Mother’s Day

Looking for that perfect go-to gift for the wonky feminist mama in your life? Look no further. Your online guide to all things research-and-resource is here. Well, ok, it’s a partial list. Feel free to add suggestions in comments or tweet them at me (I’m @deborahgirlwpen) and I will share. Here’s a start:

1. A book (of course) to help her navigate feminist motherhood. Topping my personal list this season are two by colleagues  from the Brave Girls Alliance, a gender equality think tank and advocacy group I’m part of that’s dedicated to communicating with and influencing media, corporations, and retailers.  First up, Redefining Girly: How Parents Can Fight the Stereotyping and Sexualizing of Girlhood, from Birth to Tween by Melissa Atkins Wardy, my neighbor to the north. You can read an excerpt here, purchase apparel and gifts for “full of awesome” girls and boys that go beyond gender stereotypes at Pigtail Pals and Ballcap Buddies, and join an incredibly active Facebook community over at Wardy’s page.

Next, Her Next Chapter: How Mother-Daughter Book Clubs Can Help Girls Navigate Malicious Media, Risky Relationships, Girl Gossip, and So Much More, hot off the press, by Lori Day, M.Ed., and her daughter, Charlotte Kugler, a student at Mt. Holyoke. Covering far more than the significance of book groups, the book hits on eight of the biggest challenges facing girls today, including bullying, gender stereotypes, and negative body image. The authors provide tools and strategies for discussing these thorny topics, providing carefully chosen books, movies, media recommendations, discussion questions, and group activities to go along with each.

And while we’re on it, The Good Mother Myth: Redefining Motherhood to Fit Reality, edited by Avital Norman Nathman, is practically a Mother’s Day standard, as is pretty much any title from She Writes Press, Seal Press, or The Feminist Press – three very different presses whose lists include high-quality works on a range of topics related to gender.

2. An experience to massage her mind. Why not gift a mama a slot in The OpEd Project’s Write to Change the World seminar, coming up next in Atlanta, Chicago, LA (where I’ll be teaching it on June 1), NYC, Boston, San Francisco, Tucson, and DC. And for Chicago-area locals, how about a ticket to Women Employed’s Working Lunch gala event.

3. A savvy report for her to curl up with at the end of the day.  Hey! This one’s FREE! Gift her the newly released report “The Economic Importance of Women’s Rising Hours of Work: Time to Update Employment Standards” by the Center for Economic and Policy Research’s Eileen Appelbaum, Heather Boushey, and John Schmitt, which Schmitt wrote about here.

Or send her Judith Warner’s new report from the Center for American Progress, “Women’s Leadership: What’s True, What’s False, and Why It Matters,” which explores the “silver lining” to exclusion. (Hint: women, long outsiders, have had no choice but to think, act, and lead in out-of-the-box ways, which is why they’re now poised to change our institutions for the better.)

4. Music, jewelry, pjs, a yoga class, or any of the myriad gifts available from the online shop run by Every Mother Counts, where part of the proceeds go to help mothers around the world.

5. A magazine or movie to feed her brain. How about a subscription to Brain, Child magazine, or the DVD of the documentary, “Who Does She Think She Is?“, about conflicts between motherhood, work, and art. ‘Nuf said.

Of course, no need to wait for Mother’s Day, or limit such gifts to mothers. Thinking back to Julia Ward Howe’s call for a Mother’s Day of Peace, come Sunday, here’s wishing all GWP readers and bloggers an equitable and sincerely peace-filled day.

I invite you to follow me on Twitter and Facebook and subscribe to my occasional newsletter to keep posted on coaching, workshops, writings, and talks.

Seems like quite a few other folks have been reimagining the possibilities of Mother’s Day as well!

