Throughline - Motherhood

Episode Date: May 1, 2025

Baby bonuses, childless cat ladies: the rhetoric around motherhood is politically charged right now. And the fantasy of an ideal mother remains powerful, even as real-life parents struggle to reconcile its demands. Today on the show, three myths of motherhood, and the people who have fought to break them down. This episode originally ran in 2023 as The Labor of Love.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Keeping up with the news can feel like a 24 hour job. Luckily, it is our job. Every hour on the NPR News Now podcast, we take the latest most important stories happening and we package them into five minute episodes. So you can easily squeeze them in between meetings and on your way to that thing. Listen to the NPR News Now podcast now. You know, I felt like I did all the things that you're supposed to do. I read all of the books and I went to the prenatal classes and I felt like pretty well-educated, I guess.

And then my son arrived. When he was born he was five pounds, twelve ounces, and when they put him on my chest for the first time I just said, he's so tiny, he's so tiny. I, of course, like, was overwhelmed with joy and awe and wonder at this little creature. That sentiment of like, wow, he's so small and vulnerable and now I'm in charge of him really was also very big for me. The transition to parenthood is like a really powerful time of growth. But in any kind of growth there's a cost to it.

And I just I felt a lot of worry. Mother, you promised Tampkin Ring at 6 o'clock. You need to be around that baby, around the clock. You're not compensated and all of a sudden you're paying. Motherhood is a hard, unending chore. Mommy, wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up. It's a week since I've delivered. How could I be expected to work at this moment?

My entire paycheck goes to the daycare. Beautiful experience and the most rewarding experience. Looking 12 steps into the future. Mom was accused of leaving her kids in the car alone while she went shopping. Millions of women haven't rejoined the workforce. No secret that I have a state of emergency during the pregnancy to turn me in. Even at of women haven't rejoined the workforce since the COVID-19 estate and forced her to bring her pregnancy to term,

even if the steepest personal and familial cost for two or more years. All the possible things that could go wrong. Just listen to your mom, God. Motherhood costs women everything. Everything, right? Everything. The K-com can constitute everything.

There's a powerful fantasy in American society. The fantasy of the ideal mother. You know who I mean. This fantasy mother is devoted to her family above all else. She raises the kids, volunteers at the school, cleans the house, plans the birthday parties, cares for her own parents. She's a natural nurturer. And she's happy to do it all for free. The mother we've just described is imaginary.

And yet the idea of her permeates our culture, our economy, and our social policy. And it distorts them. The US doesn't have universal health insurance or universal child care. We don't have federally mandated paid family leave or a meaningful social safety net for when times get rough. Instead of all this, we have an imaginary mother. We've structured our society as though she exists, but she doesn't. And we all pay the real-life price for that fantasy.

I certainly think that young women right now are looking at people of my generation and saying, that doesn't look that great. This is Chelsea Conaboy. She's a health and science journalist and the author of Mother Brain, How Neuroscience is Rewriting the Story of Parenthood. She's one of the people who are going to help us look at three myths of motherhood that prop up the fantasy. The maternal instinct. Women are natural, innate caregivers that it just sort of springs forth from us as soon as a child is placed in our arms. The welfare queen. The racialized stereotype of a woman of color

who had multiple children out of wedlock, who was lazy, who was interested in living off of other people's tax dollar. And the doting housewife. The woman who gives all her life, all her work, all her thoughts to the people around her. You're listening to Thru Line from NPR. I'm Ramtin Arab-Louis. And I'm Rhonda Adderfattah. Coming up, we break open the myths of motherhood and tell the stories of real life people, some mothers,

some not, who have fought for a much more generous vision of family, labor, and care. This is Ricardo Nunez calling from Puerto Petchland in Pascuaro, Michoacán in Mexico and you're listening to Throughline from NPR. Myth 1. The maternal instinct. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things and other currencies. With WISE, you can send, spend, or receive money across borders, all at a fair exchange rate, no markups or hidden fees. Join millions of customers and visit WISE.com.

