Throughline - The Labor Of Love (Throwback)

Episode Date: May 9, 2024

There's a powerful fantasy in American society: the fantasy of the ideal mother. This 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.Problem is? She's imaginary. And yet the idea of her permeates our culture, our economy, and our social policy – and it distorts them. The U.S. doesn't have universal health insurance or universal childcare. We don't have federally mandated paid family leave or a meaningful social safety net for when times get rough. Instead, we have this imaginary mother. We've structured our society as though she exists — but she doesn't. And we all pay the real-life price.Today on the show, we look at three myths that sustain the fantasy: the maternal instinct, the doting housewife, and the welfare queen. And we 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.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for this podcast and the following message come from the NPR Wine Club, which has generated over $1.75 million to support NPR programming. Whether buying a few bottles or joining the club, you can learn more at nprwineclub.org slash podcast. Must be 21 or older to purchase. 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 12 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 to have dinner in 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. The United States is one of just seven countries in the world without national paid maternity leave. 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. It's been a beautiful experience and the most rewarding experience. Looking 12 steps into the future.

Mom is accused of leaving her kids in the car alone while she went shopping. Millions of women haven't rejoined the workforce. No straight retirement. A stay in first grade pregnancy determined. Even at the steepest personal and familial cost. Two or more years. Millions of women haven't rejoined the workforce. No secret time has been forced to bring a pregnancy to term, even at the steepest personal and familial cost. Two or more years. All the possible things that could go wrong. It is real work.

Just listen to your mom, God. Motherhood costs women everything. Everything. It's everything, right? Everything. The king comes 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 U.S. 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. I first talked to Chelsea when I was pregnant with my son last year. I'm just going to come clean. So I'm currently pregnant. You are? Yeah, I'm six months along. But I'm like, I've been gripped by the anxiety from the start. Yeah, it's hard not to have some, right?

I mean, yeah, I was super anxious back then. And honestly, I still have my days now. There's so much noise, so much pressure. It can squeeze out the joy. And it doesn't have to be this way. In this episode, we're going to dig into motherhood in the age of capitalism. We'll 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. And the doting housewife. You're listening to ThruLine from NPR. who gives all her life, all her work, all her thoughts to the people around her. You're listening to ThruLine from NPR.

I'm Ramtin Arablui. And I'm Randa Abdel-Fattah. 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 Putapeche land in Pascuaro, Michoacan in Mexico and you're listening to

ThruLine from NPR. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today or visit

wise.com. T's and C's apply. Support for this podcast and the following message come from Autograph Collection Hotels, offering over 300 independent hotels around the world, each exactly like nothing else. Hand-selected for their inherent craft,

each hotel tells its own unique story through distinctive design and immersive experiences, from medieval falconry to volcanic wine tasting. Autograph Collection is part of the Marriott Bonvoy portfolio of over 30 hotel brands around the world. Find the unforgettable at AutographCollection.com. Darian, why have so many people fallen out of love with dating apps? That is such a question of the moment, and I posed it to the CEO of Hinge

for Love Week on The Indicator. That's our week-long investigation into the business side of romance. Find us on your favorite podcast app, The Indicator from Planet Money. It's Love Week! We love you. Myth one, the maternal instinct. Myth 1. The Maternal Instinct We are 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. 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 that it feels true, is something that a lot of people listening to this will, like have that knee jerk in reaction. Right. Yes. Which is like, well, no, no, there must be something. So I guess my question is like, 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 Premala Nadasan. She's a professor of history at Barnard College and co-director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women. 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, a.k.a. eugenics, a pseudoscience McDougall embraced when he eventually relocated to the United States. He was a notable racist and eugenicist 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 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. McDougal, 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, you know, 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 Suniti Sridhar calling from Los Angeles, California, and you're listening to ThruLine on NPR. Hey there, if you're a ThruLine Plus subscriber, we just want to send you a big thanks for all of your support. As a reminder to the rest of you, ThruLine Plus listeners help support our work here at ThruLine, and they also get benefits like ad-free listening and special bonus episodes every month. Go to plus.npr.org. If you're constantly asking what's good to eat around here, the Seattle Eats podcast is for you. Food and drink writer Tan Vin here, from the best pizza in the Puget Sound to the best wine to buy at Costco.

