Organizing around motherhood works. It can activate women politically by helping them tap into a powerful identity. But maternal activism can also have some unintended consequences that don't advance justice. So in the final episode of the season, we're asking this season’s guests: should the left still be playing into maternalist politics? Or can we evolve beyond it — to a kind of politics that focuses on values, not a fixed identity, and makes space for all caregivers?
Organizing around motherhood works. It can activate women politically by helping them tap into a powerful identity. But maternal activism can also have some unintended consequences that don't advance justice. So in the final episode of the season, we're asking this season’s guests: should the left still be playing into maternalist politics? Or can we evolve beyond it — to a kind of politics that focuses on values, not a fixed identity, and makes space for all caregivers?
This season's cover art features a photograph by Jonathan Wilkins.
White Picket Fence is supported by Planned Parenthood. For more information or to book an in-person or virtual appointment, visit plannedparenthood.org or call 1-800-230-PLAN.
Julie Kohler (interview):
So I'd like to pivot a little bit and maybe ask a bit more of a personal question
Julie:
Throughout this season, I’ve asked my guests a lot of questions. I was trying to get a better understanding of the ways that motherhood and politics intersected. But some of the most illuminating answers came from a more personal line of questioning:
Julie (interview):
How does, how does your experience of mothering really inform your activism?
What role does motherhood play in your own political activism or political identity?
Did that experience of becoming a mother change the way that you approached these topics?
Patrice DiQuinzio:
Uh, that is a good question. Um, and of course that's changed, uh, over the course of my children's lifetime.
Dani McClain:
Yeah. I think things became a lot less theoretical, right?
Arionne Nettles:
it does feel a little different once you're a mom. It feels so different when you have a person that you have to protect. And it does feel as if you have to be involved in some way.
Danielle Atkinson:
My children are the most brilliant, beautiful children that teach me about myself every single day. They teach me never to substitute other people's wisdom for my own wisdom, right? They are, they are experts in their own lives, and, and I'm learning to parent them differently than I was parented.
Shannon Watts:
It is still the, the main reason I do this. My kids are grown now and I'm an empty nester, but I'm still constantly worried about their safety. No one sort of tells you that it doesn't end at 18.
Jennifer Jenkins:
I always say to people, I'm a registered Democrat because of what I believe. I don't believe what I believe because I'm a registered Democrat. And I feel like that's the same thing to your question. I advocate for what I believe in and for my child because it's what I believe in and what is best for my child. Not because someone told me that it is.
Monifa Bandele:
Yeah. I think becoming a mom was really the spark.
Julie:
I’m Julie Kohler, and this is White Picket Fence.
We’ve spent this season exploring moms as a political force. How our identity's been weaponized—and used as a force for good. We’ve explored the nuances of progressive maternal activism. The ways that it can also reinforce conservative views of women’s family roles. And reflect race and class privilege. We’ve discussed how we can course-correct by centering Black and brown mothers in the fight for justice — and in the policy solutions that we all champion.
But I have to be honest – there are still some aspects of motherhood activism I’m feeling unsure about. Women – and mothers – are not a monolith. So sometimes I wonder: is it too broad of an identity to be organizing around? And of course, there are so many women, so many caregivers, who aren’t mothers. But still have a stake in these issues. How do they fit in?
Right now we’re in a critical moment where the issues at stake are determining our freedoms and our children’s futures.
We can’t just give up this space to conservative moms, who are working to resurrect an outdated family ideal. Repeal fundamental rights. And weaken our democracy.
In this episode, we’re going to examine the concept of maternalism and the role it should play in our politics. And we’re going to return to many of the people we’ve talked to throughout this season to figure out what a contemporary playbook for motherhood activism should look like.
Julie (interview):
Patrice, thank you again. I'm looking forward to getting into so many of these juicy topics with you today. So thank you for joining
Patrice DiQuinzio:
Oh, it's my pleasure.
Julie:
Patrice DiQuinzio is a political philosopher who studies motherhood and feminist theory.
Patrice DiQuinzio:
I got interested in feminist theory toward the end of my time in graduate school. And while I was a graduate student, I became a mother myself. And I had the rare chance to meet a wonderful scholar who had really, published the first serious philosophical work on mothering. And that's what got me started.
Julie:
Part of Patrice’s work deals with feminism as it relates to maternalist politics – which is an academic term. But the definition, by now, should sound pretty familiar.
Patrice DiQuinzio:
Maternalist politics, is the kind of political action, political activism that women engage in as mothers, like sort of leading with their identity as mothers, as a basis on which the ideas they're advocating the changes that they're calling for, those should be adopted because they're speaking as mothers, they have the experience of motherhood and that gives them some authority in the political realm.