T's and C's apply. Hey, it's Rund. In our latest bonus episode, we hear from our producer, Lawrence Wu, about the world's first automatic machine gun and the lengths he took to find out exactly what it would have sounded like in a 19th century battle. Listen now and get sponsor-free listening for all of our episodes by signing up for ThruLine Plus at plus.npr.org slash ThruLine. Tariffs, recessions, how Colombian drug cartels gave us blueberries all year long. That's the kind of thing the Planet Money podcast explains. I'm Sarah Gonzalez, and on Planet Money, we help you understand the economy and how things all around you came to be the

way they are. Para que sepas. So you know. Listen to the Planet Money podcast from NPR. We're here in the vast, rugged wilderness of Montana. As the sun begins to peek over the horizon, a gentle breeze winds its way through a web of leaves and branches, carrying the melodies of the western meadowlark with it. It is a land teeming with life, a land of untamed beauty and danger. Hidden amid towering mountains and dense forest we meet a formidable resident. The grizzly bear. We find her foraging for berries alongside the river where she'll score her next meal.

And she is not alone. Nestled alongside her we find her young cub. This mother bear leads her cub to the river, teaching them to patiently wait for the perfect moment to catch a leaping salmon. But nature is unpredictable. A male grizzly approaches nearby. The mother bear confronts the male grizzly head-on. Translation. Stay away from my cub. The male grizzly retreats into the forest. The extraordinary bond between mother and cub has prevailed. bond between mother and cub has prevailed.

So maternal instinct is something that feels true, right? It was hard for her to describe exactly how she knew her baby was in trouble. She called it instinct, even referred to it as a voice in her head. The story we've told about mothers is that women are natural, innate caregivers, that we come to this work automatically, that it just sort of springs forth from us as soon as a child is placed in our arms, and that it is really distinctly female, and that that's based in science, and none of those things are true. In her book, Chelsea Conaboy argues that this scientific story of the maternal instinct

is actually pretty new, even though it might feel real when we observe nature. And that's one of the criticisms I've gotten the most of this book of like, how can you say maternal instinct isn't real? Like, have you ever tried to get between a mother bear and her cub? And that protectiveness is absolutely real. And I would not deny that it's real. But when you look across all species, you see that parenting is quite variable

and it's not always just the mother who is doing that. Yeah, because I think that it feels true is something that a lot of people listening to this will have that knee jerk in reaction, right? Yeah. Yes. Which is like, well, no, no, there must be something. So I guess my question is, is it simply that the maternal instinct does not exist or is it something that exists in a different way than we conceptualize it and that it can be transferred to people beyond the biological mother.

So we go through really powerful changes, fascinating adaptations that connect us to our children. That is real. It's just not a fixed pattern of behavior, which is what an instinct is. It's not this like Lego circuitry that like snaps into place once you reach the third trimester or something. It is something that grows from our brain and that is a process that takes time

and that is shaped also by our babies and their particularities and who they are. It's a two-way street. We shape their brains and they shape ours. In other words, while mothers' brains can absolutely develop something akin to a maternal instinct over time, research shows they aren't the only ones who can do that. In fathers and other non-gestational parents,

the same factors are at play, hormones and experience. Fathers go through hormonal changes as they approach fatherhood. It's thought that there's small but potentially significant changes in testosterone. There's changes in their prolactin system, which we often think of as a milk-making hormone, but it's also present in males and related to bonding.

And they experience very similar spikes in oxytocin when they interact with their babies, as mothers do. And it's thought that all of that makes their brains more plastic, more moldable also, if they engage in direct care of their children. In fact, Chelsea says humans couldn't have survived as a species if only their biological mothers could care for them. What I like to say is human mothers have always been really important

and they've never been enough in terms of caring for children. The very thing that propelled our species into being like the most dominant, most social primate on the planet is the fact that we relied on other people to help raise our children. The earliest humans distinguished themselves from other primates by having babies in closer succession. So we'd have another baby before our first was self-sustaining. And we did that because we relied on support.

