Motherhood

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. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:16Speaker 01

  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.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  And then

• 0:35Speaker 01

  my son arrived.

• 0:42Speaker 01

  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."

• 0:57Speaker 01

  I, of course, was overwhelmed with joy and awe and wonder at this little creature.

• 1:07Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:24Speaker 01

  The transition to parenthood is like a really powerful time of growth. But in any kind of growth, there's a cost to it.

• 1:38Speaker 01

  And I just, I felt a lot of worry.

• 1:44Speaker 02

  Mother, you promised to have dinner ready at 6 o'clock.

• 1:49Speaker 03

  You need to be around that baby around the clock.

• 1:52Speaker 04

  You're not compensated and all of a sudden you're paying.

• 1:54Speaker 03

  Motherhood is a hard, unending chore. Mommy, wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up.

• 1:59Speaker 05

  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. Mom was accused of leaving her kids in the car alone while she went shopping. Millions of women haven't rejoined the workforce since COVID-19. The state enforced the birth of pregnancy term, even at the steepest personal and familial cost. For two or more years.

• 2:23Speaker 06

  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.

• 2:48Rund Abdelfatah?

  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 childcare. 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.

• 3:24Speaker 06

  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 Conneboy. 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.

• 4:01Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 4:16Speaker 06

  And the doting housewife.

• 4:17Speaker 01

  The woman who gives all her life, all her...

• 4:40Speaker 01

  Work all her thoughts to the people around her.

• 4:44Speaker 06

  You're listening to Throughline from NPR. I'm Ramtin Arablouei.

• 4:48Rund Abdelfatah?

  And I'm Randa Abdelfattah. 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.

• 5:17Speaker 00

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• 6:36Speaker 02

  This is Ricardo Nunez, calling from Puerto Feliz, Illinois, in Pascua de Michoacan in Mexico. And you're listening to Throughline from NPR.

• 6:47Rund Abdelfatah?

  Myth one, the maternal instinct.

• 6:53Speaker 00

  We're here in the vast rugged wilderness of Montana.

• 6:58Speaker 00

  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.

• 7:22Speaker 00

  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.

• 7:44Speaker 00

  A male grizzly approaches nearby. The mother bear confronts the male grizzly head-on.

• 7:52Speaker 00

  Translation: Stay away from my cub.

• 7:59Speaker 00

  The male grizzly retreats into the forest. The extraordinary bond between mother and cub has prevailed.

• 8:12Speaker 01

  So maternal instinct is something that feels true, right?

• 8:17Speaker 02

  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.

• 8:25Speaker 01

  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.

• 8:52Rund Abdelfatah?

  In her book, Chelsea Conneboy argues that this scientific story of the maternal instinct is actually pretty new, even though it might feel real when we observe nature.

• 9:03Speaker 01

  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?

• 9:16Speaker 01

  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.

• 9:38Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 9:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:49Rund Abdelfatah?

  Right?

• 9:50Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 9:50Rund Abdelfatah?

  Which is like, well, no, no, there must be something.

• 9:53Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 9:53Rund Abdelfatah?

  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?

• 10:09Speaker 01

  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.

• 10:53Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 11:03Speaker 01

  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 um 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 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.

• 11:49Rund Abdelfatah?

  In fact, Chelsea says humans couldn't have survived as a species if only their biological mothers could care for them.

• 12:02Speaker 01

  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.

• 12:19Speaker 01

  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.

• 12:55Speaker 04

  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.

• 13:10Rund Abdelfatah?

  This is Premalyn Addison. She's a professor of history at Barnard College. Her book is called Care: The Highest Stage of Capitalism.

• 13:18Speaker 04

  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.

• 13:31Speaker 06

  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 McDougal.

• 13:47Speaker 01

  William McDougal 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 is common to almost all the higher species of animals. McDougal 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,

• 14:17Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 14:33Speaker 01

  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.

• 14:48Speaker 06

  McDougal was born in 1871, just a decade after Charles Darwin put forth his theory of evolution. And by the time McDougal was in university studying psychology, some people were expanding Darwin's theory to explain supposed hierarchies among humans, aka eugenics, a pseudoscience McDougal embraced when he eventually relocated to the United States.

• 15:18Speaker 01

  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.

• 15:37Speaker 04

  White motherhood in particular was often associated with racial purity and elevated in status.

• 15:44Speaker 01

  So he advocated for maintaining gender norms that would preserve maternal instinct, especially in upper class, upper-middle-class white women.

• 15:58Speaker 04

  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.

• 16:25Speaker 01

  McDougal, you know, promoted maternal instinct as biological destiny.

• 16:35Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 16:48Speaker 04

  Capitalism has created motherhood as an economic identity.

