Moms look out for each other, but who's looking out for them?
On electing moms and the expectation that they do it all
Five years ago today, I asked my colleagues on city council to support a parental leave policy that allowed both protections and accommodations for new parents, as well as for other qualifying events. I was 7 1/2 months pregnant, so what that really meant was that I was asking if I, personally, could have protections and accommodations, which was as awful as it sounds, given how hyper-partisan our Council was.
It passed, however, with both bipartisan and unanimous support, something I’m not so sure would happen today, given how (publicly) partisan motherhood has become. And while I am sure some of them would have preferred to see me resign and stay home with my new baby, they either kept it to themselves, or at the very least off-camera.
The whole experience, and those that would unfold over the next half(ish) of my term, opened my eyes to the lack of supports for moms in office, particularly at a time when we need more of them. Because we do need more moms in elected office. More specifically, we need more moms with children and teens in office.
In the United States, 85% of women are mothers by the time they are 45, yet less than 8% of our state and federal representatives have minor children. Yet, those 8% are crushing it when it comes to advocating for policies that benefit children and families.
According to a summary from this Marie Claire article on Vote Mama Foundation’s State of Motherhood report in 2022, “Of the 10 states with the most mothers in the legislature, five have adopted or will soon implement paid family leave (Oregon, Colorado, Washington, California, Maryland). Seven of the top 10 states guarantee workers paid sick days (Oregon, Colorado, California, Washington, Maryland, Vermont, and New Mexico). All of the top 10 offer some form of universal preschool.” (Emphasis mine)
In other words, moms know how to get things done.
The thing is, though, saying we need to elect more moms isn’t enough.
Sure, tweeting or posting elect more moms! makes for a great headline, but too often the conversations fail to address the very real challenges moms face once they are in office, leaving them to fix it on their own.
First, a little story time. When I was first elected to office in 2017, I didn’t have kids. If you had asked me how I felt about moms running for office, I would have shouted from the rooftops that I loved it and would do anything (anything!) I needed to support them.
I praised my colleague Nicole, a single mom of three young kids, when she ran and subsequently wrote a policy allowing campaign funds to be used for childcare way back in 2019. I may have even posted or tweeted or talked about how great it was to see moms running and lead.
Then, when I got pregnant midway through my Council term, I learned that we didn’t have a parental leave policy. So, I wrote my own, which as I mentioned earlier, we then publicly discussed the merits of on a public livestream. At the time, it was both humiliating and empowering, but in hindsight it’s just infuriating that it wasn’t already done.
And also, how had I not noticed these important policies were missing that whole time?
From On the Same Page with Abby and Paige. You can watch the full discussion here or read about it here.
Not only was leave for moms in office not a thing at the local level, state legislatures also lack formal parental leave policies. While some states offer nursing rooms and have policies around excused absences, it wasn’t until 2020 that Colorado became the first state to codify a paid parental leave policy for its legislators after then-Senator Brittany Pettersen became pregnant and learned there was no formal policy. The real kicker, however, is that Senator Pettersen had to have this fight again more recently in Congress, and from the outside looking in, the fight looks harder now than it did then.
And so here’s where I start to take issue with many of the elect more moms conversations, because it’s not just about running.
We hear a lot about how hard it is for moms to run for office. And it is hard. It’s long hours, thousands of phone calls, countless public events, fundraising, weekends spent canvassing, etc. But being in office is also hard, and this is the part that is too often forgotten, or overlooked, despite it being the part that lasts for years.
The hours are also long and don’t coincide with school or traditional childcare centers’ hours. Meetings can run until 2 am, which means your high schooler babysitter is probably not available and besides, childcare is expensive. Not that you can afford it, anyways, (unless you’re independently wealthy) because so many state and local offices pay $40k or less for full-time work with unpredictable schedules and being on-call 24/7, making it hard to hold down a job if you work for someone else.
Oh, and kids (especially younger ones) are generally unwelcome at meetings or events outside of a cute appearance. If they’re “well-behaved”, they’re begrudgingly tolerated, but if they make themselves known, they’re a “distraction”. And if you need to bring your child with you anywhere but would prefer to keep their photo out of the public eye, good luck - there is very little respect for this. After all, you asked for it.
And so we expect the moms who were just elected to navigate all of the above and then also spend the next several years working on policies to address those challenges and pave the way for future moms. And they will. They do. And they do it successfully. They do this on top of everything else they care about and want to work on because moms get shit done and look out for other moms.
But it comes at a cost, and I can tell you from personal experience that there is a large swath of people who really hate moms in office and think they should shut up and stay home with their kids (that’s almost a direct quote from an email I received). So now you have a newly elected mom trying to do all of the things while also bearing the brunt of the backlash and if she says anything, she’s told to shut up and stop complaining because again, she asked for it.
Which brings me back to the missing piece of the conversation.
Everyone loves a pro-mom tagline (Run for office! Do hard things! Be superwoman!) but rarely in politics does that translate into systemic changes to support those same people. We need people in office now to write policies that will benefit moms once they get there, not just talk about it when they’re on the ballot.
Proclaiming support for them on social media while failing to bring forward actual policies that will help them does nothing but uphold the status quo and forces moms to overcome barriers to office twice: both when they run and again when they’re elected. It’s unnecessary and entirely preventable.
I say this, of course, as someone who didn’t get it. I praised Nicole, my colleague with three kids, but I didn’t bring forward any policies that would have made her job easier. From the outside, she was doing great! She was handling things so well!
But that’s the things with moms - we can rally and project strength even when we’re struggling. We will put in the work to make things easier for the person coming in after us, no matter the personal cost, and now that I know better, I want us to do better. (I should point out that Nicole is one of my dearest friends now and this is shared with her consent. It is partly because of my recognition of how we failed her that I’m so passionate about this now).
So yes, we need to elect more moms. But we also need to talk more about how to proactively put supports into place for them for once they get there. And we need to demand that the people in office now, who express their support for electing more moms, take the lead with some actionable policies that help them succeed after they win. Because even though moms are expected to do it all, they shouldn’t have to.
Not sure what those policies are? Here are a few off the top of my head:
Parental leave
Allowing campaign funds for childcare (Vote Mama Lobby is successfully working on this one)
On-site childcare for meetings or childcare stipends, including for parents who are required to staff the meetings
Remote participation rather than being forced to miss votes
Flexible committee meeting times, such as during the school year vs. summer
<Insert any number of other ideas>
Note: Shout out to the people and organizations who are doing this work, who are not only helping moms run for office, but are ensuring they are set up for success once they get there. I love to see it.
Want to support more moms in office or policies that benefit children and families? Check out Moms First US, Moms Rising, Moms in Office, Mother Forward, Vote Mama, or any other number of organizations.
Want to learn more about policies such as childcare, paid leave, etc.? Check out , , and (who surely have even more recommendations). Oh, and subscribe to Delightfully Difficult!
A version of the essay was published in July 2024. You can read the original here.
Oh gosh with the way things are currently I truly cannot imagine any mom running for any elected office with young kids in tow especially if they are in an unsupportive relationship. I love the ideas in your article. I'm going to read up about this more on your shared links