There were grandparents taking care of grandchildren. There were aunts and uncles. Sometimes individuals who were not biologically related to a family, who would join a family. And so family has traditionally been a very elastic category. This is Premaline Addison. She's a professor of history at Barnard College. Her book is called Care, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. And so I think a better way to think about it

is that community has been really the bedrock of human society for most of our history. So when does the myth of the maternal instinct and the mom who can do it all start to take hold? Chelsea says the idea took off in the early 20th century, thanks in large part to a guy named William McDougall. William McDougall was an early psychologist who was really one of the people who wrote maternal instinct into scientific theory. The maternal instinct, which impels the mother to protect and cherish her young, is common

to almost all the higher species of animals. McDougall wrote that maternal instinct was so powerful it overpowered every other instinct, even fear itself. The protection and cherishing of the young is the constant and all absorbing occupation of the mother, to which she devotes all her energies, and in the course of which she will at any time undergo privation, pain, and death. His book, An Introduction to Social Psychology, is one of the most successful

British authored psychology books ever published. He also said that the more you educate a woman, the more her maternal instinct will decline. So it wasn't more powerful than education in his view. McDougall was born in 1871, just a decade after Charles Darwin put forth his theory of evolution. And by the time McDougall was in university studying psychology,

some people were expanding Darwin's theory to explain supposed hierarchies among humans, AKA eugenics, a pseudo like a lot of powerful white men of his day, was really worried about the influx of immigrants to the United States and the influx of immigrants to the United States. He was a very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, eugenicists who, like a lot of powerful white men of his day, was really worried about the influx of immigrants to the United States and preserving the state and white supremacy. White motherhood,

in particular, was often associated with racial purity and elevated in status. So he advocated for in status. So he advocated for maintaining gender norms that would preserve maternal instinct especially in upper-class, upper-middle-class white women. And other groups on the other hand were not considered worthy of reproduction and this includes people who had low IQs or racialized minorities, people with disabilities and other non-normative people. There was a whole eugenics program throughout much of the 20th century beginning in the early 20th century where non-normative people were denied the right and the opportunity to reproduce. McDougall, you know, promoted maternal instinct as biological destiny.

This was happening in the wake of the Industrial Revolution and the rise of American capitalism, when the nature of work had radically transformed, pulling more and more people off of farms and into cities. Capitalism has created motherhood as an economic identity. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, gender roles weren't quite as intensely divided as they became by the mid to late 19th century. Now men would go off to factories and offices to work, to make their mark on the world. And the home… The home became like a place of virtue and reprieve, and it was no longer like a site

of production. It was a place of consumption. And women were the caretakers of that place. That is, white women. Because this ideal of womanhood was constructed with them in mind. Their role became to uphold the virtue of the home. Their moral importance was really elevated as their societal roles shrank.

As the 20th century went on, Maternal instinct was kind of recast in different ways by a long string of scientists and carried forward under different names. I call it a classic case of disinformation because it's something that felt true and that got repeated over and over again until we believed it reflexively. Though of course, not everyone believed it. There is a strong and fervent insistence on the maternal instinct. We possess no scientific data at all on this phase of human psychology.

So Lita Hollingworth was a pioneering psychologist in the early part of the 20th century. She wrote in 1916 an essay that was in response to William McDougall and she said essentially, I see what you're trying to do here. I see that you're trying to make all of this look easy and it's not. She called maternal instinct a cheap device. There is no verifiable evidence to show that a maternal instinct exists in women of such all-consuming strength and fervor

as to impel them voluntarily to seek the pain, danger, and exacting labor involved in maintaining a high birth rate. She said that women were being compelled to have more children using the same tools for social control that compel soldiers to go to war. And so she was saying, just as war is glorified and the horrors of war are hidden from soldiers,

the same is true in motherhood. For example, the fact that pregnancy was incredibly dangerous then. Maternal mortality rate was something like 60 times higher than what it would be at the end of the century. Or that mothers, women, still couldn't vote or support themselves if they wanted to leave a bad marriage.

