Motherhood

Summary

Throughline: Motherhood
Hosted by Rund Abdelfatah and Ramtin Arablouei
Released on May 1, 2025

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Introduction

In the "Motherhood" episode of Throughline, NPR hosts Rund Abdelfatah and Ramtin Arablouei delve deep into the complex and often misunderstood facets of motherhood. By unraveling historical narratives and challenging prevalent myths, the episode seeks to answer the pivotal question: "How did we get here?" Through personal stories, expert insights, and historical analysis, the hosts explore the societal constructs that shape our understanding of motherhood today.

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Personal Stories and Experiences

Chelsea Conoboy begins the discussion by sharing her personal journey through motherhood. She recounts the overwhelming mixture of joy and anxiety that accompanies the birth of her son:

"[00:32] Chelsea Conoboy:...the transition to parenthood is like a really powerful time of growth. But in any kind of growth, there's a cost to it. And I just, I felt a lot of worry."

This personal narrative sets the stage for a broader exploration of motherhood's demands and societal expectations.

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The Myth of the Maternal Instinct

A central theme of the episode is the debunking of the "maternal instinct" myth—a notion that women are naturally predisposed to caregiving roles innately and effortlessly.

Chelsea Conoboy challenges this idea by stating:

"[08:36] Chelsea Conoboy:...it is something that grows from our brain and that is a process that takes time and that is shaped also by our babies and their particularities and who they are. It's a two way street."

This perspective emphasizes that caregiving is not an automatic response but a learned and adaptive behavior influenced by both the parent and child.

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Historical Context and Eugenics

The episode traces the origins of the maternal instinct myth to the early 20th century, highlighting the influence of William McDougal, an early psychologist, who infused these ideas with racial and class biases.

Chelsea Conoboy discusses McDougal's problematic views:

"[14:12] Chelsea Conoboy: McDougal... promoted maternal instinct as biological destiny."

McDougal's work, steeped in eugenics and white supremacy, posited that maternal instincts were strongest among white, upper-middle-class women, thereby marginalizing women of color and other marginalized groups.

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Welfare Rights Movement

The narrative shifts to the welfare rights movement, spotlighting Johnny Tillman, a black mother and activist who confronted the stigmatization of welfare recipients. The movement emerged as a response to the pervasive stereotypes that depicted women on welfare—particularly women of color—as lazy and dependent.

Johnny Tillman recounts her awakening to these injustices:

"[28:17] Johnny Tillman: That's what got me going."
"[31:21] Johnny Tillman...: That's why Governor Reagan can get away with slandering welfare recipients..."

Her activism was pivotal in challenging the "welfare queen" stereotype and advocating for the rights and dignity of all welfare recipients.

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The Wages for Housework Movement

Parallel to the welfare rights movement, the episode explores the Wages for Housework movement, spearheaded by Sylvia Federici. This movement sought to recognize and compensate the unpaid labor of housewives, framing domestic work as essential economic activity.

Sylvia Federici articulates the necessity of this movement:

"[42:46] Sylvia Federici: Everything... work... essential for every kind of work that takes place in our society."

By advocating for wages for housework, Federici and her peers aimed to alter the economic and social perception of caregiving, promoting gender equality and the valuing of domestic labor.

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Reframing Care and Radical Care

The episode culminates in a discussion about redefining care work and building community-based support systems. Premilla Nadasen emphasizes the importance of "radical care," which involves deep, meaningful relationships and collective support structures:

"[51:33] Premilla Nadasen: ...the value of that kind of community based care, or what I call radical care... our ability to provide care when somebody needs it."

This reframing challenges the individualistic approach to caregiving, advocating instead for systemic changes that support families and communities.

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Conclusion and Reflections

Throughline concludes by reflecting on the resilience of mothers and the potential for societal transformation. Rund Abdelfatah shares a personal perspective:

"[50:26] Rand Abdelfatah: ...maybe there's some hope in that. Maybe when everything else fails, that is the thing we can fall back on each other."

The episode underscores the necessity of dismantling harmful myths and building supportive infrastructures to honor and sustain the vital role of mothers and caregivers in society.

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Key Takeaways

1. Debunking Myths: The idea of an innate maternal instinct is a relatively modern construct, influenced by historical biases and not a universal truth across all cultures and species.

