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The cell phone service in backwoods Canada is lousy. Ann Crittenden's voice fades in and out as I sit at my desk in Virginia, scribbling down snatches of notes. I'm trying to conduct an interview with Crittenden, who's on vacation somewhere green and remote. I want to ask her, five years after she wrote a groundbreaking book on the financial perils of motherhood, if she thinks there's a mothers' movement underway in this country. But the limits of technology are proving hard to overcome. At times, all I can hear is a high-pitched electronic whine. We talk over each other, sometimes shouting to make ourselves heard. "I would have to say [crackle] but that's probably true of every [fade] . . . " The electronic whine starts to drown out her words. ". . . mothers aren't mad enough about it. Right now in our culture it's not where. . . " What? What's not where? Mad about what? Just as I am about to ask her to repeat her comment, the line goes dead. As I wait for her to call back, I'm struck by a thought. Here I've been trying for weeks to reach a woman considered by many to be one of the leading lights in the effort to improve mothers' lot. When we do connect, we can barely hear each other. Just when the conversation gets going, we get cut off. We're both pressed for time, so we keep it short. Will we ever get it together? What a perfect metaphor for the current state of the mothers' movement. *** Ann Crittenden was the final interview on my quest to find the answer to a question that's been bugging me for a few years now: Is there, or is there not, a real live mothers' movement going on in this country? Ever since Jennifer Niesslein and I began this magazine, five years ago, we've been hearing rumblings about people and groups that want to change the status quo for mothers in the U.S. Sometimes these rumblings go under the heading of "mothers' rights," sometimes "work/life balance," sometimes "helping families." I wanted to find out if there is a common agenda--a consensus about what is wrong with mothers' lives and what should be done about it--and find out who, if anyone, is leading the fight for change. Because judging by the way the cultural wind is blowing, there's something in the air. In books like Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety, in novels like I Don't Know How She Does It, in newspaper articles like Lisa Belkin's "Opting Out," on TV talk shows like Dr. Phil and Oprah, or reality TV shows like Wife Swap or the comic soap opera Desperate Housewives-- and, if I can say so, in places like Brain, Child--mothers' lives are emerging from the shadows. Mothers' voices have been taking on a new tone, too: confessional, self-expressive, unapologetic. It's a tone that says, "Motherhood is great, but it isn't all hearts and flowers; it's hard work and we shouldn't have to pretend that it isn't." And running under it, that rumble: "Maybe it's harder than it needs to be; maybe we should ask for some changes." But moving from expressing those feelings to agitating for change in mothers' collective lot is like moving from Sunday stroll to Boston Marathon. Part of the problem undoubtedly has to do with definition. Recently, I tried a little experiment with a mother-friend of mine. Me: Can I give you a little word association quiz? Her: I have to pick up Lee from camp in five minutes. Me: If I say "Civil Rights Movement," what comes to mind? Her: Rosa Parks. Integration. Martin Luther King. Equality for African Americans. Me: What about "Women's Rights"? Her: Gloria Steinem. Bra burning. Feminism. Me: Mothers' Rights? Her: (pause) . . . maternity leave? . . . childcare? I don't know. I'd have to think about it. I repeated this experiment with various friends, some who are active politically, some who aren't; some who work full-time outside the home, some who don't; some my age, some younger, some older. Overall, the results were pretty clear. If there is a mothers' movement going on, it hasn't reached my neighborhood yet. *** Three years ago this fall, in October 2003, a sort of mothers' version of a Super Friends summit took place in a conference room at Barnard College, in New York City. Some of the biggest names in motherhood and feminist circles were there, including Kim Gandy, the president of the National Organization for Women; Sylvia Ann Hewlett, the researcher and writer best known for exposing the disappointment career women face when they wait too long to have children; the editor of Mothering magazine, Peggy O'Mara; author Ann Crittenden; the philosopher Jean Bethke Elshtain; and the president of Barnard College, Judith Shapiro. They'd all been brought together by one woman, Enola Aird, founder and director of the group that sponsored the conference, a non-profit research and advocacy group called the Motherhood Project. In other words, not exactly a room full of slouches. During the day-long event, these women debated such questions as "Where does motherhood fit in the vision of a liberated life for women?" and "What can maternal feminism teach us about building a motherhood movement today?" At the center of the conference was the Motherhood Project's own "Call to a Motherhood Movement"--part manifesto, part spur to action. Motherhood, according to the Call, is under siege in America. "We, women who nurture and care for children, we who mother, call all mothers to a renewed sense of purpose, passion, and power in the work of mothering":