There were these laws at the time preventing women from having their independence. Hollingworth was saying the quiet part out loud, which many mothers, then and now, would probably agree with. Motherhood isn't always easy or instinctive or joyful. It is work. Rewarding work, sure. But still, hard work. She warned that the clock would run out, essentially, on maternal instinct. And then you'll have to pay us. Then you'll have to pay us. Because in a capitalist system, that's how you reward hard work. An idea that was radical in Hollingworth's time and would remain just as radical in the

decades to come. I'm a woman. I'm a black woman. I'm a poor woman. I'm 45 years old. I have raised six children. There are millions of statistics like me. Coming up, the clock runs out and one mother leads the charge to get paid. Hi, this is Sunidhi Shreiver calling from Los Angeles, California, and you're listening to Throughline on NPR. Myth 2, The Welfare Queen. Look, we get it.

When it comes to new music, there is a lot of it, and it all comes really fast. But on all songs considered, NPR's music recommendation podcast, we'll handpick what we think's the greatest music happening right now and give you your next great listen. So kick back, settle in, get those eardrums wide open, and get your dose of new music from All Songs Considered only from NPR. These days, there's a lot of news.

It can be hard to keep up with what it means for you, your family, and your community. Consider this from NPR as a podcast that helps you make sense of the news. Six days a week, we bring you a deep dive on a story and provide the context, backstory, and analysis you need to understand our rapidly changing world. Listen to the Consider This Podcast from NPR. Does the idea of listening to political news freak you out? world. Listen to the Consider chance with the NPR Politics Podcast, available wherever you get your podcasts. I'm a woman. I'm a black woman. I'm a poor woman. I'm a fat woman. I'm a middle-aged

woman and I'm on welfare. In this country, if you're any one of those things, you count less as a human being. If you're all of those things, you don't count it all, except as a statistic. Welfare is like a traffic accident. It can happen to anybody, but especially it happens to women. When Gwendolyn Fowler first read these words, like a light bulb went on in my head, the author was a woman named Johnny Tillman, and she'd penned this article more than four decades earlier,

in 1972. It moved Gwen to her core. Not in like, like I was crying when I read this. You know, it was more of like I was angry, I think. And I guess just kind of pissed off that the things that Tillman is addressing in 1972, if stuff we're still arguing about. The article Tillman wrote was called

Welfare is a Women's Issue. And she published it in what would soon be the most prominent feminist publication of the time, Ms. Magazine. Welfare is a woman's issue. For a lot of middle-class women in this country, women's liberation is a matter of concern. For women on welfare, it's a matter of survival.

And then just looking at Tillman and seeing how she looks, she's a large Black woman, she's older. I just never saw activists looking like that. All Gwen knew was that Johnny was a Black mother on welfare that became the head of the National Welfare Rights Organization, a civic group fighting for welfare reform in the 1960s and 70s. But she wanted to know more, so she focused her entire master's thesis on her.

Why don't people know who she is? And why do I not know anything? Why is it so hard to find information about her? She wasn't finding much on Tillman until she stumbled upon the voice of the woman herself. My father used to tell me if I really wanted to know what my mother looked like and look in the mirror at myself because he thought I looked just like her. This is Tillman talking to oral historian Sherna Berger-Gluck.

It's been a long time since I first interviewed Johnny. Sherna conducted a series of interviews with Johnny, beginning in 1984. She welcomed me into her home and in this sort of kind of chaotic scene, let me put it that way. First of all, some piece of equipment was going that kept shorting out my recorder

and sometimes shorted out the microphone. You can hear it on the tape. Her daily domestic duties don't stop just because she's being interviewed. Johnny's house is bustling with activity. The washing machine was going, and the daughter came with her laundry to do the wash, and the son came to do something else,

and Armonica Pats, her husband, was in the back room making rangelster gigs. The interviews Sherna conducted are some of the only remaining records of Johnny, from her early life to her catapult into activism. Here's what we know. I was born in a little place called Scott, Arkansas. It's about 17 miles north of Little Rock. Middle of Jim Crow. She also worked in the field.

