Why capitalism makes motherhood so hard
The activist and scholar bell hooks observed that the homeplace was a site of revolution. Whether you are a mother, or someone who works with mothers, you know that the act of mothering - all the emotional labor, bedtime stories, care and love, feeding, comforting, and encouraging - is an incredibly profound and meaningful experience.
But mothers are tired. Mothers are frustrated. Mothers are overwhelmed. The pandemic forced mothers everywhere to wake up to a painful truth…this world is not set up to support us. And until we understand how the institution of motherhood is socially constructed to exploit women and reinforce social inequality and injustice, we will continue to devalue mothers and hold them back from fully realizing their power and place in the world.
It’s time for a motherhood revolution.
This is a four-part blog series in which I dive into four cultural forces that oppress modern motherhood in America: patriarchal motherhood, whiteness, capitalism, and patriarchal religion. You can read the other blogs in the series here:
What is capitalism?
Let’s start with some definitions, shall we? I wanted to start with an unbiased definition of capitalism, so I looked up a children’s definition to keep it super simple:
Capitalism is an economic system. That is, it is a system for dealing with money and wealth. In a capitalist country, citizens, not governments, own and run companies. These companies compete with other companies for business. They decide which goods and services to provide. They also decide how much to charge for the goods and services and where to sell them. Companies do all these things to make money for their owners. People who use their money to start or to run companies are called capitalists. (Brittanica Kids)
That’s the bare bones definition and everything that follows is my own voice.
A brief history of capitalism (that you didn’t learn in high school)
Capitalism as a system began through violent acts of enclosure, called primitive accumulation. In many parts of Europe in the 13th-15th centuries, land was typically owned by feudal lords, but peasants could use it for their own families, so they had some degree of control over the means of production. They could grow their own food, clothe their families, sustain their houses. During the shift from feudalism to capitalism, that land was privatized, so there was a wash of people who were now landless.
This developed two distinct classes - the class of owners (you’ll sometimes hear the term “the bourgeoisie") and the class of workers (“the proletariat”). The owners had the capital, or wealth, to control the means of production (land, factories, etc), while the workers did not own land or capital. They no longer had control over means of production, so they now had to sell their labor for a wage in order to pay for the food and clothing they were once able to supply themselves.
When Karl Marx wrote Capital: A Critique of Political Economy in 1867, he described the motivating force behind capitalism as the exploitation of labor. Through the system of private competition, owners are always in vying with each other to increase profits and market share, which requires keeping labor costs low, and extracting natural resources at the lowest possible cost. Profit is the amount made between the cost of creating the product (labor, materials, etc.) and the price to sell the product. Essentially, capitalists create surplus value by NOT PAYING THE LABORERS the full value of their social labor. That’s what allows for profits to be made and accumulated. That keeps these two classes of people locked in an endless conflict with each other.
Silvia Federici expanded upon Marx’s theories, bringing into the conversation a critical focus on how the development of capitalism required the control and subjugation of women in her book Caliban and the Witch: Women, The Body, and Primitive Accumulation. She also reminds us that “the demonization of the American indigenous people served to justify their enslavement and the plunder of their resources. In Europe, the attack waged on women justified the appropriation of their labor by men and the criminalization of their control over reproduction.” (p. 102)
Capitalism exists because of the domination of women’s bodies, the horrors of the slave trade, the mass slaughter of indigenous people, and the plunder of earth’s natural resources. Capitalism is a massively inequitable system that, when you take into account everything I just listed, has killed far more people than Stalin, Hitler, or Mao.
Capitalism today
Over time, capital concentrates into fewer and fewer hands. In 2021, the top 1 percent of income earners held 32.1 percent of all wealth in the United States. That is the highest percentage of wealth the top 1 percent has held since the Fed began publishing the data set in 1989. That’s up nearly 20 percent from the period following the 2007-2008 Financial Crisis, and nearly 35 percent from 1990.
This is how we end up with the billionaire class that has undue influence on our democracy, because those who have the most resources and capital use it to fix the system to continue to benefit themselves. Which is how a capitalist economic system affects the political environment; although the state doesn’t own businesses, businesses and their billionaire shareholders control the state.
And this is when it becomes clear that there’s no saving the system; there’s no amount of tweaking or adjusting by our political system that can “fix” capitalism. Capitalism survives by the exploitation of humans and the exploitation of the environment for profit. Even if you have companies out there creating green energy or cleaning up pollution (which we still need people to do!) we need to have our eye on transitioning out of the system because it will never be sustainable.
