More Than A Magazine, A Movement
All women should have the right to choose if or when to be mothers, and to have the economic and social support to do so. This choice has been restricted across time and place due to discriminatory legislation against mothers and pregnant people, lackluster social safety nets and anti-abortion/anti-birth control movements.
Any road to the White House runs through moms. But new polling from Demand Justice shows that on the issues moms care most about—women’s rights, gun safety and healthcare—former president Donald Trump has a problem: his stacking of the U.S. Supreme Court with extremist justices.
Part one of a three-part series about the 900-plus-page right-wing “misogynistic manifesto”:
Project 2025 promotes traditional heterosexual marriage, stigmatizing single parenthood and same-sex spouses, and cutting programs to support single mothers and their children.
(This article originally appears in the Fall 2024 issue of Ms. Join the Ms. community today and you’ll get issues delivered straight to your mailbox!)
Sen. JD Vance, Donald Trump’s running mate, has faced backlash for his controversial comments about Vice President Kamala Harris and other Democrats, as well as his extremist pro-natalist beliefs. Vance’s ideology is part of a broader conservative movement concerned with declining marriage rates and changing family patterns. This movement seeks to incentivize marriage, punish single parenthood, and weaken policies that enhance women’s economic autonomy. Vance and his allies oppose public investments in child care and family leave, fearing these would empower women to make independent family decisions. Their efforts echo a broader conservative agenda to reinforce traditional family structures and gender roles.
Front & Center is a groundbreaking Ms. series that offers first-person accounts of Black mothers living in Jackson, Miss., receiving a guaranteed income. Moving into the fourth year and next phase of this series, the aim is to expand our focus beyond individual stories to include a broader examination of systemic issues impacting Black women in poverty. This means diving deeper into the interconnected challenges they face, including healthcare, childcare and elder care, and the importance of mental, physical and spiritual well-being.
“When we started our Front & Center series three years ago, our goal was to give Black women living in extreme poverty—too often ignored in our politics and press—a platform to share their lived experience. … Instead of the narrow spotlight we’ve held to the singular program of the Magnolia Mother’s Trust guaranteed income pilot, we recognize that we must illuminate the full range of systems that harm our most vulnerable communities.”
The collective female rage in response to JD Vance using the “childless cat lady” archetype as an insult is driven by shared hurt at the mockery that reduces us to our reproductive capacity in a political context where women are already devalued. It demeans our dreams and aspirations outside motherhood. It seems small, but those three words carry so much emotional weight for us.
The fight is exhausting and there will come a time when I stop. But I pray that other women fight. All of us—intentionally childfree, mothers, delayed in motherhood, deprived of motherhood, stepmothers, more—certainly have a stake in the future: a hope that we may be cherished, not for the services our bodies offer men and society at large, but merely for our humanity and the women we are.
On Aug. 7, activists across the country observe Mothers’ Equal Pay Day, raising awareness for working mothers and the unique challenges they face. This day calls attention to the earnings gap between mothers and fathers and highlights workplace policies that are unfriendly to moms.
Together, we must work toward a world where women can care for themselves and their children without worrying about falling behind financially, and where professional progress doesn’t come at the expense of a healthy, supported family. Mother’s Equal Pay Day is one “holiday” that I would like to stop observing. Together, we can make this aspiration a reality.
Our lack of childcare options in the United States is hampering the workforce, and keeping a quarter of parents from having the freedom to seek out a job that is a better fit for them and their families.
Conservative politicians are complaining about childless cat ladies, declining marriage rates, unstable families and single-parent households. Their strategy so far has been to ban abortion, offer families no real support, do nothing to help struggling Americans find greater financial stability, promote a deeply misogynistic worldview to young men, and then yell at young women that they need to get married and have babies. Shockingly, this is not working very well.
On the other side, liberals have de-emphasized marriage and the nuclear family as the primary organizing unit for society, while offering women and men alike more choices about when, how, and if to start families, and more support if they do. And while marriage and childbearing rates are down generally, the prototypical Democratic voter—the college-educated woman working for pay in or near a large city in a blue state—is more likely to find herself in a happy, stable marriage than the prototypical Republican voter.
This isn’t a coincidence.
Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership is the radical vision for America’s future under the next Republican president. If you’re like me, you’re curious about where the $22 million to produce its 900-pages of planning and policy came from. The project claims it’s the product of over 100 organizations, headed by The Heritage Foundation, a tax-exempt nonprofit. It has a long and influential history with deep monied roots.
I focused on the health-related parts of Project 2025’s chapter on Health and Human Services—our nation’s department for medical and family concerns—as its authors rail against the Center for Disease Control, abortion access and abortion pills, childcare, fertility treatments, what makes a proper family, and more. It’s dystopian, to say the least.
Since the 1960s, guaranteed income has been seen as a way to help communities of color, women and LGBTQ+ people. Each of those groups still faces large pay disparities in an economy built primarily to support white men.
For eight years, researchers have been quietly putting together the largest, most comprehensive study on programs that give people a monthly stream of cash—no strings attached. Over time, does that income transform people’s lives? The data is now in. Right away, the data clearly showed that cash helped people spend more on their basic needs.