Julie:
Basically… what we’ve been talking about this whole season. But as we’ve seen with the trad wives, and other conservative activists, maternalist politics don’t always align with feminism.
Patrice DiQuinzio:
What I really am interested in is the way in which the identity “woman” and the identity “mother” don't overlap, and yet both are imbued with just incredible ideological resonance. And it's that place where they don't neatly overlap. That I think generates a lot of contradictions or paradoxical experiences. And I'm interested in exploring those and seeing if there are some ways to determine when a maternalist kind of politics is the appropriate or best approach. And in other contexts, it might not be the best approach. There might be some other basis on which women or anyone steps into the political arena and claims their right there.
Julie:
We know that it’s a strategy to organize under the banner of “mom.” But there are also potential pitfalls.
Patrice DiQuinzio:
I have the concern that maternalist politics inadvertently solidifies the idea that I call essential motherhood, that women are meant to be mothers, all women want to be mothers. Mothering is the most important thing about women. That may help move a particular activist agenda forward to some extent, but it's not necessarily moving a more overall feminist agenda forward.
Julie (interview):
I'm also wondering what impact maternalist politics has on women's political agency and political voice more generally. Like what specifically are the implications then for women who aren't mothers who don't have children?
Patrice DiQuinzio:
On the one hand, there's the question of if I'm a woman who has no children, has not given birth, has not experienced any kind of caregiving that resembles what mothering is there even a place for me in this movement?
Julie:
Patrice is grappling with what seems like the most important critique of maternalism: that it can be reductive…and exclusionary. By focusing on this one aspect of our identities—it can limit us that role. It also alienates women who aren’t mothers. It implies that they have less of a right to speak on issues that they may care deeply about.
And: It erases the myriad of ways that people care for children. Like Florida Representative Michele Rayner, who you heard from in episode 1.
Rep. Michele Rayner:
I am not a mother. I do have a lot of godchildren. I do have a lot of nieces and nephews that I feel like I mother.
Julie:
For Rep. Rayner, mothering is not biological—or even necessarily gendered. It’s about the ways you love and show up for children.
Rep. Michele Rayner:
I think for me, I always am very, very intentional about wanting to make sure, especially our nieces and nephews and godchildren who are of color, that they remain as free as they can be. So instead of the terrible twos, it's the terrific twos. Instead of, oh my gosh, she's wild. No, she's free. Because we are in a world that will – is actively trying – to snatch away little Black girls and little black boys, the little brown boys and little brown girls and children's freedoms.
Julie:
That love can be expressed both in our private lives…and in our public roles.
Rep. Michele Rayner:
A good chunk of my legislation I'm filing this year is based on children, children's rights. Not being able to possess, uh, a firearm in a sensitive place. So a school of daycare also a social media safety bill for children.
Julie:
Rep. Rayner is not a mom. That doesn’t make this legislation any less valuable. At its worst, maternalist politics would negate her right – or others like her – to lead on these issues. The limiting nature of maternalist politics doesn’t stop there. Here’s Patrice again.
Patrice DiQuinzio
Without taking the time to think through, who do you mean when you say mothers who is in a position to claim that identity? The mothers from the more dominant groups become The Mothers of maternalist politics. And to the extent that maternalist politics relies on mothers’ moral authority, you're inadvertently playing into the good mother, bad mother distinction. Cuz of course, if someone is a bad mother, then we shouldn't listen to what she has to say or what she recommends that we do.
Julie:
Ideas of “good” and “bad” mothers are not arbitrary….
Patrice DiQuinzio:
There's a long history and better scholars than I have written a great deal about how the distinction, good mother, bad mother plays out across other kinds of lines: race, sexuality, socioeconomic class. So they are inadvertently substantializing that distinction of good and bad mothers. And it's not clear that there's any room in the maternalist movement for the quote unquote bad mothers.
Julie:
You know…In some ways, to some people, I am one of these quote unquote bad mothers. I’m a single mom. And some people use that to delegitimize my ability to speak on certain issues.
I get “feedback” on my writing—or even this podcast—that gets pretty personal. Here’s a recent email:
“Depth of psychotherapy could help you to overcome whatever is keeping you from forming a whole family. This goal is natural, not nostalgic.”
On one level, I can kind of shrug this off. Trolls are part of the game. But on a deeper level, there’s something that’s so cruel about calling another family unnatural. No one should have to endure that.
