Motherhood Manifesto: the movie
A couple of weeks ago, I had the chance to view the Motherhood Manifesto documentary. (I work for one of the Moms Rising aligned organizations, so we set it up in the conference room during lunch and brought popcorn.)
It’s very well done. For each of the letters in the MOTHER agenda, they have a funny pseudo-fifties animated clip, a feature about someone affected by the issue, and brief interviews with experts who are working on the issue with aligned organizations. It’s a nice mixture of wrenching personal stories with just a touch of policy wonkery and, unlike many discussions of work-family issues, they leave viewers with hope that progress is being made rather than with handwringing over the current state of the world.
When the movie was done, we sat around and discussed it. Some in my organization (which focuses on low-income individuals and families) were concerned that there weren’t more low-income mothers featured in it, but I’m pretty sure that was a deliberate choice. I think it’s almost certainly true that the way to get more affordable child care, health care, etc. for poor families is to get middle- and upper-income families to fight for changes in the system, out of self-interest as well as altruism. But I think it’s also important to make sure that the solutions then work for everyone. (Recently, there was a discussion on one of my parenting email lists about the high cost of child care in the DC area, and the solution that someone suggested was to increase the amount that could be put aside tax free for child care in Flexible Spending Accounts. I tried to be polite in pointing out that FSAs don’t help people who don’t make enough to owe federal income taxes.)
The more interesting question that was raised was whether it’s limiting to frame this as a mothers’ organization rather than as a caregivers organization, since many of the proposals are needed by people caring for the elderly or sick as well as by parents. And someone — not me — did ask my favorite question of Where Are The Dads? I’m really ambivalent about this one. On the one hand, I do think that always talking of these issues as mothers’ issues lets fathers and others off the hook. But I do think that being a mother is a very salient part of lots of mothers’ identities, and so it’s a good way to mobilize them. In particular, there are a lot of people who don’t think of themselves as activists, but if you convince them that being politically engaged is an important part of being a mother, they might do it. And I’m not sure that a broad "caregivers movement" would engage people in the same way. What do you think?
In any case, the documentary is worth watching. If you’re in the DC area, and want to see the movie, the Women’s Information Network is having a screening and discussion tonight at AFSCME. (Sorry, I won’t be there — I’ll be at D’s soccer team dinner.) If that doesn’t work for you, let me know if you’d like me to arrange a kid-friendly viewing at my house some time. (Probably not until January.)
November 15th, 2006 at 12:18 pm
“if you convince them that being politically engaged is an important part of being a mother…”
I think you are right about this, and that mothers are a more cohesive group than other caregivers, thus a good place to start.
November 17th, 2006 at 11:11 am
I agree with your sense that engaging mothers on these issues will be easier than building a broad ‘caregivers’ movement. I was just yesterday talking to a co-worker about our struggle to be inclusive of the dads in our organization, and the tension that some of us feel around whether or not the men actually experience the challenges of working parenthood in the same way that women do.
I’m not quite ready to concede the point that it is inevitable that we feel differently about these struggles, but I know in my own life, it seems like a much more urgent problem for the moms than the dads.