2. Historical Influences: Early psychological theories, intertwined with eugenics and racial biases, played a significant role in shaping societal expectations of motherhood.

3. Activism and Change: Activists like Johnny Tillman and movements such as Welfare Rights and Wages for Housework have been crucial in challenging stereotypes and advocating for the rights and recognition of caregivers.

4. Reframing Care: Emphasizing community-based care and recognizing domestic work as essential can lead to more equitable and supportive societal structures.

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Notable Quotes

• "Motherhood is a hard, unending chore."
  Premilla Nadasen [02:07]

• "There’s a powerful fantasy in American society... an ideal mother devoted to her family above all else."
  Rand Abdelfatah [02:47]

• "We relied on support."
  Chelsea Conoboy [12:13]

• "They're essential for every kind of work that takes place in our society."
  Sylvia Federici [44:38]

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This episode of Throughline offers a profound exploration of the societal constructs surrounding motherhood, urging listeners to question ingrained narratives and advocate for systemic change to support and honor the multifaceted roles of mothers and caregivers.

Transcript

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[Chelsea Conoboy]

Felt like I did all the things that you're supposed to do. I read all of the books and I went to the prenatal classes and I felt like pretty well educated, I guess. And then my son arrived. When he was born, he was 5 pounds 12 ounces. And when they put him on my chest for the first time, I just said, he's so tiny. He's so tiny. I, of course, like, was overwhelmed with joy and awe and wonder at this little creature. That sentiment of like, wow, he's so small and vulnerable and now I'm in charge of him really was also very big for me. The transition to parenthood is like a really powerful time of growth. But in any kind of growth, there's a cost to it. And I just, I felt a lot of worry.

[Johnny Tillman]

Mother, you promised to have dinner ready at 6:00.

[Premilla Nadasen]

You need to be around that baby around the clock.

[Chelsea Conoboy]

You're not compensated and all of a sudden you're paying.

[Premilla Nadasen]

Motherhood is a hard, unending chore.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Mommy, wake up.

[Chelsea Conoboy]

Wake up, wake up, wake up.

[Premilla Nadasen]

It's a week since I've delivered. How could I be expected to work.

[Chelsea Conoboy]

At this entire paycheck goes to the daycare.

[Rand Abdelfatah]

Beautiful experience and the most rewarding experience.

[Premilla Nadasen]

Looking 12 steps accused of leaving her.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Kids in the car alone while she went shopping.

[Sponsor Message]

Women haven't rejoined the workforce since the pregnant.

[Rand Abdelfatah]

To bring a pregnancy to term, even at the steepest personal and familial cost.

[Premilla Nadasen]

Two or more years, all the possible.

[Rand Abdelfatah]

Things that could go wrong.

[Premilla Nadasen]

Just listen to your mom.

[Sponsor Message]

Gun.

[Johnny Tillman]

Motherhood costs women everything.

[Premilla Nadasen]

Everything.

[Rand Abdelfatah]

Everything. Right. Everything the can cost. There's a powerful fantasy in American society. The fantasy of the ideal mother. You know who I mean? This fantasy mother is devoted to her family above all else. She raises the kids, volunteers at the school, cleans the house, plans the birthday parties, cares for her own parents. She's a natural nurturer and she's happy to do it all for free.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

The mother we've just described is imaginary and yet the idea of her permeates our culture, our economy and our social policy, and it distorts them. The US doesn't have universal health insurance or universal childcare. We don't have federally mandated paid family leave or a meaningful social safety safety net for when times get rough. Instead of all this, we have an imaginary mother. We've structured our society as though she exists, but she doesn't. And we all pay the real life price for that fantasy.

[Chelsea Conoboy]

I certainly think that young women right now are looking at people of my generation and saying that doesn't look that great.

[Rand Abdelfatah]

This is Chelsea Conoboy. She's a health and science journalist and the author of Mother How Neuroscience Is Rewriting the Story of Parenthood. She's one of the people who are going to help us look at three myths of motherhood that prop up the fantasy. The maternal instinct.

[Chelsea Conoboy]

Women are natural, innate caregivers that it just sort of springs forth from us as soon as a child is placed.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

In our arms the welfare queen, the.