• 16:52Speaker 01

  Prior to the Industrial Revolution, like, gender roles weren't quite as intensely divided as they became by the mid to late 19th century.

• 17:03Rund Abdelfatah?

  Now, men would go off to factories and offices to work, to make their mark on the world. And the home...

• 17:10Speaker 01

  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.

• 17:20Rund Abdelfatah?

  And women were the caretakers of that place. That is, white women, because this ideal of womanhood was constructed with them in mind.

• 17:28Speaker 01

  Their, like, role became to uphold the virtue of the home. Their moral importance was really elevated as their, like, societal roles shrank.

• 17:42Speaker 06

  As the 20th century went on...

• 17:44Speaker 01

  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.

• 18:05Speaker 06

  Though, of course, not everyone believed it.

• 18:12Speaker 03

  There is a strong and fervid insistence on the maternal instinct. We possess no scientific data at all on this phase of human psychology.

• 18:21Speaker 01

  So Leda 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.

• 18:51Speaker 02

  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.

• 19:07Speaker 01

  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.

• 19:31Speaker 06

  For example, the fact that pregnancy was incredibly dangerous then.

• 19:36Speaker 01

  Maternal mortality rate was something like 60 times higher than what it would be at the end of the century.

• 19:42Speaker 06

  Or that mothers, women, still couldn't vote or support themselves if they wanted to leave a bad marriage.

• 19:48Speaker 01

  There were these, you know, laws at the time preventing women from having their independence.

• 19:58Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 20:16Speaker 01

  She warned that the clock would run out, essentially, on maternal instinct. And then you'll have to pay us.

• 20:24Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 20:42Speaker 05

  Woman, I'm a poor woman. I'm 45 years old. I have raised six children. There are millions of statistics like me.

• 20:52Speaker 06

  Coming up, the clock runs out and one mother leads the charge to get paid.

• 21:09Speaker 03

  Hi, this is Suniti Shriver calling from Los Angeles, California, and you're listening to Throughline on NPR.

• 21:16Speaker 00

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• 21:59Speaker 00

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• 22:29Rund Abdelfatah?

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• 22:42Rund Abdelfatah?

  Myth Two: The Welfare Queen.

• 22:46Speaker 04

  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.

• 23:14Rund Abdelfatah?

  When Gwendolyn Fowler first read these words...

• 23:16Speaker 05

  Like a light bulb went on in my head.

• 23:18Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 23:28Speaker 05

  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, the stuff we're still arguing about.

• 23:40Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 23:53Speaker 04

  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.

• 24:04Speaker 05

  And then like, just like, looking at Tillman and seeing how she looks, you know, she's a large, black woman. She's older. I just never saw, like, activists looking like that.

• 24:13Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 24:29Speaker 05

  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?

• 24:35Rund Abdelfatah?

  She wasn't finding much on Tillman, until she stumbled upon the voice of the woman herself.

• 24:40Speaker 04

  Uh, 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.

• 24:53Speaker 06

  This is Tillman talking to oral historian Sherna Berger-Gluck.

• 24:56Speaker 02

  It's been a long time since I first interviewed Johnny.

• 24:59Speaker 06

  Sherna conducted a series of interviews with Johnny, beginning in 1984.

• 25:04Speaker 02

  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.

• 25:24Speaker 06

  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.

• 25:32Speaker 02

  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 Rachel's her gigs.

• 25:48Speaker 06

  The interviews Sharna conducted are some of the only remaining records of Johnny, from her early life to her catapult into activism.

• 25:56Rund Abdelfatah?

  Here's what we know.

• 25:57Speaker 04

  I was born in a little place called Scott, Arkansas. It's about 17 miles north of Blue Rock.

• 26:06Rund Abdelfatah?

  She was born in 1926.

• 26:08Speaker 05

  Middle of Jim Crow.

• 26:09Rund Abdelfatah?

  A share cropper's daughter.

• 26:10Speaker 05

  She also worked in the field.

• 26:13Rund Abdelfatah?

  When she was five years old, her mother died in labor.

• 26:16Speaker 05

  And then just trying to live a life without a mother, where you're probably the caretaker for your family.

• 26:22Speaker 04

  I learned to cook, learned to sew, learned to keep a house pretty good, but don't really like it.

• 26:28Rund Abdelfatah?

  She also worked as a domestic worker in other people's homes, but her dream was to be a blues singer.

• 26:34Speaker 04

  I always felt I didn't want to be a housewife. I didn't want to be no mother. I wasn't interested in being no homemaker. That wasn't my thing.

• 26:44Speaker 06

  Eventually, she decided to move west to California.

• 26:47Speaker 05

  She had six children by 1960, by the time she moved.

