The Power of ONEsies

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Contemporary mothers are chron­ically overburdened, sleep-deprived, and usually busy organizing something or other. And that’s made these working women notoriously difficult to organize for political action and social change.

A cyber-savvy bootstrap organization called MomsRising.org is up for the challenge. Recruiting thousands of mothers (and anyone who has a mother) to join via its website, MomsRising.org may have found the formula to engage, educate, and amplify the voices of America’s millions of mothers.

Most women in America become mothers (82 percent by the age of 44), and most mothers with kids under 18 (71 percent) work in the paid labor force.

While many mothers manage to juggle work and family commitments relatively successfully, millions of others find themselves crushed.

First, there are the wage hits: On average, women earn 25 percent less than their male counterparts. Mothers, in comparison to their childless female peers, take an additional estimated pay cut of 5 percent to 10 percent. There’s also the lack of flexibility to work reduced or flexible hours or to take time off when a child is sick or has a school emergency. And the realization that they must tolerate substandard child care because good alternatives are unaffordable. And the fact that taking a leave, even an unpaid leave, following childbirth might lead to a pink slip.

Facts like these led Joan Blades and Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner to write The Motherhood Manifesto and—when their research revealed that U.S. policies to support mothers and families lag well behind those of other industrial nations—to found MomsRising.org in May 2006.

Stay-at-home and working mothers were essential to the success of the second wave of the women’s movement in the 1960s and 1970s, but since then mothers have not had a leading voice. Blades and Rowe-Finkbeiner realized that organizing mothers was crucial to moving the United States toward becoming more family-friendly and, by doing that, to helping women take the final step toward equality.

Blades knew better than perhaps anyone in the country how to use new technology to mobilize ordinary citizens for political action: She and her husband founded the now 3 million–strong online grassroots organization MoveOn.org in 1998. And she is a mother, one who was shocked, she says, to find out how often mothers today hit invisible “maternal walls” (akin to “glass ceilings”) of job and wage discrimination that impede their families’ economic security.

Rowe-Finkbeiner was less surprised by the scary statistics that surround modern motherhood in the United States, having written The F Word: Feminism in Jeopardy—Women, Politics, and the Future in 2004. She also had experienced firsthand some of the difficulties moms face, such as the need for health care, parental leave, and other support following a child’s birth.

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