I'll be your host and guide across our vibrant local food scene. Listen to Seattle Eats from KUOW, The Seattle Times, and the NPR Network, wherever you get podcasts. This October, heal your existential dread with shortwave. We're going to talk about the science of why we die and come out the other side with answers to live better as we live longer hear about the innovations when you subscribe now to shortwave the science podcast from npr

adrian do you feel that nip in the air? The smell of pumpkin spice wafting from your local coffee shop? Yeah, the overwhelming urge to suddenly watch holiday rom-coms? Yes, with all of these warm and fuzzies on the brain, it is the perfect time to explore the economic side of romance on The Indicator. We've got a week of episodes we're calling Love Week. Subscribe wherever you get podcasts. Myth 2. The Welfare Queen. 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 at 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 is stuff we're still arguing about in 2023. 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 women'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 like, just like looking at Tillman and seeing how she looks, you know, she's a large Black woman. She was older. I just never saw like 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, to look in the mirror at myself because he felt 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 did this sort of kind of chaotic scene, let me put it that way. 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. You know, the daughter came with her laundry to do the wash and the son came

to do something else. And our Monica Pats, her husband, was in the back room making arrangements for 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. She was born in 1926. Middle of Jim Crow. A sharecropper's daughter. She also worked in the field.

When she was five years old, her mother died in labor. 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 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. I didn't want to be no mother.. 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 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, like, 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 talks a whole bunch of crap about people on welfare, how they're lazy and things like that. At that moment, something just clicked. 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 rights organizations in the entire country. Today, a hope of many years 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 millions 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 Premalyn 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 wives, 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. A 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 in 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 reenter the workforce,

affordable child care, a right to dignity and privacy. There was something very famously known as the midnight raids, where caseworkers 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 U.S. 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. Unlike 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. 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 the system we have today, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF. The new bill restores America's basic bargain of providing opportunity and demanding in return 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 waitress for housework. Coming up, what happens if the homemakers of the world unite? My name is Giorgio Aguilar, in Florence, Italy. You're listening to ThruLine from NPR.

I'm Rachel Martin, host of NPR's Wildcard podcast. I'm the kind of person who wants to skip the small talk and get right to the things that matter. That's why I invite famous guests like Ted Danson, Jeff Goldblum, and Issa Rae to skip the surface stuff. We talk about what gives their lives meaning, the beliefs that shape their worldview, the moments of joy that keep them going. Follow Wildcard wherever you get your podcasts, only from NPR. Myth 3. The doting housewife. An hour marked by destiny made the sky of our homeland. I knew that I was not born in a perfect world.

I knew that there was a lot of injustice, a lot of struggle. Life was precarious. My name is Silvia Federici. I was born in 1942, in the middle 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, running, 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. 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, when civil unrest was reaching a fever pitch. Listen, I was radicalized in the United States. Racism is an excuse used for capitalism. 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 as central, it was first of all necessary to analyze briefly how capitalism has created the modern family, and the housewife's role in it.

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, you know, in the history, the last 400, 500 years of capitalists, have been engaged primarily in activities that have not been recognized as work. This article put into words what Silvia 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. kind of work that takes place in our society. Women's labor of social reproduction, as feminists in the 1970s and 80s called it, is the work that really undergirds all other work. Again, Pramila Natasen. 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, you know, 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, a movement called Wages for Housework

was launched in Italy. Feeling inspired, Sylvia decided to start a chapter in the U.S. 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. What do we want? Equal pay! Equal pay!

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 would begin to change the power relation between women and men, women and the state,

would 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 wagesages 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. 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 unwaged 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 still waiting for the pre-K that Biden had promised.

He sends billions to support wars, but he doesn't invest in the children of this country. We're failing. I mean, truly. In a sense, we're sort of saying like, okay, the time is up now. Now pay us. Give us paid leave and financial stability and affordable, accessible child care 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. 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 ability to provide care when somebody needs it.

Our ability to be cared for when we need it. I'm Ron D'Abdel-Fattah. That's it for this week's show. I'm Randa Abdel-Fattah. I'm Ramteen Adablui. And you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR. This episode was produced by me. And me and... Thank you to Olivia Chilcote, Devin Katayama, 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-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel. 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,

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