• 26:51Speaker 06

  Even though it hadn't been her dream, she was a mother.

• 26:58Rund Abdelfatah?

  Once in Los Angeles, they moved into a housing project, Nickerson Gardens.

• 27:03Speaker 05

  She's working at a laundry.

• 27:05Rund Abdelfatah?

  But then?

• 27:06Speaker 05

  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 cutting school.

• 27:13Rund Abdelfatah?

  At this point, Johnny had to consider something she dreaded: getting on welfare.

• 27:20Speaker 05

  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?

• 27:31Rund Abdelfatah?

  So she does it. Johnny signs up for welfare. And right away, she starts to feel the stigma she was afraid of.

• 27:40Speaker 06

  One Sunday, she overhears a lady from a nearby church complaining loudly about welfare recipients right outside of Johnny's housing project.

• 27:48Speaker 05

  And she just talks a whole bunch of crap about people on welfare, how they're lazy and things like that.

• 27:55Speaker 06

  At that moment, something just clicked. That's what got you 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.

• 28:07Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 28:27Speaker 05

  Today, a hope of many years' standing is in large part fulfilled.

• 28:33Rund Abdelfatah?

  Before we can continue with Johnny's story, we have to take a step back to the beginning of what we call welfare.

• 28:40Speaker 05

  This social security measure gives at least some protection to 30 million of our citizens.

• 28:50Rund Abdelfatah?

  Federal welfare programs began with the 1935 Social Security Act. The idea was simple: give cash to poor mothers with children. But historian Premal Anadison says other ideas were baked into the program's DNA.

• 29:05Speaker 04

  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.

• 29:29Rund Abdelfatah?

  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."

• 29:46Speaker 04

  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.

• 30:01Speaker 06

  In her first book, Welfare Warriors, Pramila argues that welfare was uncontroversial until the late 1950s and 60s.

• 30:10Speaker 04

  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.

• 30:27Speaker 06

  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. Desert it 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.

• 30:52Speaker 04

  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.

• 31:06Speaker 06

  Johnny Tillman was aware of this tainted image of welfare recipients long before the term "welfare queen" was officially coined.

• 31:14Speaker 05

  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.

• 31:35Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 31:51Speaker 04

  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.

• 32:01Rund Abdelfatah?

  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 childcare, a right to dignity and privacy.

• 32:15Speaker 04

  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.

• 32:47Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 32:57Speaker 04

  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.

• 33:34Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 33:47Speaker 04

  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.

• 34:04Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 34:28Speaker 05

  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.

• 34:47Speaker 04

  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.

• 34:58Rund Abdelfatah?

  And they saw it as something that would ultimately help more than just Black mothers on welfare, or even women.

• 35:05Speaker 06

  And the idea caught on.

• 35:08Speaker 04

  Martin Luther King endorsed a guaranteed annual income.

• 35:12Speaker 05

  And we must develop progress that will drive the nation to a guaranteed annual income.

• 35:19Speaker 04

  Richard Nixon proposed before Congress a guaranteed annual income.

• 35:25Speaker 06

  Federal minimum would be provided, the same in every state.

• 35:29Speaker 04

  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.

• 35:42Speaker 05

  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.

• 36:11Speaker 06

  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.

• 36:30Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 36:45Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 37:20Speaker 06

  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 Families, or TANF. The new bill restores America's basic bargain of providing opportunity and demanding in return responsibility. Under TANF, less families received less cash assistance, and as its name implies, the help runs out even faster than before.

• 37:52Speaker 06

  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

• 38:13Rund Abdelfatah?

  a wages-for-house war. Coming up, what happens if the homemakers of the world unite?

• 38:28Speaker 06

  Il mio nome è Giorgia Aguilar, a Firenze, Italia. State sentendo True Line dal NPR.

• 38:35Speaker 00

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• 39:36Rund Abdelfatah?

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• 40:03Rund Abdelfatah?

  Myth Three: The Doting Housewife.

• 40:22Rund Abdelfatah?

  I knew that I was not born in a perfect world.

• 40:30Rund Abdelfatah?

  I knew that there was a lot of injustice,

• 40:35Rund Abdelfatah?

  a lot of struggle,

• 40:40Rund Abdelfatah?

  that life was precarious.

• 40:55Rund Abdelfatah?

  My name is Silvia Federici. I was born in 1942, in the middle of World War II, in Parma, Italy.

• 41:11Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 41:25Rund Abdelfatah?

  And then running, with two little girls, running, running, running to the nearby fields

• 41:34Rund Abdelfatah?

  and squat there for much of the night.

• 41:39Rund Abdelfatah?

  I think those accounts are partially one of the reasons why I decided never to have children.