[Premilla Nadasen]

Racialized stereotype of a woman of color who had multiple children out of wedlock, who was lazy, who was interested in living off of other people's tax dollars.

[Rand Abdelfatah]

And the doting housewife, the woman who.

[Sylvia Federici]

Gives all her life, all her work, all her thoughts to the people around her.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

You're listening to Throughline from npr. I'm Ramtin Arablouei.

[Rand Abdelfatah]

And I'm Rand Abdelfatah. Coming up, we break open the myths of motherhood and tell the stories of real life people, some mothers, some not, who have fought for a much more generous vision of family, labor and care. This is Ricardo Nunez calling from Budapest and land in Botscaro, Michoacan in Mexico. And you're listening to throughline from NPR. Myth 1 the maternal instinct.

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[Narrator]

We'Re here in the vast, rugged wilderness of Montana. As the sun begins to peek over the horizon, a gentle breeze winds its way through a web of leaves and branches, carrying the melodies of the western meadowlark. With is a land teeming with life, a land of untamed beauty and danger. Hidden amid towering mountains and dense forest, we meet a formidable resident, the grizzly bear. We find her foraging for berries alongside the river where she'll score her next meal. And she is not alone. Nestled alongside her, we find her young cock cub. This mother bear leads her cub to the river, teaching them to patiently wait for the perfect moment to catch a leaping salmon. But nature is unpredictable. A male grizzly approaches nearby. The mother bear confronts the male grizzly head on. Translation Stay away from my cup. The male grizzly retreats into the forest. The extraordinary bond between mother and cub has prevailed.

[Chelsea Conoboy]

So maternal instinct is something that feels true, Right. It was hard for her to describe.

[Premilla Nadasen]

Exactly how she knew her baby was in trouble.

[Sponsor Message]

She called it instinct, even referred to.

[Premilla Nadasen]

It as a voice in her head.

[Chelsea Conoboy]

The story we've told about mothers is that women are natural, innate caregivers, that we come to this work automatically, that it just sort of springs forth from us as soon as a child is placed in our arms. And that it is really distinctly female. And that that's based in science. And none of those things are true.

[Rand Abdelfatah]

In her book, Chelsea Conoboy argues that this scientific story of the maternal instinct is actually pretty new, even though it might feel real when we observe nature.

[Chelsea Conoboy]

And that's one of the criticisms I've gotten the most of this book of, like, how can you say maternal instinct isn't real? Like, have you ever tried to get between a mother bear and her cub? And that protectiveness is absolutely real. And I would not deny that it's real. But when you look across all species, you see that parenting is quite variable. And it's not always just the mother who is doing that.

[Rand Abdelfatah]

Yeah, because I think that it feels true is something that a lot of people listening to this will, like, have that knee jerk reaction, right?

[Chelsea Conoboy]

Yes.

[Rand Abdelfatah]

Which is like, well, no, no, there must be something. So I guess my question is like, is it simply that the maternal instinct does not exist or is it something that exists in a different way than we conceptualize it and that it can be transferred to people beyond the biological mother?

[Chelsea Conoboy]

So we go through really powerful changes, fascinating adaptations that connect us to our children. That is real. It's just not a fixed pattern of behavior, which is what an instinct is. It's not this like Lego circuitry that snaps into place once you reach the third trimester or something. It is something that grows from our brain and that is a process that takes time and that is shaped also by our babies and their particularities and who they are. It's a two way street. We shape their brains and they shape ours.

[Rand Abdelfatah]

In other words, while mothers brains can absolutely develop something akin to a maternal instinct over time, research shows they aren't the only ones who can do that.

[Chelsea Conoboy]

In fathers and other non gestational parents, the same factors are at play. Hormones and experience. Fathers go through hormonal changes as they approach fatherhood. It's thought that there's small but potentially significant changes in testosterone. There's changes in their prolactin system, which we often think of as a milk making hormone, but it's also present in males and related to bonding. And they experience very similar spikes in oxytocin when they interact with their babies as mothers do. And it's thought that all of that makes their brains more plastic, more moldable also if they engage in direct care of their children.

[Rand Abdelfatah]

In fact, Chelsea says humans couldn't have survived as a species if only their biological mothers could care for them.