• In “Mother’s Day is more than a greeting-card holiday,” Karen D’Souza also returned to the origins of Mother’s Day and wrote about how Julia Ward Howe imagined a day of peace.
• Nicholas Kristof urged readers to celebrate by “saving” a mother and in a separate essay, pointed out that investing in family planning worldwide would result in 94,000 fewer women dying in pregnancy each year.  (Full disclosure: I’m not a fan of the rhetoric of “saving”—it’s something we spend a lot of time critiquing in my Transnational Feminism class—but I deeply appreciate how Kristof continues to remind everyone that women’s “issues” are indeed newsworthy.)
• Also in The New York Times, Stephanie Coontz observed that “it’s too bad that nostalgia for a golden age of motherhood that never existed still clouds our thinking about what’s best for mothers, fathers and their children.”  At Ms., Laura Paskus urged readers to honor all mamas—including “immigrants, single, young, queer and low-income” mothers—on Mother’s Day.  And over at Strollerderby, Rebecca Odes drew attention to all the nannies who help mother children, and who should be a part of Mother’s Day as well!

In the spirit of infusing new meanings into Mother’s Day—and in keeping with the Mother’s Day Challenge I issued to myself and interested readers—I did two things.  Right after eating brunch, and sending flowers to my mom (about whom I’ll write more later), and right before going on a family hike, I gave to two organizations:

Mothers’ Day Movement.  Founded by six women who were “shocked to learn that $14 billion was spent in the US in 2010 on Mother’s Day celebrations including flowers, cards and meals,” they selected Shining Hope for Communities, a Wesleyan student-founded organization working in Kibera, Kenya, as the target of their 2011 fundraising efforts.  (The co-founder and president of SHOFCO, Kennedy Odede, grew up in Kibera.)  I am totally impressed that college students founded SHOFCO, and I remembered well the insightful opinion essay, “Slumdog Tourism,” written by Odede in The New York Times last August.

Save the Children: Every Mother Counts campaign.  They have a midwifery training program in Afghanistan, which ranked as the worst place to be a mother in their Mothers’ Index.  I like the emphasis on training.

I didn’t quite make it to writing any letters to my political representatives as I had planned… but I figure that Father’s Day is around the corner, and I’m planning on pitching a surprise to my husband after I serve up his brunch: co-authorship?

Just in time for Mother’s Day, Save the Children has published its twelfth annual State of the World’s Mothers Report.  This report includes the Mothers’ Index, a ranked list of 164 countries around the world.  Like last year, Norway tops the list for the best place to be a mother.  Afghanistan is worst.  The U.S. fell three places, to number 31 on the list.

In other words, the U.S. ranks closer to the bottom than the top of the 43 developed countries examined in the report.

Of course, as the report reminds us, the numbers don’t always tell the whole story—an individual mother’s situation can vary greatly within the same country.  Nonetheless, national-level comparisons do suggest trends and provide overviews that can provide a valuable framework for digging deeper.

For those of us living in the U.S., these national numbers should give us pause.  Why didn’t mothers in the U.S. fare better?  And why are we falling in the rankings instead of improving?  These startling numbers complicate the rosier picture of motherhood and family that many Americans tend to hold.

The first reason for our low ranking is our maternal mortality rate, an issue I wrote about last month for Girl w/Pen and Ms.  As the State of the World’s Mothers Report points out, the U.S.’s rate for maternal mortality is 1 in 2,100—the highest of any industrialized nation.  In other words, a woman in the U.S. is “more than 7 times as likely as a woman in Italy or Ireland to die from pregnancy-related causes and her risk of maternal death is 15-fold that of a woman in Greece.”

Other reasons for our low ranking include the under-five mortality rate (forty countries beat us on this one) and the percentage of children enrolled in preschool—only 58%, making us the fifth lowest country in the developed world for educating young kids.

Finally—surprise, surprise—our country lags in supporting working women with children, and in creating pathways for women to political office nationally:

The United States has the least generous maternity leave policy—both in terms of duration and percent of wages paid—of any wealthy nation.

