Motherhood : Throughline

The Every Mother is a Working Mother network held the protest outside a welfare office in 2002 urging the federal government to take money required for a war against Iraq and spend it instead on welfare and other social programs.

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.

Guests:

Chelsea Conaboy, health and science journalist, and the author of Mother Brain: How Neuroscience is Rewriting the Story of Parenthood.

Premilla Nadasen, professor of history at Barnard College and author of Care: The Highest Stage of Capitalism.

Gwendolyn Fowler, doctoral student at Rutgers University focusing on the women of the Welfare Rights Movement.