[Chelsea Conoboy]

What I like to say is human mothers have always been really important and they've never been enough in terms of caring for children. The very thing that propelled our species into being being like the most dominant, most social primate on the planet, is the fact that we relied on other people to help raise our children. The earliest humans distinguished themselves from other primates by having babies in closer succession. So we'd have another baby before our first was self success sustaining. And we did that because we relied on support.

[Premilla Nadasen]

There were grandparents taking care of grandchildren. There were aunts and uncles, sometimes individuals who were not biologically related to a family who would join a family. And so family has traditionally been a very elastic category.

[Rand Abdelfatah]

This is Premilla Nadison, she's a professor of history at Barnard College. Her book is called the Highest Stage of Capitalism.

[Premilla Nadasen]

And so I think a better way to think about it is that community has been really the bedrock of human society for most of our history.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

So when does the myth of the maternal instinct and the mom who can do it all start to take hold? Chelsea says the idea took off in the early 20th century, thanks in large part to a guy named William McDougall.

[Chelsea Conoboy]

William McDougall was an early psychologist who was really one of the people who wrote maternal instinct into scientific theory.

[Narrator]

The maternal instinct, which impels the mother to protect and cherish her young, is.

[Rand Abdelfatah]

Common to almost all the highest species of animals.

[Chelsea Conoboy]

McDougall wrote that maternal instinct was so powerful, it overpowered every other instinct, even fear itself.

[Narrator]

The protection and cherishing of the young.

[Rand Abdelfatah]

Is the constant and all absorbing occupation.

[Narrator]

Of the mother to which she devotes all her energies, and in the course of which she will at any time undergo privation, pain and death.

[Rand Abdelfatah]

His book, An Introduction to Social Psychology is one of the most successful British authored psychology books ever published.

[Chelsea Conoboy]

He also said that the more you educate a woman, the more her maternal instinct will decline. So it wasn't more powerful than education, in his view.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

McDougal was born in 1871, just a decade after Charles Darwin put forth his theory of evolution. And by the time McDougal was in university studying psychology, some people were expanding Darwin's theory to explain supposed hierarchies among humans, aka eugenics, a pseudoscience McDougal embraced when he eventually relocated to the United States.

[Chelsea Conoboy]

He was a notable racist and eugenicist who, like a lot of powerful white men of his day, was really worried about the influx of immigrants to the United States and preserving the state and white supremacy.

[Premilla Nadasen]

White motherhood in particular, was often associated with racial purity and elevated in status.

[Chelsea Conoboy]

So he advocated for maintaining gender norms that would preserve maternal instinct, especially in upper class, upper middle class.

[Premilla Nadasen]

White women and other groups, on the other hand, were not considered worthy of reproduction. And this includes people who had low IQs or racialized minorities, people with disabilities and other non normative people. There was a whole eugenics program throughout much of the 20th century, beginning in the early 20th century, where non normative people were denied the right and the opportunity to reproduce.

[Chelsea Conoboy]

McDougal, you know, promoted maternal instinct as biological destiny.

[Rand Abdelfatah]

This was happening in the wake of the industrial revolution and the rise of American capitalism, when the nature of work had radically transformed, pulling more and more people off of farms and into cities.

[Premilla Nadasen]

Capitalism has created motherhood as an economic identity.

[Chelsea Conoboy]

Prior to the industrial revolution, like gender roles weren't quite as intensely divided as they became by the mid to late 19th century.

[Rand Abdelfatah]

Now men would go off to factories and Offices to work to make their mark on the world and the home.

[Chelsea Conoboy]

The home became like a place of virtue and reprieve. And it was no longer like a site of production. It was a place of consumption.

[Rand Abdelfatah]

And women were the caretakers of that place, that is white women. Because this ideal of womanhood was constructed with them in mind.

[Chelsea Conoboy]

Their role became to uphold the virtue of the home. Their moral importance was really elevated as their societal roles shrank.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

As the 20th century went on, maternal.

[Chelsea Conoboy]

Instinct was kind of recast in different ways by a long string of scientists and carried forward under different names. I call it a classic case of disinformation because it's something that felt true and that got repeated over and over again until we believed it reflexively, though.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Of course not everyone believed it.