Mothers must overcome divisions of race, background, religious or political affiliations, and work status, it continued. Mothers must rise above the historical division between "equal rights feminists"--those focused on gaining rights for women in the public sphere--and "maternal feminists," those focused on gaining recognition and support for nurturing children. "All too often, efforts to raise the concerns of mothers have been perceived as attempts to undermine the gains of feminism," it said. To get anywhere, the different brands of feminism need to make peace. "We seek to build a 21st century motherhood movement that will move us all forward, building on the advances of the women's movement to extend equal rights to mothers and put mothers' concerns about children and nurturing at the top of our national agenda." The Call, written by Aird and other members of the Motherhood Project, is a stirring document. It hits a lot of the right buttons for kick-starting a movement: coalition-building, the end to the so-called mommy wars, the idea that the concerns of women from left and right can be set aside in favor of working to raise the value of caregiving in the public eye. It's a strong foundation on which to build a movement. Okay, then what? The Motherhood Project conference got some press at the time it took place. I vaguely remember reading about it. But then Aird's group fell off my radar. If I--whose job it is to keep up with motherhood-related news--hadn't heard much about the Motherhood Project for a few years, could it be that not much has come of it? Over the last six months, I've tried to track the progress of this thing-- this shape-shifting, squishy, now-you-see-it, now-you-don't movement--and I've come to think that maybe the Call was more prophetic than prescriptive. All the seeds of schism are outlined there--all the issues that divide mothers working toward a movement. Would a movement be mother-focused or child-focused? Would it be a branch of feminism? What kind of feminism? Would it ask for legal rights for mothers? Would it be aligned with the political left or the right? I'd envisioned my quest to find out what was going on in motherhood circles as a journey. At the end, I hoped to find a nice place with a bunch of good people gathered together-- kind of like a big family reunion. But as I went along, it came to seem more like a road trip between the houses of a bunch of relatives, some of whom don't exactly see eye to eye. *** First stop: the Motherhood Project's Enola Aird. Aird is a lawyer and former director of the anti-violence group Safe Start and the Black Community Crusade for Children. She founded The Motherhood Project in 2000 with an ambitious agenda. It would hold conferences like the one in New York, but it would also create a Mother's Council, an advisory group of women, including Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Peggy O'Mara, the actress Frances Fisher, Children's Defense Fund founder Marian Wright Edelman, the heads of attachment parenting organizations, leaders of community change centers, college presidents, authors, filmmakers, psychologists, and plain old mothers. The Council would meet twice a year to "analyze the forces shaping the future of motherhood and the vocation of mothering," to produce scholarly papers on the issues, and "to target opinion-makers, activists, and policymakers through print, video, audio and Internet media." The Motherhood Project would also act as a cultural watchdog, identifying forces in advertising and public life that undermine the essential innocence of children. "We want to take a fresh look at mothers and mothering," Aird says, "especially by bringing together mothers from different perspectives. We want to find ways to focus on the things that aren't right--like that mothers in our culture are not valued. And that there ought to be more support for mothers in the work of mothering. We believe there's something important about mothering that needs recognition." When I talk to other mothers' movement figures, there is a tone of caution in embracing the Motherhood Project. Because the movement on the whole seems mostly populated by lefties, the fact that Aird's organization is housed at the socially conservative Institute for American Values--known for its emphasis on the importance of marriage and its opposition to liberal divorce laws--raises alarm bells for some. "The Institute is focused on family and civil society," Aird says carefully. She knows the rap well and has clearly had to defend this ground before. "They're focused on values. Values are a mothers' issue. The Institute allows me to pursue these issues. But I'm not right wing--I'm an independent. A lot of people would rather call me names and argue over the marriage question than engage. I would rather say, ÎWhat concerns do we have in common? What can we do to redirect a culture that's going in the wrong direction?' How can we find ways to speak to one another?" "Enola is clever and brave to create an organization of people who wouldn't otherwise talk," says Andrea O'Reilly, the founder of the Association for Research on Mothering at York University in Toronto, the first academic society dedicated to research on the history, ideology, literature, and evolution of motherhood. O'Reilly is a member of the Council who at times has been, in her own words, "a thorn in the side of