And then just trying to live a life without a mother, where you're probably the caretaker for your family. I learned to cook, learned to sew, learned to keep a house pretty good, but don't really like it. She also worked as a domestic worker in other people's homes, but her dream was to be a blues singer.

I always felt I didn't want to be a housewife, and I didn't want to be no mother. I wasn't interested in being no homemaker. That wasn't my thing. Eventually, she decided to move west to California. She had six children by 1960, by the time she moved. Even though it hadn't been her dream, she was a mother. Once in Los Angeles, they moved into a housing project, Nickerson Gardens.

She's working at a laundry. But then? She gets really, really sick and she can't work. And in the midst of that, also she finds out that her daughter has been cut in school. At this point, Johnny had to consider something she dreaded, getting on welfare. She doesn't want to apply for welfare. She's heard terrible things about the experience of being on welfare in terms of how caseworkers treat you. And she's like, I don't want any parts, but they're like, you can't work.

What are you going to do? So she does it. Johnny signs up for welfare. And right away, she starts to feel the stigma she was afraid of. One Sunday, she overhears a lady from a nearby church complaining loudly about welfare recipients right outside of Johnny's housing project. And she just talked a whole bunch of crap about people on welfare, how they're lazy and things like that.

At that moment, something just clicked. That's what got me going. That's what got me going. She started to question why people thought she was some sort of criminal just for being on welfare. So the following Tuesday, Johnny started to organize with other mothers to form what would become one of the first welfare standing is in large part fulfilled. Before we can continue with Johnny's story, we have to take a step back to the beginning of what we call welfare. This Social Security measure gives at least some protection

to 30 million of our citizens. Federal welfare programs began with the 1935 Social Security Act. The idea was simple, give cash to poor mothers with children. But historian Premaline Addison says other ideas were baked into the program's DNA. — Well, the welfare system from the very outset was really centered on this idea that women, and the code word here was white women, needed a man to take care of them. That they should not be in the workforce, that they in fact needed economic support

from the state if there was not a man available to provide economic assistance and to support the family. The program reinforced the gendered division of labor, men as breadwinners and women as mothers and homemakers. But it didn't recognize all women's work the same way. In order to qualify for these funds, families had to be considered suitable homes. And this was very racialized. It did not apply to all women, which is why women of color were excluded from the welfare

roles in the early years. In fact, there were always more white women on welfare than black women on welfare. In her first book, Welfare Warriors, Pramila argues that welfare was uncontroversial until the late 1950s and 60s. More and more women of color started applying for and receiving welfare assistance. And along with that, we saw a deep racialization of the welfare system, as well as growing stigma and social isolation of welfare recipients. As more black women used welfare, there were more attacks on the system and all the women

that needed it. Mass migration of unskilled Negroes from the South. Deserted wise, sometimes turning to any man who comes along. And the self-perpetuating breeding grounds of city slums. These fears would eventually crystallize into the myth of the welfare queen. Racialized stereotype of a woman of color who had multiple children out of wedlock,

who was lazy, who was interested in living off of other people's tax dollars. Johnny Tillman was aware of this tainted image of welfare recipients long before the term welfare queen was officially coined. That's why Governor Reagan can get away with slandering welfare recipients, calling them lazy parasites, pigs at the trough and such. We've been trained to believe that the only reason people are on welfare is because there's something wrong with their character.

