Every time motherhood radicalizes someone, an angel gets its wings
Katherine Goldstein masterminds taking back care and getting sh*t done; icymi
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When I had a new baby, I was going to work on four hours of sleep, and inevitably with baby spit up on my clothes every day (I would always find the spit up after I had arrived at work, and always in a new place it seemed).
At some point around this time I googled some version of “working mom with infant this is bananas how do you do it?” And up popped Katherine Goldstein.
In her 20’s Katherine Goldstein had been an “all-in on Lean-in” corporate feminist, climbing the ladder at exciting New York media companies. But at 32, she found herself as a new mom without a job and with a 6-month-old with health problems, convinced she was a failure and that “everyone else had this working mom thing figured out except for me.”
She started an award-winning journalistic podcast about the experiences of working mothers called “The Double Shift” (named after the challenge of the two jobs/sites of labor that working moms toggle between) to “challenge the status quo of motherhood in America.”
Yes, this woman gets it, I thought while scrubbing spit up from my pant leg.
Katherine has since gone on to become a Harvard Nieman Journalism fellow, researching why so many working moms feel like failures and the social and economic forces that make motherhood in America so difficult.
The Better Life Lab at New America published her report this fall titled A Playbook to Transform How America Cares. She basically went on to become a badass advocate of gender and care equity (and mother to pandemic twins, oy). She is also the creator of the Double Shift community including the Double Shift newsletter.
Last week Allison interviewed Katherine and icymi, you can find the whole wonderful interview here. Katherine’s work and the interview struck me as especially relevant this week as a Vox article on “maternal dread” and the fact that Millennial women are having fewer kids got a lot of traction.
The article itself is actually quite nuanced, but has spawned a new batch of takes on how motherhood is super great and women just need to suck it up.
A couple days ago, I saw a video based on the story that had thousands of views on social media. In it, a woman bizarrely argues that yes, there are reams of evidence that American women are more likely to die or be injured in childbirth, and that raising children has become unaffordable in the U.S. But what we need is a counterbalancing narrative to all this doom and gloom that is bumming Millennial women out! We need a counterbalancing narrative about how motherhood is wonderful and super duper.
To which I say, y’all, the narrative that motherhood is super duper is the only narrative we have ever had until now! Women speaking up now about the struggle is the counter narrative!
Which is why I love the unflinching work of Katherine Goldstein who has steadfastly been documenting that nope, motherhood right now is not super duper. Care in America—how we take care of children, how we take care of our sick loved ones, who we take care of those who are aging (which will be all of us sooner or later!), is not super duper.
The narrative doesn’t need to change, circumstances need to change.
And Katherine Goldstein has done the homework to create a playbook for how to change the circumstances by building the caregiving movement.
Here are a few of my favorite takeaways:
Normalize care
Instead of changing the way that we talk about motherhood to support the status quo, we can change the way that we talk about care, and how it impacts everyone. As Allison and Katherine note, the notion and narrative of “care” in the U.S. that is commonplace in other places is still fairly new here. It needs to be normalized.
“When I say I'm working on a playbook about care, a lot of times people think I'm talking about health care. And so immediately I'm, like, “No, it's everything else. It's all the ways we care for people,” said Katherine.
“And I actually think we should not just talk about policy names. If you say “universal pre-K” that’s a policy, and people may or may not know the details, the ins-and-outs of that.
But if you say “how we care for children,” basically everyone can understand. How to care for children is something worth fighting for.”
Extend the role of caregiver beyond “moms”
“I recently did a poll and asked, “How many of you identify as a caregiver?” And some people are like, “Well, some days more than others.” I'm like, “If you identify any day as a caregiver, I think you are a caregiver.”
That can really help people understand that it can be very inclusive. We think of it as early child care or early child rearing. But what about doing insurance paperwork for your elderly parents from across the country? Making sure your sibling’s medications are lined up for the week? That is caregiving.
The idea that women are naturally better at care work – I think that especially younger parents, especially millennial men, are really interested and open to challenging that idea. There's more and more awareness that caregiving is not inherently gendered.”
Don’t despair, dig in. The care movement is just getting started
“ [Care] policies are wildly popular. And corporate greed [that often blocks care policies] is a wildly popular villain. So we have all the great building blocks for an effective political movement.
There just has to be coalescing, and there has to be a lot more money behind this movement. We're going to take them down the way and get the policies we deserve the same way people did with Big Tobacco. The climate movement has spent decades working on this. The care movement has spent like, three years working on this. But I think it's absolutely possible to do.
Very few things radicalize anyone more than personal experience. So I think that it’s good that people are allowing their personal experiences to connect to the systemic.
I like to say every time every time a woman says motherhood radicalizes her an angel gets its wings.”
I’m not interested in reverting to narratives that uphold the status quo, or take us backwards. I’m all for moving forward with a new narrative.
Katherine’s playbook for the care movement includes practical solutions from unionizing to starting your own ballot initiative. Read the rest of Katherine and Allison’s interview here.
The Vox article by Rachel M. Cohen can be found here.
Amanda Montei wrote a great piece on “maternal dread” this week that can be found here.
MATRIARCHY REPORT is written by Lane Anderson and Allison Lichter.
Lane Anderson is a writer, journalist, and Clinical Associate Professor at NYU who has won several awards for her writing on inequality and family social issues. She has an MFA from Columbia University. She was raised in Utah and lives in New York City with her partner and young daughter.
Allison Lichter is the Associate Dean at the Newmark School of Journalism at the City University of New York. She has been a writer, producer and editor for radio and print, covering the arts, politics, and the workplace. She was born and raised in Queens, and lives in Brooklyn with her partner and daughter.
Wonderful Lane! We will get there. You are right, we are at the beginning of this movement and I already see evidence that consciousness is changing to embrace care.