Mothering under capitalism
So how specifically does the system of capitalism affect motherhood? Well, unless we’re part of the owner / capitalist / billionaire class, we’re likely part of the working class. Which means the only means of production we own is our body, so we hire it out in the free market to earn a wage. Additionally, under free-market, or neoliberal capitalism, many services that are offered by the government in other countries (such as healthcare, maternity leave, and child care) are left to the market, which means we have to spend our own money on these things or hope our employers offer them.
The ideology of capitalism (especially when combined with the ideologies of patriarchy and whiteness, because remember these are all interconnected systems) creates many conscious and unconscious beliefs that directly affect mothers, such as:
Carework and "the mental load" is devalued.
Under patriarchy and capitalism, the belief is that care work should be provided by the mother for free. And so the invisible, unseen mental and emotional labor of managing children's schedules, keeping the pantry stocked, remembering birthday presents, and so much more, is not only typically done by the mother, it is done with little respect or even acknowledgement.
Career vs. motherhood, or "the mommy track."
Many mothers have this false choice of choosing between a career or motherhood. Really, as we're seeing, our so-called choices in motherhood are actually shaped and defined by systems beyond our control, before we even get to start thinking about our options. Because under capitalism, we have zero paid maternity leave and minimal protections for women and mothers in the workplace or government, so our choice of working or staying at home is severely limited. And stereotypically female jobs like nursing, or teaching, are severely underpaid. We're all familiar with the wage gap, which is even worse for women of color, so again this reinforces that our "choice" to go back to work or not in motherhood is limited and defined by what jobs are even available to us to begin with.
Consumerism is synonymous with motherhood.
One study indicates that in the U.S., the transition to motherhood is linked with an increase in consumption. This makes sense, right? Often the only rite of passage we have to celebrate the beginning of our mothering journey is the baby shower…while it can be a lovely gathering of women loving on and nourishing the mother-to-be, it’s also incomplete without a “showering” of gifts. Often, the shower isn’t even centered on the mom, it's usually only gifts for the baby.
But even well into motherhood, consumerism prevails. There’s evidence that “good mothers” are often characterized by their commodity and product orientation.
Complete lack of social support for mothers.
I mentioned earlier that under capitalism, we have zero paid maternity leave and minimal protections for women and mothers in the workplace or government. Additionally, when everything is put out to the market, we have no government-provided day care centers, no public cafeterias, no help for laundry or other support for the critical functions of raising humans. All is done by individual mothers, instead of sharing the load communally. This often means that women end up staying dependent on men and their earnings in order to provide the care for children, which can increase the rate of domestic violence, or even just mildly unsatisfactory marriages.
A culture of competition instead of collaboration.
Finally, capitalism's competitive nature influences our social behaviors toward each other so we are positioned against each other instead of working together. This is where we see the nonsense about the "mommy wars" that pit mothers with different beliefs against each other.
How capitalism hurts all humans
My work focuses on the effect of capitalism on motherhood, but here is a really powerful example of one of the fundamental problems of capitalism for *all* humans. If you're not already familiar with Maslow's Hierarchy of needs, it's a theory of human development psychology that classifies the universal needs of society as its base, and when each condition is fulfilled, a person is motivated and able to arise at the next stage, ultimately arriving at self-actualization and achieving their full potential.
Source: https://findonlinecourses.org/leadership/maslows-hierarchy-of-needs/
But here's the thing - under capitalism, nearly all of our very basic physiological needs of survival cost money. Food, water, shelter, clothing, healthcare - none of it is guaranteed to us as a basic human right. We've let everything be put out to the market for a price. And of course, under the systems of patriarchy and whiteness, it ends up being women, and especially women of color, and their children who are more likely to live in poverty, and be housing and food insecure. CPS will come in and take children away because of neglect, but “neglect” is often an inability to provide these basic physiological needs…because they cost money!
Mothers (and children) everywhere deserve to have their basic survival needs met.
Let's start by reframing what is considered a human right. We're so concerned with the right to free speech, right to vote, right to bear arms, right to practice religion, etc in this country. (And don't get me wrong, these are important rights, I’m not saying to take those rights away.)
But what about the right to clean water? The right to safe and secure housing? The right to healthy and nutritious food? The rights to our very own bodies? Redefining what we consider to be the most important rights for all humans and others is a critical step to the revolution because it tells us where to focus our energy and action for all of humanity to reach their full potential, not just those with the most wealth.
It’s important and helpful to remember that capitalism is a human-invented system. Capitalism as it exists today is only a few hundred years old. We created this, and we can uncreate it.
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