The United States is also lagging behind with regard to the political status of women. Only 17 percent of congressional seats are held by women, compared to 45 percent in Sweden and 43 percent in Iceland.

This report made me feel a lot of different emotions about the state of motherhood in the U.S. as well as globally—shock, anger, outrage—not to mention gratitude. I’m fortunate enough to have healthy kids and privileged enough to be able to pay for things like health insurance and preschool. Given the state of things for many mothers, this is no small potatoes! And yet, the more I thought about this report and my reaction to it, the more I began to think about how important it is to use feelings to propel us to something more—understanding, wisdom, action, and working together.

This view of motherhood lies at the origins of Mother’s Day.  Long before Hallmark made sentimentality synonymous with Mother’s Day and restaurants began the tradition of the Mother’s Day brunch (neither of which I plan to reject come Sunday!), Julia Ward Howe imagined a very different kind of occasion.  In her 1870 Mother’s Day Proclamation, she called for a day when women could come together and work towards peace.  In the aftermath of the violence and carnage of the U.S. Civil War, she called for women to

…meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.

Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means

Whereby the great human family can live in peace…

After grief, counsel.  After sorrow, solidarity.  After remembrance, action:

To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,

The amicable settlement of international questions,

The great and general interests of peace.

So here’s my Mother’s Day Challenge to myself this year: after enjoying whatever treats my family makes for me, and feeling lots of warm tenderness toward them (note to kids: you will be good), and making sure I have time to write in my journal, and calling my own mother on the phone—I’m going to do one thing, one action, toward addressing one of the issues raised by this report.  I haven’t decided what, quite yet.  But here are some ideas I scribbled down this afternoon, a personal list to start my brain juices flowing:

• Write a letter to one of my representatives about some of the issues that really matter to mothers and families.  (Education!  Parental leave!  Women’s health!)
• Send money to Emily’s List.
• Write an opinion essay.  Send it out.
• Go to a protest, like this one sponsored by Mothers & Others United in the Hudson Valley.
• Find out more about the campaigns to connect kids across the borders of class and geography—the UN’s Girl Up and Save the Children’s k2kUSA are ones I’ve recently run across.  Think about how to plug my own family into these networks.
• Find out more about efforts in my own backyard.  (I could start by actually reading all those items in my church’s bulletin!) Ask someone how I and my family can get involved.
• Make a donation to one of these campaigns, or one of the many organizations working for women’s rights and healthy families.
• Write down in my calendar that I will bring up all these issues up again on Father’s Day.

I invite anyone and everyone to join me in this challenge.  Share ideas and actions from your own list.  (And be sure to watch the video about Julia Ward Howe below, released from Brave New Foundation in 2009, which includes an inspiring reading of her Mother’s Day Proclamation.)  Happy Mother’s Day!

Imagine

1. A morning spent reading the newspaper and drinking coffee without constant interruption from the kids.

2. A newspaper filled with stories about the new global peace: no environmental disasters, no bombs exploding, no torture, no hate crimes, no war.

3. A house overflowing with peace (no screaming fights over Lego pieces, etc.).

4. Clean dishes. Even after pancakes.

5. Phone call from father-in-law acknowledging that nearly 20 years of political conversations have resulted in his conversion on certain points, such as the need for nationwide family-friendly policies (affordable childcare, paid parental leave, flexible work/life policies, universal healthcare, etc.).

6. A country with the political will to pass policies such as the ones listed above.

7. A world in which being born a girl is not a risk factor for malnourishment, hunger, neglect, discrimination, poverty, abuse, sexual violence, forced labor, trafficking, or death.

8. A world in which social inequalities are shrinking, and progress is being made toward the UN’s Millennium Development Goals.

9. Sufficient time to play with kids, talk with husband and friends, and care for self (read, exercise, shower, write in journal, and meditate).

10. Ability to do the above with a sense of abundance instead of stress.

And, last but not least:

11. No BlackBerry or iPhone. All day.