the Motherhood Project." She worries that Aird's image of a morally superior "mother world" that exists in contrast to the greedy and individualistic "market world" is a throwback to a nineteenthöcentury value system. In other words, if mothers are the angels in the house while fathers go out to wrestle the devil in the workplace, where does that leave mothers who work and fathers who stay home? Can only mothers mother? "I would hate to see this kind of rhetoric take over and reinforce old gender roles. Yes, mothers' work should be validated, but not linked solely to mothers," O'Reilly says. "Enola's group really has that underlying bias: Good mothers stay at home. If you absolutely have to work, they'll support you, but the bias is there. "Whenever an organization talks about putting children first, over and over again, I worry that that means mothers come second," O'Reilly continues. "Some activists would say that, in this particular political climate, that's the strategy you have to take. You make it about the children. But I get concerned that our strategies will end up becoming our reality." It's an argument that mimics the disagreements among feminists: Maternal feminism, which Aird supports, takes its cue from difference feminism, which stresses that men and women have different biological and emotional make-ups. Equity feminists, like O'Reilly, don't want to base their arguments for women's--or mothers'--rights on difference, but on the fundamental sameness of all human beings. Aird, who was born in Panama and raised in Brooklyn by two aunts and an uncle, remains sensitive to the tendency of mainstream feminism to reflect the experiences and desires of white, middle-class women. While she dislikes being pigeonholed in any way--"I'm much more complex than any one label can represent," she says--she will readily call herself a womanist, Alice Walker's term for black feminists. The maternalism underlying The Motherhood Project may appeal to all women. But no version of feminism, so far, has been able to cover all ground. Historically, middle-class white women have had to fight to get into the workplace; historically, women of color and poor women have had to struggle to be in an economic position to stay home with their kids. Given her background, it's understandable that Aird would want a mothers' movement not to repeat the failures of 70s feminism. Certainly some mothers want a better way to combine paid work with raising young children--but others have good reason for wanting more respect and more support for not working during their kids' early years. But a bigger problem with The Motherhood Project might be just keeping the momentum going. The Council (today down from twenty members to fifteen) meets sporadically. ("We meet when we can," Aird says.) The website is updated only a few times a year. The vow to host gatherings of small groups of mothers around the country to get feedback on the Call to a Motherhood Movement hasn't really been fulfilled. Public action by the group has mostly been confined to efforts to protect children from "negative and debasing media and advertising images." (Several articles on the site are devoted to Janet Jackson's Super Bowl breast-flash.) The recent release of its most sustained and potentially important piece of work--an in-depth phone survey of 2,000 mothers around the country--frames its findings in such a way that it almost seems as if the group wants to underplay the possibility that mothers want things to change in any meaningful way. Aird herself is absorbed these days writing a book on what she terms "militant motherhood." And when I ask her about the most pressing issues facing mothers today, she talks about her concerns over things like the effect on mothers and children of genetic engineering and cybertechnology, rather than about ways to extend equal rights for mothers. *** Perhaps the biggest boost for mothers' equal rights came in 2002, in the form of Ann Crittenden's The Price of Motherhood. If The Feminine Mystique was the book that laid the seeds for the women's movement of the 1960s, The Price of Motherhood may someday be regarded as the one that did the same for the mothers' movement. The Feminine Mystique famously brought to light the problem that had no name: women's internalized oppression. It had no name because women had always subordinated their own desires because they lived in a culture where it wasn't accepted to express dissatisfaction with their lot. The Price of Motherhood sheds similar light on the way the culture of motherhood is doing women wrong. But instead of encouraging women to say "I'm not happy with the choices I'm being given as a woman," it prompts mothers to say "I'm not happy being screwed out of financial security because I've chosen to be a mother." The book puts the wrongdoing in concrete, economic terms. A woman who leaves the workforce to care for her children, Crittenden shows, forgoes an average of $1 million in lifetime income. That money not made translates into money not put away for retirement, and, crucially, money not paid into the Social Security system. In the single most-often cited finding of her book, she demonstrates that having children is the leading predictor of a woman's poverty in old age. Crittenden's book broke ground. Here was real evidence of a disservice being done. Here was a foundation upon which change could be sought. It was real, it laid out the