work.
While new activist groups and organizations—with diverse areas of focus—emerged after 1990,
many of their goals remain similar to those from the 1970s. Motherhood, valuing women’s work, and
fighting sexual assault, for example, remain long-standing concerns for feminist activists.
Motherhood, Employment, and the Labor of Care
In two memoirs published in the years after the 1992 Ms. essay that catapulted her onto the public stage,
Rebecca Walker publicly criticized her feminist mother, Alice Walker, for regularly abandoning her
during her childhood. According to Rebecca, Alice was off doing her feminist work, leaving Rebecca at
home to fend for herself. Seeing her mother as representative of second-wave feminism, Walker took
feminism to task for discouraging women from having children and for not valuing the mother-child
relationship and the responsibilities of mothering. “Feminism,” she would argue, “has betrayed an entire
generation of women into childlessness.”^62 While Walker’s high-profile celebrity feminist relationship
with her mother is admittedly unique, her story is again illustrative of at least one aspect of the
contemporary movement: namely, its interest in reexamining women’s relationship to motherhood in light
of the societal and cultural changes brought by the earlier women’s movements.
As they aged, many feminist activists and writers in the post-1990 generation focused their attention
on motherhood, both as a personal experience and as a political institution. Like their feminist
predecessors, they fought for the work of motherhood to be recognized—as labor, as care work, and as a
contribution to the gross domestic product of the United States. Yet many also struggled with a new set of
issues that an earlier generation rarely had to face. Previously women were given just one socially
approved option: get married and have children. Women in the early twenty-first century face many more
choices—such as if, when, and how to mother—and they often feel deeply ambivalent about whatever
decision they ultimately make. Although women’s movements have expanded the opportunities and
options available to women and men, these possibilities remain deeply embedded in inherited political,
cultural, and economic structures that have remained largely unchanged. In short, policies in the
workplace and gender expectations in the home have not caught up to the changes in women’s lives. The
American workplace is still designed around the mythical male worker who can devote long hours to his
job because he has no obligations in the home. Women are still expected to do the vast majority of
housework and childcare within the home, even as they work outside the home at nearly the same rates as
men do. Whereas for a brief period in the 1980s this “having it all” image of the modern superwoman was
celebrated, women of all generations today are more likely to be critical of this ideal, recognizing that in
practice “having it all” means “having to do it all alone” with very little support. (And we still don’t ask
men how they manage to “have it all.”)
The group MomsRising formed in 2006 to address the issues confronted by mothers in the twenty-first
century. In the group’s “Motherhood Manifesto,” they lay out a progressive agenda to improve the lives,
work, and economic conditions of mothers in the United States. Their manifesto argues for paid parental
leave, expanded coverage for the Family and Medical Leave Act, flexible work hours and work
locations, quality after-school educational programs, universal healthcare for kids, excellent and
affordable childcare, living wages and equal pay for equal work, and an end to workplace discrimination
against mothers. It is important to remember that today the overwhelming majority of mothers of small
children work outside the home, and most have no choice about whether or not to do so: they have to
work to make ends meet.