And it makes me think: If others can prevent a person from evoking an identity by telling them they’re not “deserving enough” or “good enough” to claim it, is it an identity worth centering in our politics?
In fact, it’s such a slippery slope that sometimes, being a mom can be used to delegitimize women altogether. Even “good” moms.
Patrice DiQuinzio:
The appeal to emotion cuts both ways. It may get some folks to listen to what a group identifying themselves as terms of mothers. Uh, it may get some folks to listen more clearly to what they say, but it opens up the opportunity to delegitimate them on exactly the same terms. Their arguments aren't worth listening to. They're irrational, they're based only on emotion.
Julie:
And it can narrow the scope of what we allow women to speak about.
Patrice DiQuinzio:
I worry that again, inadvertently a maternalist politics delegitimizes women to speak on other topics because they're only supposed to be concerned about various political issues because they're mothers. Right? So if that's the case, then they don't have anything particularly useful to say about political issues that don't come down to or have some connection to mothering.
Julie:
In other words, maternalism pigeonholes moms and women more generally.
The assumption is that we only care about the books our kids are reading in schools or how we’re going to pay for childcare. When really, the needs and concerns of moms are much more varied.
Maybe that’s why maternalist politics fit so well into the Right’s wheelhouse.
Patrice DiQuinzio:
I think it is easier for conservative women to mobilize political activism as mothers because they're more comfortable, I suspect, with that close overlap of an identity as a woman and as an identity as a mother. And perhaps not as concerned about who might be excluded when you deploy that rhetoric of motherhood as the basis of your political agency.
Julie:
It’s more complicated for progressives. We’ve fought for women to have agency in a whole variety of roles and domains and spaces. We’ve fought for equity. And in a way, maternalism puts us back in a box. So if this identity is so much more fraught for the left….should we organize around it?
More on that after the break.
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Julie:
So I, like Patrice, may have some reservations about maternalism. But here’s another truth: it works. Shannon Watts is a prime example.
Shannon Watts:
I think Moms Demand Action was needed to galvanize women and mothers. Look, do I hope that my children or their children have to use monikers that carry the weight of, of somewhat anachronistic roles. I don't, I, I hope they can just be, you know, Americans for whatever, but we also have to be pragmatic and, and I think that's where we are right now. And, and the fact that we've had so much success in passing good Gun safety legislation and stopping bad bills in educating people about secure storage, in electing guns sense champions. At the end of the day, it's because people want to stand with moms in red shirts.
Julie:
And there’s a reason for that. Because being a mother is meaningful. Fundamental to who we are. So many of our guests this season referenced how deeply felt the identity of ‘mom” was to them. How it influenced—or even drove—their personal activism.
Here’s Monifa Bandele
Monifa Bandele:
Becoming a mom made it more urgent, you know, to deal with the broader issues that are facing women and girls. And so it's shaping me every day. It shaped me when they were born, the urgency of making sure that they were able to live a better existence than me and my mom.
Julie:
Ashley Walker
Ashley Walker:
So, I always say I do this work selfishly, right? I do it for my daughter. She means the world to me. She is everything to me. So everything I do is to make a better life for her. Right now, we're at a stage in life where my child will have worst experiences than I had growing up, and that should never be the case. Right? As a parent, the first thing you wanna do is make life better for your children and for your future grandchildren. And that's what I want for my daughter.
Julie:
Dani McClain
Dani McClain:
I mean, I think what comes up for me is this need to take it personally. It's not a pastime. It's not, you know, something to opt into because you've got a few extra hours per week. It's your child who you love more than anyone, and your kid's peers who you're hoping, you know, grow up alongside your child. You see them at risk, and you have to do something. And so you spring into action.
Julie:
Danielle Atkinson
Danielle Atkinson:
My children have been not only my inspiration, but my biggest educator on what we need to do to change society.
Julie:
I relate a lot of what you just heard. Like Ashley, so much of the work that I do is for my son…directly or indirectly.
Like Danielle, being a mom teaches me about myself…what my strengths are. What my shortcomings are. It may be cliche, but motherhood is both amazingly joyful… and incredibly hard. And when you listen to people talk about their mothering experiences, you realize that it gives you something of a shared language. A way of connecting.
Simply put, motherhood is universal. Here’s Patrice DiQuinzio again:
Patrice DiQuinzio:
Not all women share the experience of motherhood, but all women have some relationship to it. And so that it can be a unifying identity, even for women who are not literally birth giving mothers.
Julie:
And if we don’t acknowledge that, then we’re ignoring something that can build connection and that sense of shared fate that Monifa Bandele talked about in our last episode.