numbers, it could hardly be passed off as women's whining. A few months after the book was published, the National Association of Mothers Centers (NAMC), a national network of neighborhood mothers' support groups, took up the cause and started an initiative called Mothers Ought to Have Equal Rights (MOTHERS). From the beginning, in 2002, Crittenden lent her name and support to MOTHERS, as did fellow writer Naomi Wolf, whose book Misconceptions reflected her own misgivings about the way mothers are treated. According to Linda Juergens, the head of Long Island-based NAMC, MOTHERS was set up as a grassroots organization to gather support for an Economic Empowerment Agenda, a listing of "the basic family-friendly policies that American caregivers need and deserve." They include paid family leave for each parent, refundable caregiver tax credits for anyone caring for a dependent, re-evaluation of Social Security for mothers, elimination of the marriage tax penalty, assured child support for children of divorce, and universal quality preschool, among others. On the MOTHERS website, mothers are asked which three "hot button issues" are most important to them. Two years ago, NAMC sponsored its first Mother's Day Project to raise awareness of the lapses in Social Security for at-home mothers that Crittenden's book pointed out. They urged mothers to fax their congressperson a copy of their Social Security statement with all those dangerous 0s circled. Last fall, NAMC hosted a conference on motherhood at their headquarters in Long Island. This year, NAMC launched the MOTHERS Book Bag, a blog on motherhood-related books. So far, however, MOTHERS seems to have generated more light than heat. Crittenden and Wolf aren't involved on a daily basis. The problems and proposed solutions are clearly laid out, but--perhaps owing to its laissez-faire, grassroots structure--MOTHERS hasn't been able to fire up individual mothers to fight the good fight. When I checked in August, the online discussion forum had just over a hundred members. When I ticked off my "hot button issues" on the website, I was taken to a page that told me how others voted, but no effort was made to sign me up for any petition or collect my name to work on my pet issues. (There is information on the site on how to contact other activist groups.) MOTHERS is led by an all-volunteer staff, most of whom have full-time, paying jobs making demands on their time and attention. NAMC itself is mostly focused on helping the women in its forty local chapters. Juergens' energies right now are directed to getting grant money to train peer facilitators in postpartum depression counseling. She admits that NAMC's focus on mothers' health and local support leaves little left over for building a more formal political advocacy organization. "This is still a person-by-person revolution," says Juergens. "There is change happening, but the pace is pretty glacial." *** The idea of a glacially paced movement frustrates Judith Stadtman Tucker. From her home in New Hampshire, she surveys the mother-movement scene and records what she sees at the website she created in the spring of 2003, the Mothers Movement Online (MMO). Each month she publishes an e-newsletter containing the latest news that affects mothers, interviews with mother-activists, reviews of books, and her own long and incisive analyses of motherhood issues. She's outspoken, old school in her feminism, unapologetically left wing. To Tucker, a mothers' movement would do nothing less than take up the torch of the New Deal, continuing to fight back against forces that want to undermine the government's role in helping to ease the burden of the poor, the disadvantaged, and the underserved. "We've had lots of movements on behalf of children, like Mothers Acting Up. We've had Mothers Opposing Bush. But we've never had a movement on behalf of mothers themselves," Tucker says. "When I started the Mothers Movement Online I found a huge number of women intensely interested in hashing over ideas, looking for ways to meld the larger impetus of the women's movement and issues of motherhood in a coherent way that doesn't reinforce gender ideology." Of all the women I spoke to for this article, Tucker seems to have the most panoramic view of what's actually happening on the ground. If anyone would know what's holding back an activist movement, she would. "There are lots of seeds out there. But I don't believe there is a unifying politics of motherhood," she says. "Mothers don't think alike just because they're mothers. So some mothers will get behind certain issues--like paid parental leave--and other mothers will take a more pro-business stance and oppose it, believing it will ultimately hurt them. "When the women's movement kicked off, it was thought that all women would get behind it because it talked about issues that all women shared. In some ways that was right--all women became more sensitive to sexism and sex discrimination. But in other ways they weren't unified and still aren't. "The mothers' movement hasn't taken off yet because there's a divide that exists between whether this is a maternalist movement or if this is about the politics of motherhood aimed at resolving the social disadvantages of motherhood," she says. It's a divide that keeps Tucker from signing on with the maternalist camp of Enola Aird, for instance. Tucker seems to have the desire and focus to direct a mothers' movement. But