And that's what brings us back to the moment that sparked Johnny into action. Johnny saw how at every level, from the governor of California, Ronald Reagan, to church ladies, mothers on welfare were seen as less than. So she started organizing other mothers. In their living rooms, in their housing projects, in their kitchens, when they're waiting in line

and welfare, they begin to talk to their neighbors. Groups like Tillman's were popping up across the country, pushing for a few key protections. Better worker training so they could re-enter the workforce, affordable child care, a right to dignity and privacy. There was something very famously known as the Midnight Raids, where case workers would show up in the middle of the night and search a recipient's apartment or home looking for some kind of evidence of a man who was present, maybe a man's shoes or a man's razor in the bathroom. And if they found anything,

it would be grounds to cut the recipient off of public assistance because presumably the man would be able to support her and her children. And for Johnny and many of the women she organized with, it also meant addressing the fact that US society didn't value Black motherhood or even allow for it. Black women were never allowed to be full time mothers to their children. They were always expected to work. They were expected to work during slavery. They were expected to give birth under slavery only to have their children sold from them. They were expected to work in the post-Reconstruction period. There were vagrancy laws that were passed in the South during this time that insisted that black women, former enslaved women, in fact, enter the

job market. Everything in our society has worked against African American women actually being able to stay home and take care of their own children. That's why Johnny first organized as ANC Mothers Anonymous. Being a mother and defining what that meant was key to the struggle, because the value of motherhood wasn't a flat rate system. For them to call themselves mothers and to insist on public assistance as mothers was in fact a radical reclamation of a role that they had been historically denied from the

days of slavery. Unite the white-led feminist movement, which in the 60s was pushing for the choice to work outside the home or to not have children. Many Black mothers wanted the choice to stay home and raise a child. And as the movement grew into the National Welfare Rights Organization, welfare mothers began to expand their cause to include everyone. We put together our own welfare plan called guaranteed adequate income, which would eliminate sexism from welfare. There would be no categories, men, women, children, single, married, kids, no kids, just poor people who need aid. In 1968, the amount they requested was $5,500 for a family of four, which was well above

the poverty line at that time. It was a fairly high amount. And they saw it as something that would ultimately help more than just Black mothers on welfare. Or even women. And the idea caught on. Martin Luther King endorsed a guaranteed annual income. We must develop progress that will drive the nation to a guaranteed annual income. Richard Nixon proposed before Congress a guaranteed annual income. Richard Nixon proposed before Congress

a guaranteed annual income. Federal minimum would be provided, the same in every state. And so there was widespread discussion in the 1960s and early 70s about the possibility of the federal government providing an income floor for all poor people in this country.

Maybe we poor welfare women will really liberate women in this country. As far as I'm concerned, the ladies of the NWRO are the frontline troops of women's freedom, both because we have so few illusions and because our issues are so important to all women. The right to a living wage for women's work, the right to life itself. Imagine for a second if this idea of a guaranteed annual income had actually become reality. Maybe we'd have significantly fewer families in debt, fewer kids unable to afford school lunches, fewer people living on the streets. But in the end, this idea faded.

By the mid-1970s, another idea had come to dominate the public conversation. An idea that consolidated all of the stereotypes Johnny had been fighting against for decades into one phrase, the welfare queen. And it caught on like wildfire, thanks to that governor Johnny had called out, who was now running for president, Ronald Reagan. In Chicago, they found a woman who holds the record. Her tax-free cash income alone has been running $150,000 a year. The myth of the welfare queen seemed to prove what a growing number of lawmakers believed.

That welfare made people dependent. In the battle of ideas, the myth won out. And it stuck. In 1996, President Clinton dismantled the aid to families with dependent children and replaced it with a system we have today, Temporary Assistance for Needy responsibility. Under TANF, less families receive less cash assistance. And as its name implies, the help runs out even faster than before. But even though welfare was largely dismantled, Johnny helped spark a revolution of ideas that questioned who got to be a mother and challenged the very core of the nuclear family ideal that powers American capitalism. That money that women on welfare were receiving was actually the beginning of a wages for housework.

