Moms are having a political moment. On Monday, a bipartisan group of Texas state legislators voted a bill out of committee that would raise the legal age to buy certain assault-style weapons to 21. Images from the committee hearing room show grieving Uvalde mothers hugging one another after the vote, flanked by women wearing the signature red shirts of Moms Demand Action, a national organization that says it has nearly 10 million supporters fighting for gun violence prevention laws.
Elsewhere, a very different form of mother-driven activism has become resurgent.
Elsewhere, a very different form of mother-driven activism has become resurgent. It is conservative, largely white, and serves as the public face of the culture wars that now animate much of the GOP. Led by groups like Moms for Liberty, these moms advocate for book bans, fight to curtail the rights of LGBTQ youth and push for widespread restrictions on what public schools can teach about race, sexual orientation, and gender identity.
As we celebrate and honor moms this Mother’s Day, I’ve been grappling with how to make sense of why, in 2023, the identity of “mother” remains so central to our politics. There are benefits to grounding activism in this identity, but there are also risks, especially when motherhood is evoked in ways that advance outdated tropes and impede justice. What does an inclusive, contemporary playbook for motherhood activism look like?
Developing such a vision is a fraught endeavor. The political identity of “mom” remains powerful because it taps into something nearly universal: the intense love and protectiveness that we feel for our children. At the same time, it is an identity that has routinely been weaponized in defense of an unjust status quo.
As historians Michelle Nickerson and Lisa McGirr told me on my podcast, there are striking parallels between Moms for Liberty and the conservative, anti-communist suburban warriors of the 1950s and 1960s who railed against…
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