so far, she is a committee of one. Now that her two children are eight and twelve, though, she's got more room to think and act. In our conversation, she alludes to the possibility of starting her own non-profit organization this fall. "I have a framework in my head," she says, "revolving around outreach at the community level." She'd like to translate those 30,000 visitors to her website each month into a well-oiled political machine to work on issues like paid childcare and paid sick leave. "I feel the momentum growing," she says. "There's a lot of energy out there that needs to be tapped." *** If you had to select one mothers' organization to spearhead a movement--one with the best access to this energy--the national support organization Mothers & More might be it. Mothers & More has reach. It has history. It has depth. Founded nearly twenty years ago, it now has over 175 chapters across the country and membership of around 7000 women. Local chapters serve as a sort of welcome wagon for new mothers, enabling them to meet one another and break the isolation that often accompanies becoming a mother. Bi-monthly newsletters and an online listserve bridge the geographical distance between members, providing a place for them to discuss motherhood issues in general. And while the demographics of the group shows them to be mostly suburban and financially above the national average, its members are philosophically and politically diverse. Mothers & More has a neatly formed hub and spoke structure with a national headquarters in Illinois and individual chapters dispersed around the country. On the face of it, a perfect set-up for a movement. In 2003, the group released its Power Plan, a statement of beliefs--mothers' work has social and economic value; mothers shouldn't be economically penalized for caregiving; women should be supported in how they combine paid work and parenting--and a plan for spreading these beliefs, primarily by "educating mothers" and "raising public awareness." Two years ago, the group created the Apple Pie in the Face Award to censure public figures whose actions perpetuated outmoded or insulting images of mothers; Dr. Phil got one for his staged catfight between stay-at-home and work-outside-the-home mothers. This year they added the Apple of Our Eye Award, the first of which went to Brooke Shields for standing up to Tom Cruise's bashing of mothers who take drugs for postpartum depression. But that's as far as it goes, for now. What's holding back this group from being the prime mover in a mothers' revolution, says founder Joanne Brundage, may be its very success in doing what it set out to do when she started it nearly twenty years ago from her kitchen table in Elmhurst, Illinois--providing camaraderie and support to groups of mothers. "It's a dilemma," she says. "We've had so many mothers credit Mothers & More with saving their sanity. But it seems like the happier a mother becomes in her own life, the less likely she is to agitate for change for mothers everywhere." A poll of Mothers & More members last fall showed a significant percentage who would prefer that the group focus on what it does best and leave the advocacy alone, she says. As she told Judith Tucker in an interview last year, "Even among those members who acknowledge there are external things that need fixing, many worry that tackling these issues will create differences of opinion and friction within the membership. Women don't want to threaten the friendships with the women they have met and bonded with." "I am afraid that if mothers lose their anger and frustration too much, they'll wake up one day and say ÎWhat was I so worked up about?' " Brundage says. "They may think things are getting better for mothers, but it's not really true, on a macro level." For a week this summer, I joined the Mothers & More Power Loop, their online discussion forum, posting questions about what a mothers' movement might do and how. The women who responded were engaged and articulate. Former reporters, public servants, lawyers, professional activists, and business executives joined in, citing statistics, linking to relevant articles, offering up stories from their personal and professional lives. All seemed eager for a mothers' movement (and so perhaps were not representative of Mothers & More as a whole), though they weren't of one mind about whether one had actually begun. I asked them what percentage of the women they knew were actively dissatisfied with some portion of motherhood today and what percentage they thought would actively get behind a movement for change. "60% dissatisfied. 5% willing to do something about it," answered Jennifer Cerequas, a member from Verona, New Jersey. "I agree with Jennifer. And I think that 5 percent is all you really need, if it's a committed 5 percent," added Tracy Thompson, an author and former Washington Post journalist. "You know how sometimes in a kids' magazine they show a close-up of a weird object and ask you to guess what it is? It may be human skin magnified 1000x or an avocado?" wrote Mimi Shankin, of Cary, North Carolina. "That's how I feel our mothers' movement is happening. Because I am doing things on such a small scale and I'm in the throes of motherhood, I can't see what the full-blown bug picture is." Shankin went on to tell a story to illustrate the small ways the movement may be happening:"
