This writing is for mothers. How I define mothers may differ from those of you reading this but I invite you nonetheless to read with an open heart.

Mothers are the women who bear their children, as well as those who do not. Mothers are the women born with a uterus and those born without. Mothers are those that identify as “mom” and those whose gender and sexual identities make that title difficult to embody. Mothers are grandfathers, aunties, uncles, and the revered grandmother.

Mother is far more than a title. It is an act of mothering, one that surpasses the confines of gender and sexuality. It is an energetic exchange that challenges our assumption about who exactly a mother can and should be.

To be Mother is to be all, and all can be Mother.

In 1989, Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality” in reference to the political structures that marginalize certain groups, particularly women of color. A black woman herself, Crenshaw drew upon Black Feminist theory to highlight the ways in which interlocking systems of oppression, such as race and gender and sexuality, compound to create unique disadvantages.

Her theory was largely in response to the failures of mainstream feminism that had ignored the plight of women of color and instead advocated almost solely for the uplifting of white, middle-class, straight women. In other words, mainstream feminism saw women as a monolith, while intersectional feminism saw women as multi-faceted.

The image of an intersection helps us to understand this multi-faceted approach: imagine each human being sitting at the center of an intersection, and each road that meets at this point is an identity they hold. Our lived experiences sit at the center of these various identities, impacting our daily lives and the ways in which we interact with the social institutions in which we live. My experience as a white, middle-class, straight woman is far different from that of a black woman, an immigrant woman, a refugee woman, and so on and so forth.

The legacy of intersectionality has lived strongly through other women of color writers like Audre Lorde and Bell Hooks. We’ve seen intersectionality enter mainstream culture through movements like Intersectional Environmentalist. As IE’s cofounder Diandra Miazet explains, an intersectional framework “helps us understand how different people navigate the world based on different identities” and “pinpoint” how these identities overlap to create varying experiences of advantage and disadvantage.

Despite the growing popularity of intersectionality, I hardly hear intersectionality mentioned within the realm of motherhood. Take it one step further and I hardly hear motherhood mentioned within the realm of feminist theory.

Mothers have largely been excluded from mainstream feminism (although less so within the works of Black Feminist theory) which effectively leaves out a population of people motivated to care for the external and create a better world for future generations. There is potent power within mothers for activism, advocacy, and alchemy, yet we’ve left them behind.

Second Wave Feminism’s Failure: Motherhood

Feminism’s failure to include mothers dates back to the second wave in the 1960’s. Similar to the first wave feminists who saw the liberation of black women as a liability and hindrance to the overall movement, second wave feminists saw mothers as a burden they could not bear.

The second wave of feminism focused their cause largely on creating space for women in the workplace. Unfortunately, their definition of work seemed to have been taken from the patriarchy’s dictionary as it explicitly stated work to be labor outside of the home. Domestic labor - as in raising children and caring for a home - was dismissed and ignored, thereby perpetuating the misogynistic notion that domestic labor is not true work. Sorry moms, maybe next time.

Reshma Saujani, founder of Girls Who Code and Moms First, “points out that when second-wave feminism was at its peak with Title IX, the contraceptive pill, the Equal Pay Act, and Roe v. Wade (abortion rights), one word was largely absent from the feminist lexicon: motherhood.” Prominent radical feminist Shulamith Firestone strongly argued during the second wave that women could never truly be free of the patriarchy if they became a mother as their ties to motherhood would inhibit true liberation.

If liberation is freedom from external constraints, then motherhood is not the avenue by which to achieve such a state. We are tied in every which way imaginable. Whether or not those ties are a different form of liberation was not something mainstream second wave feminists considered. The loudest of these voices - white, heterosexual, middle class - chose to not create a more nuanced definition of work by recognizing the value of domestic labor. The misogynistic nail was thereby hammered into the patriarchal post.

The Motherhood Institution

During this same period of feminist writing, there were other voices, albeit somewhat lesser known, that dared to speak on the topic of motherhood. One of whom, Adrienne Rich, uttered the word “mother” in her 1976 groundbreaking book Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. As Rich explained in her introduction, “there was nearly nothing being written on motherhood as an issue” at this time.