Monifa Bandele:
People do feel connected and are inspired by working with folks through a common identity. There's a greater sense of trust. There's a greater sense of, you understand what I'm going through, I understand what you are going through.
Julie:
It’s undeniably true that mothers’ voices have helped diversify the political agenda. There are so many issues, especially pertaining to caring for infants and young children, that simply would not have received the political attention they did were it not for moms. Here’s how Dani McClain described it.
Dani McClain:
Our politics are definitely strengthened because mothers need a lot of support. We do the right thing by lifting up mothers, the plight of mothers, the needs of mothers, the needs of families, in the center of our political discourse. Like, we need to figure out how to have policies in place that support, you know, childcare and, all the ways that are, that the, the things that we need to have better work-life balance. I'm sure we could look at, you know, a number of bills and find bills that are floating around committee that are, you know, would, would go a long way toward helping us. The question is, why are they not moving? Like absolutely we should be centering mothers and we should be centering families, but what is it about our political system that won't let us do that?
Julie:
In other words, perhaps the problem isn’t with maternalist politics but with a political system that is frankly…sexist. A system that minimizes the importance of any issue pertaining to women and children. And so maybe the right question is not whether maternalism should have a role in our politics, but how we should be evoking it. Thoughtfully. Intentionally. Strategically. In ways that change the system.
How do we do that? Well, Patrice had an idea to get us started. In some ways, good motherhood activism looks a lot like successful … mothering. Both require us to acknowledge differences and a willingness to put ourselves on the line on behalf of others.
Patrice DiQuinzio:
It has to start with the difficult work of recognizing other women's experiences and how their experiences are differently structured than yours are. And even if you have your identity as a mother in common, if you have certain privileges, your experience of mothering is gonna be very different than theirs.
Dani McClain:
I don't wanna be in the trenches with like someone who just like identifies as quote unquote progressive. I don't actually care about that anymore at all.
Julie:
Here’s Dani McClain again.
Dani McClain:
I don't care about that. I don't care about these political labels that people give themselves. I wanna know how do you care? How do you show up for people? Deep relationship is everything. And that honestly at this point in my life, I don't really even believe in effective organizing that doesn't place deep, deep relationship building and nurturing at the center.
Julie:
Deep relationships allow us to build bridges. And to create onramps so that others see themselves in this work. Shannon Watts talked about how this was a key part of Moms Demand Action’s strategy.
Shannon Watts:
I think we've been very sophisticated in our approach in that we are not just moms anymore, just like Mothers Against Drunk Driving. We are all concerned Americans, and we have so many people joining us, mothers and others, students and survivors. I think that we are more than just the name moms now, but that it is that idea of being caretakers and doing what is best for our children and our communities that guides us. I think there's power in that
Julie:
For the Round Rock Black Parents Association, who we heard from last week, the desire to be inclusive and build bridges is reflected in the organization’s name.
Here’s Ashley Walker, the group’s chief communications officer.
Ashley Walker:
Well, dads are parents too. You know, dads love their kids just as much as we love our children as well. Right? Then there are parents who may not identify as a mom. You know, they can be film presenting, but not be a mom. They're parents, though. It doesn't stop them from being a parent. And so we wanted to make sure that we included everybody who's important to a child. And it's not just for parents, it's for guardians and those who love the kids around them, the Black kids around them. So we chose that particularly because we wanted to make sure that everyone felt as if they could be included.
Julie:
And they're not the only ones who are working to find ways to encourage more men to engage in activism on behalf of kids and families. Earlier this year, Representative Jimmy Gomez created the first Congressional Dad’s Caucus.
Rep. Jimmy Gomez (speech):
I approach this whole thing with humility, recognizing we’re getting a lot of attention for what women have always done. But what matters is how do we use that attention to really help women, children, and families across the country.
Julie:
The group aims to bring attention and advocacy to the policies that support working parents. Many of the same ones that were proposed in President Biden’s Build Back Better bill … but that ultimately got stripped out.
Acknowledging the fact that men can be caregivers—that they’re also implicated in this fight—could help us get to a point where maternalist politics morph into a politics of care.
We’re already seeing the beginnings of this evolution, thanks to organizations like the National Domestic Workers’ Alliance. NDWA organizes care workers and leads campaigns that unites the interests of those workers with parents. With anyone who’s a caregiver. Which, if we’re being honest, is most of us.