Coming up, what happens if the homemakers of the world unite? My name is Giorgio Aguilar, from Florence, Italy. You are listening to True Line from NPR. Myth 3 The doting housewife I knew that I was not born in a perfect world. I knew that there was a lot of injustice, a lot of struggle, that life was precarious. My name is Silvia Federici. of World War II in Parma, Italy. My mother would speak about what it meant waking up every night in the city,

seeing the sky turning red, a sign that the bombing would start soon. And then running with two little girls, running and running and running to the nearby fields and squat there for much of the night. I think those accounts are partially one of the reasons why I decided never to have children. are partially one of the reasons why I decided never to have children. After the war, Sylvia remembers watching her mom, this brave woman who protected her and her sisters from bullets and missiles, fight a different battle, day after day, right in their living room.

You know, my father was a teacher, and he was the one bringing home the money. And my mother was a full-time housewife. I remember my father telling my mother that she was not being paid because that work was not real work. And my mother would complain, I'm working, I'm working, I'm working and not being appreciated. What her mother called work, her father called natural love. As I started growing up, I made a big struggle, you know, not to become a housewife. A housewife.

In the post-World War II era, as the myth about welfare mothers was starting to crystallize, so too was this myth of the doting selfless housewife who was fueled by the power of love, a myth that crossed borders and traveled wherever capitalism did. Sylvia grew up half a world away from Johnny Tillman, but soon she would cross paths with the welfare mothers movement and help launch another movement that would take the cause of paid housework beyond class, race, or welfare status. An international movement for housewives everywhere, to recast caretaking as labor, not just love. And it all began when Sylvia flew to Buffalo, New York on a scholarship to study at a college there.

Pillage, looting, murder and arson have nothing to do with civil rights. She arrived amid the long, hot summer of 1967, when civil unrest was reaching a fever pitch. I have witnessed the police officers striking women. Listen, I was radicalized in the United States. Racism is an excuse used for capitalism. And we know that racism is just a byproduct of capitalism. In 67, 68, this was the height of the student movement. So basically I was sketching up, I was reading about American history, I was reading about slavery.

Reading about Marx and feminism. Meanwhile, she was still keeping an eye on things back in Italy. I was reading some of the material coming out of the student movement in Italy. In order to see the housewife is central, it was first of all necessary to analyze briefly how capitalism has created the modern family and the housewife's role in the Casalinga in essa. and the housewives role in the Casalinga Inessa. This article called The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community by this woman that I didn't know called Maria Rosa Dalla Costa was a turning point. The fact that the majority of women in the history, the last four or five hundred years of capital receipt have been engaged primarily in activities

that have not been recognized as work. This article put into words what Sylvia had known from the time she was eavesdropping on her parents' conversations, that the work housewives do is not only hard, but essential to upholding the economic system. They are essential for every kind of work that takes place in our society.

Women's labor of social reproduction, as feminists in the 1970s and 80s called it, as feminists in the 1970s and 80s called it, is the work that really undergirds all other work. Again, Pramila Natasin. And what they meant by that is that this is work that is vitally important to our economic system because women are producing the next generation of workers and are also keeping humans alive. Community is a big factory, but it's a factory that does not produce cars

or other gadgets. It's a factory that produces workers. Momentum was building around these ideas, both in the U.S. and abroad. The same year Johnny Tillman published Welfare is a Woman's Issue, Momentum was building around these ideas, both in the US and abroad. The same year Johnny Tillman published Welfare is a Woman's Issue, a movement called Wages for Housework was launched in Italy. Feeling inspired, Sylvia decided to start a chapter in the US.

The Wages for Housework movement sat in an interesting political space. On the one hand, it could seem to be at odds with the mission of the feminist movement. The bulk of the feminist movement saw the solution, you know, to leave the home and to go and enter the male-dominated jobs. Equal pay for equal work. I have nothing against that, but we always said this is not enough. Unless we do something with the question of reproduction, we are not going to be able to change anything.