"So there was my tiny step in the movement," she wrote. "If you asked me on paper whether I'd be willing to take action toward a mothers' movement, I may say no. Lots of excuses, lack of vision, and fear stop me from making big waves. I think this only proves how I am unable to see our movement for its actual size versus my very magnified view of it." Mothers & More has been a constantly evolving organization. Even the way the group's name has morphed over the years reflects its growth, from the hapless sounding original, Formerly Employed Mothers At Loose Ends (FEMALE), to the more optimistic Formerly Employed Mothers At The Leading Edge. In 2000, it became Mothers & More, "to reflect the many additional roles mothers play during their active parenting years." Whether more of them will add "activist" to their roles remains to be seen. *** With all the schisms, from within and without, no one gave me the impression that the ideological differences were insurmountable. In fact, all the players in the mothers' movement seemed, if anything, eager to build consensus, happy to be one pole of a big mothers' movement tent. Still, you can have all the good ideas in the world for a mothers' movement--and even a willingness to work together--but to get something done you've got to have a big platform. The kind they have in Washington. The real question isn't why mothers haven't achieved more through activism, says Karen Kornbluh, but why Washington hasn't responded. Kornbluh, former director of the Work & Family Program at the progressive New America Foundation, knows a lot about how Washington works. Mothers' rights activists can expect pushback from any number of quarters, she says. Childless workers who resent the idea of subsidizing paid parental leave. Conservative politicians who are opposed on principle to expanding any entitlements. Religious fundamentalists who believe childcare is a woman's calling and that anything that makes it easier for women to work while having children violates the natural order. Mothers' issues don't divide as easily along political lines as you might assume, Kornbluh points out. Yes, some social conservatives in the Republican party don't want to provide any family subsidies that might make it easier for mothers to go out to work. But other GOP members like the idea of providing more support for families, because they believe a lot of mothers who don't have to go out to work wouldn't--they'd stay home. Democrats aren't opposed to social programs per se, but they're gun shy on large-scale legislation and torn between addressing the needs of middle-class families and making sure the needs of the poor are taken care of first. Three years ago, Kornbluh outlined the initiatives a mother-friendly candidate ought to be working toward. (Many are the same ones supported by Mothers & More, MMO, and MOTHERS. The Motherhood Project, thus far, hasn't gone on the record to advocate them.) Among them: ð providing universal after-school care and universal pre-school ð ending "parent penalties" in the tax code ð exempting secondary earners from payroll taxes ð requiring paid leave ð giving at-home parents tax-subsidized health insurance, pensions, Social Security credits, disability insurance, workers' compensation, and a childcare tax credit to compensate for income they lose by caring for a child Not a bit of it made it to the national agenda in the 2004 election. One factor, Kornbluh says, may be that too many politicos still seem to live in a time-warp bubble where decisions about work and family are framed as lifestyle choices, not economic imperatives. "I've talked to politicians--even Democratic politicians--who don't believe me when I tell them that in seventy percent of families both parents (or the single parent) work," she says. "They say, ÎYou're kidding!' The truth is, they're still afraid that if they talk publicly about working mothers, it will be perceived as appealing to a small special interest group. They don't realize how popular a reform message would be." Politicians are attracted to narrower issues than sprawling things like work/life concerns. And they listen to the squeaky wheels. Politicians listen to seniors, for instance. Seniors are very vocal--and they make up about a quarter of voters. But parents with kids at home make up even more than that, Kornbluh points out: they're one-third of voters. Parents are a tougher nut to crack on the constituency front, however. Says Kornbluh, "Unlike seniors, working parents don't necessarily look to the government to help." *** If I heard about the parallels between the mothers' movement and the feminist movement of the Î70s once, I heard it a million times. At some point it became almost irresistible to try to cast the leaders. Who's going to lead the mothers' movement? Who, in this decade, is going to don the spangly sunglasses and carry the bullhorn of the revolution? Every time a new book on motherhood and its current discontents breaks into the news, its author is hoisted briefly onto a pedestal. So far, they've all scrambled back down again about as fast as their legs could carry them. It's not surprising that writers get asked to provide the answers to the problems they expose. But it may be asking too much to expect them to provide the inspiration and the stamina of a team leader too. Earlier this year at a journalism conference in Maryland, I met Judith Warner, author of this year's big book, Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety. Her