oppressive motherhood experience, mothers will change the world.
Mothers create, by definition. We made all y'all! When we are the primary caregivers of children, we have a major (but not exclusive) impact on our culture's values, norms, habits, and outcomes.
This recognition of our importance is mostly lip service. Mothers aren't cared for as if we're the hubs, the linchpins, the keystones—the place of origination where, if it were removed or entirely rotted, everything else would fall apart. And yet, that's the truth. Primary caregivers of children are that important.
When we recognize the importance of a role, but we don't support or reward the role, we set people up to fail. They're positioned to be manipulated scapegoats.
Once these dynamics are called out, once the contradictions of how moms are regarded versus how they're treated is made clear, it's all so obvious. But what to do next?
An easy starting point? Learn, engage, and share ideas with your network:
Follow and share content to your stories, to gently expose more people to these ideas. Sharing to Stories is a great way to let people opt-in to whatever you're passionate about without directly proselytizing.
Follow and stitch your experiences and ideas to the videos! Download and share to your Instagram Stories by editing the video in your phone into 1-minute chunks, so you can upload the whole thing to your Stories.
