In December, I read a news article that had me cursing at the computer with rage. It was a New York Times investigation detailing allegations of poor treatment of mothers by Planned Parenthood, including not offering maternity leave, mistreating pregnant workers and discriminating against moms in hiring and promotion. So why did this get me so much more worked up than average? After all, we live in a general cascade of bad news, with no shortage of things to be outraged about. The story made me particularly angry because, in addition to being a mother myself, for the last two years I’ve been researching and reporting on working mothers. And the more I learn about motherhood in America, the angrier I get. Many thoughtful articles and interesting books are exploring new levels of anger in the public sphere – and there’s been a lot of attention on exploring our current renaissance of women’s rage. While mothers today are rightfully involved in all sorts political organizing and public protests, I think we should also make space to be truly pissed about what it’s actually like to be mother in 2019.

Let’s start at the beginning. When a woman learns she’s pregnant, she immediately becomes vulnerable to the “epidemic” of pregnancy discrimination; it appears no industry is immune. Mothers are more likely to die in childbirth in America than in most industrialized countries, and that rate is climbing. Even more disturbingly, black mothers are nearly 3.5 times more likely to die than white mothers. As hospitals try to address this, some of them appear more interested in blaming mothers for their own deaths than proactively changing outcomes. Since we live in the only industrialized country that doesn’t mandate paid family leave, nearly 25% of mothers go back to work within two weeks of giving birth. To give you a sense of where human mothers fall on the legal protection hierarchy, it’s illegal to separate a dog from her newborn pups before eight weeks in several states. Once we return to work, we unfortunately can expect anti-mom bias in hiring, pay and promotions. And, if a woman has a baby between the ages of 25 and 35, she can expect a lifetime of economic marginalization and diminished earnings.

While all of this is happening, the social expectations of mothers are becoming more intense. At home, mothers do more housework and childcare than fathers, even when both parents work full-time, and mothers today are doing just as much hands-on parenting as stay-at-home mothers did in the 1970s. We now live in a time where every basic parenting decision, like whether it’s OK to leave a child in a parked car for five minutes, is judged, analyzed, and sometimes even criminalized. And studies have a found that mothers are judged more harshly than fathers for making the exact same parenting decisions. I believe what it means to be a “good mother” in this era has become a total farce, increasingly out of reach for non-wealthy parents. Directives now include giving gifts to adult airline passengers who might have to suffer the indignity of hearing your child cry, interactively “co-viewing” TV with with your kids rather than taking a few moments of time for yourself while they’re occupied, and spending weekend “free” time shuttling children to expensive and time-consuming enrichment activities. The New York Times journalist Claire Cain Miller’s reporting shows that there’s no clear evidence that this form of parenting actually benefits kids, and it certainly succeeds at making many mothers stressed and miserable.

As a society, we have a deeply uncomfortable relationship with mothers getting mad. But that hasn’t stopped us in the past. Women, fueled by anger, have invoked their identity as mothers in all kinds of fights for social justice throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. Mary Harris, known as “Mother Jones”, was a powerful and fearless labor leader, seen as a mother figure to thousands of workers after losing her own children to yellow fever. Mamie Till, the mother of the lynched teenager Emmett Till, pushed to allow photos of her murdered son to be publicized, which helped galvanize the civil rights movement nationally. Mothers, of course, are instrumental to a number of powerful social movements we see today, including Black Lives Matter, the Women’s March, and teacher strikes. But when women invoke their status as mothers in activism, as we see with Mothers Against Drunk Driving, Mothers of the Movement, and Moms Demand Action, it’s nearly universally to advocate for others – most notably our children. We have not yet seen much anger-fueled activism and organizing on behalf of ourselves.

Mothers are right to be feeling some pretty intense emotions about the hand we’re dealt. But instead of bonding together in righteous fury, I hear a lot more talk about “mom guilt”. “I talk about guilt with mothers every single day,” says Alexandra Sacks, a reproductive psychiatrist and coauthor of What No One Tells You: A Guide to Your Emotions from Pregnancy to Motherhood. She notes that moms she’s hearing about guilt from aren’t just those who are seeking psychiatric care, but women she’s interacting with at lectures, workshops and on social media. She agrees that as a society, we are much more comfortable with mothers expressing guilt than we are with mothers expressing anger.

What’s very clear is that no one is coming to stand up for mothers if we don’t get angry and stand up for ourselves

Guilt and anger actually operate in different parts of the brain. Guilt is an emotion that operates in the right frontal cortex, and encourages a “withdrawal motivation”, causing us to retreat from experiences we find difficult. Unfortunately, no large-scale academic research on moms and guilt even exists to help put mothers’ current experience in historic or cross-cultural perspective. Some evolutionary psychologists theorize that guilt exists to help enforce social norms, and in the case of mothers, I don’t think many of those norms are doing us any favors. If we’re constantly inundated with the message that we’re personally doing something wrong, this leads to a brain response that shuttles us toward avoidance and isolation rather than outspoken defiance. In short, guilt keeps mothers quiet.

Anger is different from guilt from a neurological perspective. It operates in the left frontal cortex, which encourages “approach motivation”. Despite its bad rap, anger, which is different from aggression, is actually an outwardly much more productive emotion. Neural maps of the brain show that anger can energize us to move towards challenges – rather than retreating. For mothers, I think tapping into anger could motivate us to speak up more about the injustices of our experience and take action. Angry people go to protests, sue their employers for discrimination, challenge unfair work and legislative policies and demand more from their partners at home – and loudly reject intensive parenting. I think society would be much better off if we saw a lot more angry mothers doing all of those things. “You can’t organize a group of victims,” Marshall Ganz, a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School who’s an expert in social change, recently told the Atlantic. “If people only see themselves that way, there’s no sense of agency, no sense of power. But when you tell them that we’re fighting an injustice or an offense to their dignity, they become angry and involved.”

Despite all of this, I’m actually optimistic that things are starting to change for moms. (Maybe it’s because I’m angry – anger actually leads to increased optimism.) I’ve spent nearly a year reporting for a new podcast about working mothers, for which I’ve been talking to women across the country, from executives to sex workers to politicians to musicians. What all of these women have in common is that they are refusing to accept the way things are for mothers in America, and they are doing something about it. One of the women I spoke to is Nydia Sanchez, who owns a 24-hour childcare center in Las Vegas that caters to an extremely overlooked group – single mothers who work overnight. “It is amazing what these women do,” she told me, “how they stand on their own two feet.”

It is amazing what we as mothers can do, and how we stand on our own two feet. But I don’t think we should just accept our lot in this country, because it doesn’t have to be this hard. And that’s why I was so furious about the report on Planned Parenthood. If one of the most prominent women’s rights and health organizations has allowed illegal discrimination against mothers and poor treatment of pregnant workers, there is no denying what a huge problem we urgently face.

The upside of that devastating article was that the women interviewed for that story knew what they had experienced was wrong. They were mad. So they spoke up. But what’s very clear to me is that no one is coming to stand up for mothers if we don’t get angry and stand up for ourselves.

Katherine Goldstein is a journalist and the host of The Double Shift podcast, a reported show about a new generation of working mothers