What I like about the politics of care is that it connects us around a set of shared values — rather than a fixed identity. An identity that can still conjure up ideas of a specific type of family. When in reality…
Dani McClain:
Mothering is a set of caregiving activities, and we should think about those actions as something kind of separate from this fixed identity of the mother
Julie:
Organizing around care has other advantages. It allows us to see the dignity and value in all kinds of families. Here’s Dani McCLain again:
Dani McClain:
You can look to Black women to create families, outside of those kind of patriarchal ideas of, you know, the nuclear family, as the kind of ideal for raising children. I think we have a lot of practice historically in leaning on our families of origin for other adult support as we raise our children. I think what's important about that is not just that we do it, but that we do it with pride and with a sense that, you know, these other kind of families that we put together are just as good for our children, and that we are piecing together, you know whether it's with a grandmother, whether it's like within an intergenerational household, or it's, you know, a woman living with her sister and those sisters raising their children together, but that we are focused on putting the right adults together in a home to help us raise our children.
Julie:
Once we recognize the dignity and value of all families, so many other things are possible. We can move beyond thinking just about our rights as parents – and towards the shared responsibilities that we all have for one another.
Dani McClain:
Throughout many interviews that I had done with Black mothers and grandmothers this idea that this path that we're on this life journey that we're on with these children, yes, we wanna have a nice life and we wanna do all that we can do, like for our kids, but we also see a kind of broader community responsibility and the need to have an engagement in our communities. And our efforts are not just on our own behalf. Our efforts are on behalf of something larger than ourselves.
Julie:
Doing so allows us to shine a light on the important roles that many people play in children’s lives.
Dani McClain:
What I suspected, and what I found to be true,, is that community is really the answer. That none of us can do it on our own. And that, you know, I might be her primary parent, but I lean really heavily on other folks, both blood relations and, like a kinship network that I've developed to help me do it and help us survive.
Julie:
It lets all children know that they’re valued.
Dani McClain;
I think some of toppling these ideas about what's normal and what's best and what's right can just strengthen kids. So they're not in these environments where other children and other families are looking at them as if there's something wrong with them. And other families and other children can see that they are loved and that they're cared for and that they're doing well, and that they're thriving regardless of whether that kind of nuclear family is in place.
Julie:
And it positions women and mothers to have political agency on a wide variety of issues. Because our competence is not limited to the domestic arena.
Dani McClain:
I think toppling these ideas that the nuclear family, you know, is the best, is also just about another way to topple misogyny. Because we're talking for the most part about women-headed households. And so part of the kind of assumption is that a woman isn't positioned properly to be head of household. It sounds so antiquated, but it really still has a hold on the public imagination. Like there really is this belief that we just can't do it, that we can't make the decisions, that we can't manage the finances, that we can't make enough money. And so I think a kind of normalizing of women-headed households chips away at this idea that we're not capable and that we can't raise strong kids.
Julie:
We need to rewrite the stories we tell about families. Yes, I want my son and I to be recognized as what we are – a family. And yes, I want the same for millions of others who also don’t fit the traditional nuclear mold.
But I also think this rewriting is key to unlocking new ways of thinking about all kinds of issues. Like what a strong economy looks like. What vibrant communities look like. Once we rid ourselves of the myth that it’s just one type of family—a married mom and dad, living alone, with their kids—that creates stability we can design policies that actually work.
So here’s where I land. I believe in a kind of politics that meets people where they are. That taps into our shared humanity. I believe in a politics that valorizes love and care, not outdated tropes about family roles. I believe in a politics that builds the sense of shared fate.
And I believe … there’s a way for maternalism to do all these things. We can talk to mothers, and honor the importance of that identity in their lives – and then broaden the conversation to other values.
And at the same time, we need to evolve beyond maternalism. Because we’re evolving. Our needs are evolving. Our families are evolving. And that evolution can be good. So, toward those ends, I think we should acknowledge what we really mean when we talk about motherhood. Love. Care. Community.
We’re in for some tough fights ahead. I am worried about this moment: the backlash movement that we covered this season…The tired image of motherhood that they are weaponizing. I’m worried about the rights that conservatives are eroding in their quest to codify the traditional family.
But I’m also inspired by the activists who are fighting back and saying “not in my name.” Who are changing the motherhood narrative. As we build a better future for all of us to live in, we're building on that bedrock. We're making deep connections, making space for nurturing, tapping into our power. In other words... mothering.
White Picket Fence is a Wonder Media Network production. Our producers are Maddy Foley and Taylor Williamson with production support from Abbey Delk. Our editor is Lindsey Kratochwill. Executive Producer is Jenny Kaplan. Original music by Sean Petell.
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