book had just hit the news, with a long excerpt as the cover story in Newsweek. She'd been on the Today show two days in a row. She was running a gauntlet of television and radio and magazine interviews. Warner is a petite woman with dark hair and big dark eyes. She strikes me as articulate and thoughtful and smart. She also looks tired and a little shell shocked not least because she is suddenly being asked by so many women what they should be doing to fix the madness described in her book. When I ask her what she thinks a mothers' movement would look like, she grows impassioned about the kinds of steps the government could take to help mothers (like redefining tax policies for families or providing universal quality-assured preschools) and how such a movement could be organized (in small house parties, following the model of Howard Dean's presidential campaign). But when I ask her if she would be willing to put herself forward as a leader, I can see her calculating the distance between me and the door. "We need somebody with the visibility of a real politician," Warner says. "That's something I lack." When I pose the same question to Ann Crittenden, even bad phone reception from backwoods Canada can't disguise the reluctance in her voice. She pauses for a moment before answering. "I really think I can do more for mothers by writing and speaking than in an organization," she says, almost apologetically. "It's what I do." Writers are rarely also built for public life. But those who would gladly lead need what they call in the book publishing world a platform--name recognition, fame, a built-in audience--that, to date, most of the candidates who aren't authors lack. Judith Stadtman Tucker laughs when she's asked if she's considered trying to lead a mothers' movement. "I've been accused of being the Gloria Steinem of the new era," she says. "In many ways, it's my fate. It comes out of me of its own volition. I have a role in this, especially in framing and articulating the issues." (Tucker was instrumental in shaping Mothers & More's Power Plan before she left to launch MMO.) But in more sober moments, she is reticent. "I see myself as a thinking person rather than being out in front. I don't see myself as a grand leader." "At some point, all movements need someone out front, but I don't think we're there yet," says Enola Aird. "When we have a critical mass agreement about an issue, then people will say that somebody's got to take charge. I do know that the male power-down model of leadership needs to be looked at skeptically." Others say the idea of the single-leader movement is outdated. Linda Juergens of NAMC says that having a leader for each different area--one working on Social Security and tax issues, another on universal pre-school bills--might be a more effective idea. "You have a number of different champions, each working on their own goals," she says. It may be that we're looking in the wrong place for leadership, ARM's O'Reilly points out. That leadership may not come from an educated middle class, the kinds of mothers wracked by guilt and over their heads in intensive mothering--or the kind that write books about it, for that matter--but from women from the working class, who have less time to wring their hands and feel bad about whether or not they're living up to somebody's notion of good mothering. They may be women who know real hardship, who come from traditional working class backgrounds where labor unions and grassroots fights are family lore. Tucker points to welfare rights activists in low-income communities. "Most of them are mothers, working hard to argue that care for family has social and economic value," she says, such as the women of WEEL (Working for Equality & Economic Liberation), who convinced Montana's social services bureaucracy to subsidize poor women to stay home with their infants instead of signing up for the daycare subsidies under the welfare-to-work system. "Women all over are lobbying for community health care centers, for culturally appropriate childbirth education. Their broader mission is to respect the experience women have. But you don't hear much about them. They're local. They don't have websites or brochures. They're doing important work--it's just not being seen." *** As I talked to these women from Illinois and New Hampshire, New York and Washington, I got the sense that everyone knew that there was potential here to make history. I also got the sense that everyone was aware of the potential for missteps. Why do some revolutions take off and others falter? What makes some groups more successful in fostering change than others? Andrea O'Reilly points to the work of philosopher and women's study professor Patrice DiQuinzio of Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania, who has been studying mothers in social activism; she researches the ways women use their identities as mothers to effect social change. In a recent paper, she compared two mother-driven movements, Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) and the Million Mom March (MMM). MADD was instrumental in changing drunk-driving laws across the country, saving thousands of lives. MMM held a huge anti-gun rally on the mall in Washington, D.C. in the spring of 2000, emceed by Rosie O'Donnell, resulting in. . . not very much. The difference? MMM was a top-down driven organization, organized and led by a central consort of women in