On Mothers Day in 2000, I joined my four sisters in Washington D.C. at the Million Mom March. We shared a sense of urgency around gun violence, a belief in the power of protest, and a history of activism. Yet I had hesitated to go. My sisters were all mothers. I was not yet a wife; I would never be a “mom.”
But of course I should have and did participate, along with hundreds of thousands of others. The protest was a surprise success in turnout and media coverage. The name was meant to energize, not to exclude, and it did more of the former than the latter.
Today, advocacy organizations and political campaigns across the ideological spectrum continue a century-plus American history of seeking to mobilize women through appeals to motherhood. Influential groups such as Mothers Against Drunk Driving and Moms Demand Action were founded on these appeals.
Unfortunately, news organizations have tended toward this same language, too often using “mothers” and “moms” as shorthand for women. Women received coverage during the 1996 presidential campaign as “soccer moms.” It was said that “security moms” would decide the 2002 midterms. “Hockey moms” and “mama grizzlies” came to the fore in 2008. After Trump’s election, it was “MSNBC moms” and “wine moms” and when he ran again in 2020, “rage moms.” Some of these labels were created by campaigns for voter targeting before they were adopted by the media.
The blame for this conflation sometimes rests with headline writers who, for brevity’s sake, reframe articles about women voters as articles about mothers. Sometimes the problem is one of evidence: making claims about mothers can require relying on broader data about women or married women. But too often “mom” and “women” are used interchangeably even within the same piece.
What the media means by “mom” tends toward a much smaller and particular subset of women — white, married to a man, living in the suburbs, with minor children. This demographic garners political coverage in part because to big-tent Democrats, they represent possible swing voters while for base-stoking Republicans, they overlap with the party’s core. Regardless, as Kerry Howley explained a decade ago in Slate, if you are a female voter in an election year, what kind of mom you are may be in question, but “you’re definitely a mom.”
Becoming a mother can alter or deepen concerns, presenting an opportunity for advocacy groups, parties, and candidates. Political strategists have long known that when women become mothers, they can become more politically aware. They also undergo modest “attitudinal shifts,” as Jill S. Greenlee explained in her book about how women’s politics are shaped by having children, “The Political Consequences of Motherhood.” These can relate to various issues. In a recent example, activist Amara La Negra said that “becoming a mother to twins…changed her perspective on the urgency of addressing climate change.”
Politicians, of course, want to take advantage of those changes. But Greenlee discovered this becomes part of a feedback loop: campaigns use language and framing, the media echoes them, and campaigns see the echo as evidence of the validity of their language and framing. As a result, mothers and motherhood may get more attention and women without children, not so much. This perpetuates, Greenlee says, “an old tradition of rooting female political power in motherhood.”
This phenomenon has allowed some mothers the benefit of being courted by political parties and heard by journalists. But defining women and their worth by their relationship to children doesn’t just flatten their identities. It limits whether and how politicians and the media try to reach women, what they are invited to weigh in on, and how they are received as political candidates. Mothers know and care a great deal about child care and school shootings, but they also know and care about voting and abortion rights, foreign policy, inflation, Social Security, and a host of other issues.
The “mom” moniker has power when it comes to a handful of topics, highlighted by a recent CBS interview with leaders of Moms for Liberty in a segment on education. The astroturf far-right group is the kind of organization newsrooms might otherwise hesitate to platform, certainly with so little context. As Media Matters explained:
CBS Sunday Morning elevated far-right “parental rights” organization Moms for Liberty during a segment about book banning that left out some crucial details: the group's routine harassment, extremism, and violent threats against librarians and school officials; details from the co-founders on what books they want in schools; and the role far-right media played in their rise.
At the same time, the rhetorical interchangeability of “mom” and “woman” has left many women out of critical conversations and provided for the discrediting of speech by those who aren’t mothers. It allows propagandists such as Senator Tom Cotton to claim with his straightest of straight faces that Randi Weingarten, teachers union leader and former high school teacher, lacks authority on child development and education. Why? She’s not a mother.
The thing is Weingarten is a mother; she’s a stepmother. Nevertheless, Cotton’s ad hominem was renewed in odious person yesterday by Marjorie Taylor Greene, who used her time during a House hearing on pandemic schooling to explain how Weingarten — who as head of the American Federation of Teachers has spent countless hours over decades in classrooms and working with parents and students and educators and educators of educators — has nothing meaningful to say about education because she has not given birth.
It wasn’t a random attack. During his 2022 campaign for US Senate, Ohio’s J.D. Vance unleashed a replacement theory-fueled and grotesque attack on childless politicians, claiming that Americans who haven’t reproduced are less invested in the nation’s future and thus unpatriotic and unworthy of political influence. Beyond unqualified, these politicians are suspect. On Vance’s list was a woman who has devoted her life to public service and is now the highest-ranking woman in American political history, Vice President Kamala Harris, a stepmother. To today’s GOP, Harris and Weingarten aren’t real mothers and haven’t earned what real mothers earn: an assigned seat at the table.
The persistent sense that motherhood, not personhood, is what affords women a political voice or even full citizenship helps explain why we find our sexual and reproductive rights — control over our own bodies — under attack. With the first presidential campaign since the overturning of Roe v. Wade now underway, the media has a responsibility to avoid language that encourages this notion.
To fulfill the urge to produce the usual fare about which groups will “decide the next election,” journalists and pundits might want to look at the large and growing number of women who don’t fit the circumscribed political profile of “mom”:
with the median age in the US for giving birth for the first time now 30, swaths of young women are not “moms”
the percentage of women (and men) without children who say they “don’t expect” to have them (by choice or not) has risen.
a disproportionate number of people without children are in same-sex relationships and the number of transgender women is small but growing
the last of the Baby Boomers are becoming empty nesters, swelling the ranks of mothers with adult children and of older women, who, if they are grandmothers, have identities beyond “grandma”
These American women share concerns with each other and with women who fit the circumscribed political profile of “moms” and even with those who fit the far-right’s further circumscribed profile. They also have distinct concerns. And they vote and support campaigns — or could be encouraged to do so by a media ecosystem that includes them.
It’s time to break the mom code.