On the other hand, while it seemed to maintain traditional family values, the conservative call of the day, It's more important than ever for our families to affirm an older and more lasting set of values. Sylvia believed compensating housework could actually spark a revolution in gender roles. We saw that demand, that struggle, as a transition, not as an end point. That will begin to change the power relation between women and men, women and the state,

will change the way society looks at the work. Once the work was considered work, men would do it too. Men could also do it too. And just as the welfare rights movement understood the power of narratives, of the words they used, the wages for housework movement made sure to keep things like care and love out of the conversation. The welfare rights movement didn't use the language of care. And the wages for housework movement actually wrote very critically of the language of care.

And I'm sure that Silvia Federici told you this. I can, if you give me a minute, I can find a quote from her. They call it love. We call it unpaid labor. And we say it is un-wage work. They call it fragility, more smile, more money. Nothing will be so powerful in destroying the healing virtue of a smile.

Now, you might be thinking, where does that leave love? Don't we care for the people we love because, well, we love them? And would paying someone for that care diminish the value of that love? According to Sylvia, true love and care requires a collectivist mindset where work is equally shared and valued.

It takes a tribe. And just like the maternal instinct, the language of love can be a cover for all the ways our society makes the work of mothering atomized, individualized, and increasingly impossible, propping up these myths about motherhood and preventing real change from taking place. The whole issue of maternity is turning into a nightmare.

We have to talk about growing economic inequality, the gap between the rich and the poor. There are a lot of people for whom it is a question of daily survival. We have to talk about the role of federal support. It is not just a question of how an individual family survives, it's a question of our public sector. We live in a society that despite the pandemic and the platitudes about care,

we deeply undervalue care work. We're failing, I pay us. Give us paid leave and financial stability and affordable accessible childcare and health insurance that actually meets our family's needs. Or maybe we won't do this. I have to admit, while working on this episode, I have had that thought a few times. Why do people do this? Why am I doing this? Because objectively, I'm with Chelsea.

Things don't look great. The lack of government support, the unrealistic expectations, the hours of work that many people still don't consider work. It makes me pretty mad, honestly. expectations, the hours of work that many people still don't consider work, it makes me pretty mad honestly. And yet, I made the conscious choice to have a child. Maybe you can never really be ready for a metamorphosis. You just transform and learn to live in that new normal.

Even when you know that normal doesn't mean predestined. Maybe because you know that. It doesn't have to be this way. And the mothers that I know are incredibly resilient. They find a way. And they can be the most incredible support system. So maybe there's some hope in that. Maybe when everything else fails, that is the thing we can fall back on. Each other. What's been incredibly inspiring for me is to see people around the country who are actually finding alternative ways to care for themselves and to care for one another. And I cannot stress enough to you

the value of that kind of community-based care or what I call radical care. The building blocks of human society are our connections to one another, our ability to develop deep, meaningful relationships. Our abilities to provide care when somebody needs it. Our ability to be cared for this week's show. I'm Rhonda Abdel Fattah.

I'm Ramtin Adabluy, and you've been listening to Throughline from NPR. This episode was produced by me, and me, and Lawrence Wu, Julie Kane, Anya Steinberg, Yolanda Sanguine, Casey Miner, Christina Kim, Devin Kadiyama, Sasha Crawford-Holland, Christina Kim, Anya Steinberg, and Lawrence Wu for their voiceover work. And a special thanks to all our listeners who shared your stories about what motherhood costs. Thanks also to Johannes Dergi, Micah Ratner, Tamar Charney, and Anya Grunman. The interviews with Johnny Tillman were conducted by Sherna Berger-Gluck for the Feminist History

Research Project and were donated as its collection to the California State University Long Beach Library Archive. Fact-tricking for this episode was done by Kevin Voelkel. This episode was mixed by Josh Newell. Music was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes Anya Mizani. Naveed Marvi. Sho Fujiwara.

And as always, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write us at throughlineatnpr.org. And if you don't already, please follow us on Apple, Spotify, and the NPR app. That way, you'll never miss an episode. Thanks for listening. you you you