We deserve more than Mother's Day. We need to value women on their own.
Now more than ever, normalize that women don't need to be mothers — women are enough.
We are two journalists writing about family and carework from a feminist perspective. Research, interviews and personal stories connecting systemic issues and family life; also, some 40+ mom humor. You can read past issues here. Follow us on Instagram @matriarchyreport.
If you value the work we do here, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Paid subscriptions sustain this work, and help compensate for some of the time, energy (and childcare costs!) that go into it. If you’re not ready to become a paid subscriber, you can also subscribe for free and show support by sharing with friends or on social media. Thank you for being here.
Note: A version of this essay is now on the Breaking Down Patriarchy podcast, take a listen here!
I used to hate Mother’s Day. I dreaded it.
I dreaded it so much that I started planning ahead for Mother’s Day so that I could deal with it. Usually I planned to get brunch, get my nails done, and turn off my phone.
It was important to turn off my phone because I would inevitably get pinged with messages that said things like:
Happy Mother’s Day! You are a wonderful “mother” in your own way. Or, Happy Mother’s Day, our kids think you’re great.
Some women who don’t have kids like getting messages like this. I did not like it.
There’s no reason to message someone on Mother’s Day, after all, if they are not a mom. Unless you think of all women as moms, or would-be moms.
I mean, people haven’t sent me messages on Boss’s Day, or Secretary Day, or Father’s Day, or any other role-specific holiday that doesn’t apply to me. Only on Mother’s Day. If you think this isn’t that odd, ask yourself if you would text a guy who doesn’t have kids and wish him a Happy Father’s Day. No? It’s weird, right?
I have polled men without children to see if they are similarly pinged with messages on Father’s Day, and they are not.
So why is this happening?
This is happening because we have conflated the identity and worth of women with motherhood.
I say we, because I was roped into this idea too, from the time I was very young. I was raised Mormon, and on Mother’s Day, the leader of the congregation would ask not only all the mothers to stand, but all the little girls to stand, too.
Then, men and boys in the congregation would distribute a token gift--usually a single rose or some chocolates--to all the girls and women standing in the pews. It was a gift for “all the mothers and ‘future mothers’ in the congregation,” we were told.
This gesture, which now strikes me as a cross between a scene from “The Bachelor” and “The Handmaid’s Tale,” left me fuming in my pew, even when I was 12.
It presumed that the role of mother was what I wished for, and that it defined my future. The boys didn’t get the same treatment on Father’s Day. They got to keep sitting in their seats just being boys, or I presume, “future men.”
The implication was that there were no women, or future women among us— only mothers and “future mothers.”
The message that women’s worth lies not in their personhood, but in their childbearing and child-caring, is reiterated in a million ways, inside and outside religious circles.
We see this in public discourse when anti-abortion activists insist that every woman should want to become a mother or should become a mother whether she wants to or not. Revoking the right to end an unwanted or dangerous pregnancy is a legal assertion of what happened in my church—the assumption that a woman’s destiny, by virtue of the fact that she has a uterus, is to bear a child. And she has not properly fulfilled her role if she’s hasn’t done so.
We also see this message repeated when leaders respond to sexual harassment and assault allegations, from the Trump tapes to the Kavanaugh hearings. They often make statements about protecting “mothers and daughters.”
“We should always honor and respect the dignity of our mothers, sisters and daughters,” Ben Carson stated in regards to the Trump tapes.
Mitt Romney decried Trump’s words as “vile degradations [that] demean our wives and daughters.”
But do you notice what’s happening here?
These statements position women’s worth in relation to men and children — instead of as people who are deserving of respect and rights as individuals. This can make women, as individuals, undervalued or invisible, or worse.
And it’s not just men and male authority figures that do this, it’s easy for women to internalize this idea, too. I’m reminded of a time, when I was in my early 30s, when I attended a yoga class with a friend. She went to introduce me to a group of moms she knew through her kids’ school and said: “This is Lane, another mom from the neighborhood…” Then she caught herself and said, “I mean, she’s a future mom from our neighborhood.”
There was an awkward pause; and then I corrected her: “Uh, I’m a woman from the neighborhood,” I said, and we all laughed, and she apologized. But how interesting that the word “woman” simply didn’t come to her!