One of the greatest concepts to come from Of Woman Born was the idea of the “motherhood institution” in which Rich differentiates between mothering and motherhood. Mothering, the act of caretaking a child, stands distinct from the social institutions and political apparatuses that shape the experience of motherhood. Mothering can be a heart-opening, deeply loving experience. It is the social and political policies that isolate women, undervalue domestic labor, and provide little to no support that ultimately create a failed experience within motherhood.

The exclusion of mothers from feminist pursuits pushed all domestic and care labor further into the shadows. The voices of mother’s were silenced and their plights ignored. Rich’s work helped to create a hole in the cloak of invisibility that enshrouded the domestic sphere in which mothers worked. By shining a light on the historical context in which children were being raised and people were raising children, the problems that mothers faced began to be viewed less as individual failures and more as social issues.

But even Rich understood that there was a gaping hole in the feminist movement in which she operated. In her 1984 essay “Notes toward a Politics of Location,” Rich wrote that the problem with many early 1970s white feminists “was that we did not know whom we meant when we said ‘we.’”

A Legacy of Racism & Exclusion

Mainstream feminism’s “we” was not inclusive of women of color and when we exclude women of color from an entire feminist movement, we are excluding a large population of people who occupy laborious roles inside and outside the home.

Women of color have historically not had the same choice that white women of more advantage have had: to stay at home or to work. Although to be clear, this supposed “choice” is not as clear-cut as it sounds, as evidenced by Arlie Hochschild’s research around The Second Shift. The “choice” has roots in the patriarchy’s need to keep domestic labor excluded from our economy (because let’s be real, if we were to count the estimated $11 trillion worth of unpaid labor in developed nation’s GDP, we’d be having very different conversations).

But nonetheless, a choice has existed and primarily been extended to white women. For women of color, work and home have not had the same clear divide. Patricia Hill Collins, maternal theorist and Distinguished University Professor Emerita at the University of Maryland, has worked to reject the “artificial line that patriarchy has drawn between work and motherhood, between public and private, and between the personal and political.”

In “Shifting the Center, Race, Class and Feminist Theorizing About Motherhood,” Collins introduced the concept of motherwork: the work that one does inside the home and outside the home contributes to the survival of one’s family and both are therefore considered work. This work goes so far as to include the care labor done for one’s community: attending protests, volunteering, bringing meals to neighbors, attending city halls, etc. Motherwork goes far and beyond the traditional definition limited by the public and private binary.

A more fluid definition of work has been utilized by black women for generations, dating back to enslaved ancestors who were given no choice but to work in fields with babies on their backs. Such a definition is dangerous to a patriarchy that survives off of the silent and invisible nature of mothering. Shining a light on the work that mothers do inside and outside of the home has the potential to elevate their status and threaten patriarchal control.

For if we were to count mothering as a job, then would we not be deserving of a paycheck for such labor?

Repercussions of Mother as Monolith

The same social issues that afflicted mothers during Adrienne Rich’s pondering of the motherhood institution continue to be the same ones that exist today. Issues like a lack of paid parental leave, universal healthcare, affordable childcare, bodily autonomy, gender affirming care, and more.

Why do they persist you ask? Because mother as monolith is the equivalent of a hand over a woman’s mouth and chains around her wrist. When we exclude mothers of color, immigrant mothers, poor mothers, trans mothers, disabled mothers, we have agreed to be small. We have done exactly as the patriarchy asked of us and complied to silence or at the very least, quiet complaints.

The power that women could yield if we expanded our definition of “we” would be monumental. Unstoppable even. But instead we comply and follow a mainstream definition of feminism crafted within the confines of patriarchy.

And the patriarchy’s influence doesn’t stop at the women who bear children or raise them. When we speak of “saving our children,” the patriarchy and mainstream feminism adopts a similarly narrow definition of children. Who do we include under the umbrella of empathy and considerate care? Primarily white, Christian, heterosexual, cis-gendered, American-born ones.

All it takes is one news cycle to see the damning effects of motherhood without intersectionality. Mothers stand at the precipice of change or perpetuation in modern day America. Uniting through the expansion of “we” has the power to initiate that change.