• 41:50Speaker 06

  After the war, Silvia 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.

• 42:04Rund Abdelfatah?

  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."

• 42:27Speaker 06

  What her mother called work, her father called natural love.

• 42:31Rund Abdelfatah?

  As I started growing up, I made a big struggle, you know, not to become a housewife.

• 42:40Rund Abdelfatah?

  A housewife.

• 42:42Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 43:25Speaker 06

  And it all began when Sylvia flew to Buffalo, New York on a scholarship to study at a college there.

• 43:36Speaker 06

  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 a police officer striking women.

• 43:56Speaker 01

  Listen, I was radicalized in the United States.

• 43:59Speaker 06

  Racism is an excuse used for capitalism. And we know that racism is just a byproduct of capitalism.

• 44:06Speaker 01

  In 67, 68, this was the height of the student movement. So basically, I was catching up. I was reading about American history. I was reading about slavery.

• 44:18Speaker 06

  Reading about Marx and feminism.

• 44:21Rund Abdelfatah?

  Meanwhile, she was still keeping an eye on things back in Italy.

• 44:24Speaker 01

  I was reading some of the material coming out of the student movement in Italy.

• 44:31Speaker 02

  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.

• 44:45Speaker 01

  This article called "The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community" by this woman that I

• 44:53Speaker 02

  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 four or five hundred years of capitalism, have been engaged primarily in activities that have not been recognized as work.

• 45:17Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 45:31Speaker 02

  They are essential for every kind of work that takes place in our society.

• 45:39Speaker 04

  Women's labor of social reproduction, as feminists in the 1970s and 80s called it, is the work that really undergirds all other work.

• 45:51Speaker 06

  Again, Pamela Anderson.

• 45:54Speaker 04

  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.

• 46:07Speaker 02

  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.

• 46:21Speaker 06

  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.

• 46:42Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 46:51Speaker 02

  The bulk of the feminist movement saw the solution, you know, to leave the home and to go and enter the male-dominated jobs.

• 47:07Speaker 02

  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.

• 47:24Speaker 04

  On the other hand, while it seemed to maintain traditional family values, the conservative call of the day.

• 47:31Speaker 00

  It's more important than ever for our families to affirm an older and more lasting set of values.

• 47:37Speaker 04

  Sylvia believed compensating housework could actually spark a revolution in gender roles.

• 47:43Speaker 02

  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, 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.

• 48:11Speaker 06

  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.

• 48:24Speaker 04

  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 Sylvia Federici told you this. If you give me a minute, I can find a quote from her.

• 48:40Speaker 02

  They call it love. We call it unpaid labor. And we say it is unwage work.

• 48:49Speaker 02

  They call it fragility. More smile, more money.

• 48:56Speaker 02

  Nothing will be so powerful in destroying the healing virtue of a smile.

• 49:06Speaker 06

  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?

• 49:20Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 49:52Speaker 04

  The whole issue of maternity is turning into a nightmare.

• 50:01Speaker 04

  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.

• 50:35Speaker 01

  We're failing. I mean, truly.

• 50:39Speaker 01

  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 childcare and health insurance that actually meets our family's needs. Or maybe we won't do this.

• 51:05Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 51:49Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 52:12Speaker 04

  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 kind of community-based care, 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 when we need it.

• 53:26Rund Abdelfatah?

  That's it for this week's show. I'm Randa Abdelfatah.

• 53:29Speaker 06

  I'm Ramtin Arablouei, and you've been listening to Throughline for NPR.

• 53:33Rund Abdelfatah?

  This episode was produced by me.

• 53:35Speaker 06

  And me and. Lawrence Wu. Julie Kane. Anya Steinberg.

• 53:40Speaker 02

  Yolanda Sangwe. Casey Minor. Christina Kim.

• 53:44Speaker 00

  Devin Kadyama. Sasha Crawford-Holland. Amir Marshi.

• 53:49Rund Abdelfatah?

  Thank you to Olivia Chilcody, Devin Kadyama, 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.

• 54:05Speaker 06

  Thanks also to Johannes Durkey, Micah Ratner, Tamar Charney, and Anya Grunman.

• 54:11Rund Abdelfatah?

  The interviews with Johnny Tillman were conducted by Sherna Berger-Glock for the Feminist History Research Project and were donated as its collection to the California State University Long Beach Library Archive.

• 54:23Speaker 06

  Fact checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel.

• 54:26Rund Abdelfatah?

  This episode was mixed by Josh Newell. Music was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes.

• 54:33Speaker 02

  Anya Mizani.

• 54:34Rund Abdelfatah?

  Navid Marvi. Sho Fujiwara. And as always, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write us at [email protected]. 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.

• 55:04Speaker 06

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.