I’m also reminded of the time when one of my close male friends mentioned to me, unprompted, how nice it was that I nurtured my university students as a professor, which, he noted was a kind of “mothering” of its own.
Never mind that my university students were adults who did not require mothering. he had also forgotten that at the time I was no longer teaching but was working as a full-time journalist. I was not performing “nurturing” in my day-to-day life at all unless you counted my succulent garden.
But the underlying assumption in these comments, as with the Mother’s Day messages, is that for women to feel good about themselves and their place in the world, and for others to feel good about women and their place in the world, they must be nurturers or “mothers” in some sense. Even if that sense is entirely fabricated.
It should go without saying that this should not be the case. Mothers are female-identifying parents. Women are female-identifying people. Both are equally worthy because they are humans. But too often being a woman is deemed not enough.
The idea that we are failing without men or children attached to us—or that we are worthless if we are not spending our lives serving men and children--comes from our upbringing, our conditioning, our churches, it even sometimes comes from the people who love us but received the same bad ideas.
It’s also actually ingrained in our history in ways that most of us aren’t aware of. I recently learned about the legal term “coverture.” Coverture is a legal concept that American colonists brought over from England, that held that no female person had a legal identity.
Women’s historian Catherine Allgor explains that at birth, a female baby was “covered” by her father’s identity, and then, when she married, “covered” by her husband’s. This is why women held their father’s names, and then as a transfer of identity, took their husband’s.
Because they did not have a legal identity under coverture, married women could not make contracts or be sued, so they could not own or work in businesses. “The ghost of coverture has always haunted women’s lives and continues to do so,” writes Allgor.
Coverture was allowed to stand in the drafting of the U.S. Constitution and is why women weren’t regularly allowed on juries until the 1960s. It’s the reason they weren’t allowed to own property or have a bank account.
Denial of women’s existence is the reasoning that’s being co-opted now to overturn the right to abortion and justify forced birth: women weren’t in the constitution when it was made, because they didn’t legally exist. Therefore, because women weren’t in the constitution, neither was the right to end an unwanted or dangerous pregnancy.
Women still encounter coverture in smaller ways, too: real estate transactions nearly always name the male as the borrower and woman as co-borrower, even if she has more wealth (this has happened to me). They encounter it in tax matters, employment, housing, healthcare, and multiple other systems that were built to assume that women had no legal standing of their own.
No wonder “women” don’t seem to exist in so many of our institutions and conversations. When our country was founded, legally, there were girls—property of their fathers, and wives—property of their husbands. But freestanding women were not part of the collective and legal imagination.
Over the years, I have had to fight for my self-worth as a woman without a man or children attached. I have had dozens of exemplars to aid me in this, mostly peers, mostly other women without children.
They have taught me how to rely on my own self-regard, how to enjoy the singular pleasures of earning and spending my own time and spending my own money. How to struggle and fail and rely on myself. How to build my own life full of adventures, and fulfilling relationships, and how to build my own Ikea furniture. How to make a home filled with my own books, and art, and if I felt like it, mermaid decor.
Three years ago, after forty years of being child free, I got pregnant. Although my partner and I had hoped for the pregnancy, I found myself struggling with a profound loss of myself as a woman. The title of mother, I feared, would erase what I had fought for and grown to cherish: my womanhood, and my hard-won autonomy and self-regard as a woman with no one attached.
Now on Mother’s Day I get different messages on my phone, ones that congratulate me and celebrate my long-delayed motherhood. But for many years, Mother’s Day was a day when it was indicated to me that being “just a woman” left me lacking, incomplete.
So now on Mother’s Day I remind myself to be grateful for my womanhood, something that I wasn’t taught about and had to discover for myself. And this is something that I will pass on to my daughter — teaching her the joy and challenges that await her as a woman, whether or not she chooses to become a mother.
Mother’s Day will always be a day that I remember to tell her what was seldom said to me on any day of the year: Women are enough all on their own. Women are enough. Women are enough. Women are enough.
Note: A previous version of this essay appeared in The Salt Lake Tribune. This essay will appear later this month in a forthcoming episode of the podcast Breaking Down Patriarchy.
Instagram: @matriarchyreport Twitter: @laneanderson @allisonlichter