Washington. It fizzled because it didn't have the kind of grassroots structure that created buy-in by a significant number of women. It didn't have a strong enough agenda. MADD, on the other hand, was a ground-up group of bereaved mothers with crystal-clear goals. "Groups that talk in nebulous phrases like ÎChildren Matter' aren't going to get this movement going," says O'Reilly. "We need to agree on a few concrete aims. We have to say, ÎThis is going to be our first fight and we'll get to the one thousand other things that need doing next.' Okay, let's start on working for four months paid maternity leave. Let's be unified in our goals." It's not just the quality of the ingredients, others say, it's the temperature of the oven. More than the lack of focus, what's dragging back a mothers' movement is a cultural climate that's conservative, in every sense of the word. Women in the 1960s and 70s had the force of a tidal wave of change happening all around them. The mood was right for demanding change of all kinds. "It takes a broader climate of change to make a movement happen," says Ann Crittenden. "Right now in the U.S. it's not there." The year 2003 was promising--the Motherhood Project conference, the launch of MMO, the Mothers & More Power Plan--but it was also the year the war in Iraq started. Is it any wonder that, for many mothers, inequality isn't at the top of the list of things to be worried about? Then there are those mothers who believe in all the goals--but still think there shouldn't be something called a Mothers' Movement. "I want there to be a feminist movement that thinks about the issues of motherhood and support in the workplace," says Miriam Peskowitz, author of The Truth Behind the "Mommy Wars": Who Decides What Makes a Good Mother? "But I don't know if it needs to be a mothers' movement. I'd rather see it as a parents' movement, or better yet, a family values platform for progressives." "I do think it's still important to keep mothers in the title," counters Karen Kornbluh. "That's the thing about identity politics. You have to face it: mothers are still the ones who are hurt by the current set-up. Mothers are the ones up in the night worrying about what's going to happen to them if they divorce and they're left with a big gaping hole in their Social Security. At the same time, men must start taking their family leave, demanding part-time jobs and childcare before we'll see real change." *** Maybe asking mothers to commit to a social movement is like getting water to run uphill: it can be done, but there are strong forces pushing against it. If ever there was a class of person consumed by the local and personal, with fewer disposable hours to spend on life outside, observers of the nascent movement say, it's mothers. Others reject that description. Mothers have organized successfully in the past many times. The temperance movement was led by mothers. Peace movements have been led by mothers. Mothers Against Drunk Driving was led by mothers. Mothers can organize. If they want to. It doesn't take everyone--just a critical mass of motivated people. Mothers with kids under the age of five have less time to pledge to activism. But if they can just hold onto the feelings they had when they were most pressed--if they don't forget how hard it was in the early years--they can harness those feelings on behalf of other mothers, on behalf of their own daughters when they one day become mothers, says Brundage. Right now, the hard part, according to most of the leaders in this movement, is convincing women that things don't have to be the way they are now. That's why so much begins with consciousness raising. Every single person I talked to about a mothers' movement talked about the need for mothers to have their consciousness raised. For a movement to go anywhere, enough mothers have to start to believe that: a) it's okay to want help caring for your children and family; and b) it doesn't have to be a personal solution, like asking your friends or your parents or your church. Mothers can begin asking for changes from companies that are working employees longer hours than in any other industrialized nation; protesting a retirement insurance scheme that overlooks non-income-producing mothers; agitating against a government that preaches self-reliance and the value of work but forces women with small children and limited means out into the workforce without even providing help for their children. As Mothers & More member Kimberly Tso says, to get there you have to believe that help can come from Washington: "We may not be able to have a unifying politics of motherhood, but we need to have a majority agreement that government can make a positive difference in our lives." "There is a movement going on," insists Linda Juergens, NAMC director. "What makes it hard to see is that it covers a lot of activities in different places with different ways to focus on the issues. But there is a movement. Mothers are opening their mouths. The culture is shifting." When I get Ann Crittenden back on the phone, her voice at last comes through clearly: "Social change is incremental and under the surface. The real revolution will happen in people's minds. When their minds are changed, structures change." And that is where the mothers' revolution is right now. I hung up and started writing. Like Lennon said, we're all doing what we can.
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