[Premilla Nadasen]

There is a strong and fervent insistence on the maternal instinct. We possess no scientific data at all on this phase of human psychology.

[Chelsea Conoboy]

So Leta Hollingworth was a pioneering psychologist in the early part of the 20th century. She wrote in 1916 an essay that was in response to William McDougal. And she said essentially, I see what you're trying to do here. I see that you're trying to make all of this look easy, and it's not. She called maternal instinct a cheap device.

[Premilla Nadasen]

There is no verifiable evidence to show that a maternal instinct exists in women of such all consuming strength and fervor as to impel them voluntarily to seek the pain, danger and exacting labor involved in maintaining a high birth rate.

[Chelsea Conoboy]

She said that women were being compelled to have more children using the same tools for social control that compel soldiers to go to war. And so she was saying, just as war is glorified and the whole horrors of war are hidden from soldiers, the same is true in motherhood.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

For example, the fact that pregnancy was incredibly dangerous then maternal mortality rate was.

[Chelsea Conoboy]

Something like 60 times higher than what it would be at the end of the century.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Or that mothers, women still couldn't vote or support themselves if they wanted to leave a bad marriage.

[Chelsea Conoboy]

There were these laws at the time preventing women from having their independence.

[Rand Abdelfatah]

Hollingworth was saying the quiet part out loud, which many mothers, then and now would probably agree with. Motherhood isn't always easy or instinctive or joyful. It is work. Rewarding work, sure, but still hard work.

[Chelsea Conoboy]

She warned that the clock would run out essentially on maternal instinct. And then you'll have to pay us.

[Rand Abdelfatah]

Then you'll have to pay us, because in a capitalist system, that's how you reward hard work. An idea that was radical in Hollingworth's time and would remain just as radical in the decades to come.

[Gwendolyn Fowler]

I'm a woman. I'm a black woman. I'm a poor woman. I am 45 years old. I have raised six children. There are millions of statistics like me coming up.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

The clock runs out and one mother leads the charge to get paid.

[Premilla Nadasen]

Hi, this is Suniti Sridhar calling from Los Angeles, California, and you're listening to Throughline on npr.

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[Gwendolyn Fowler]

I'm a woman. I'm a black woman, I'm a poor woman, I'm a fat woman, I'm a middle aged woman and I'm on welfare. In this country, if you're any one of those things, you count less as a human being. If you're all of those things, you don't count it all except as a statistic. Welfare is like a traffic accident. It can happen to anybody, but especially it happens to women.

[Rand Abdelfatah]

When Gwendolyn Fowler first read these words.

[Gwendolyn Fowler]

Like a light bulb went on in my head.

[Rand Abdelfatah]

The author was a woman named Johnny Tillman, and she'd penned this article more than four decades earlier in 1972. It moved Gwen to her core, not.

[Gwendolyn Fowler]

In like I was crying when I read this, you know, it was more of like I was angry, I think, and I guess just kind of pissed off that the things that Tillman is addressing in 1972 is stuff we're still arguing about.

[Rand Abdelfatah]

The article Tillman wrote was called Welfare is a Women's Issue. And she published it in what would soon be the most prominent feminist publication of the time, Ms. Magazine.

[Gwendolyn Fowler]

Welfare is a woman's Issue. For a lot of middle class women in this country, women's liberation is a matter of concern for women on welfare. It's a matter of survival. And then like, just like looking at Tillman and seeing how she looks, you know, she's a large black woman. She was older. I just never saw like activists looking like that.

[Rand Abdelfatah]

All Gwen knew was that Johnny was a black mother on welfare that became the head of the National Welfare Rights Organization, a civic group fighting for welfare reform in the 1960s and 70s. But she wanted to know more, so she focused her entire master's thesis on her.

[Gwendolyn Fowler]

Why don't people know who she is? And why do I not know anything? Why is it so hard to find information about her?

[Rand Abdelfatah]

She wasn't finding much on Tillman until she stumbled upon the voice of the woman herself.

[Johnny Tillman]

My father used to tell me if I really wanted to know what my mother looked like to look in the mirror at myself, because he felt I looked just like her.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

This is Tillman talking to oral historian Shirna Berger Gluck.

[Johnny Tillman]

It's been a long time since I first interviewed Johnny.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Schurna conducted a series of interviews with Johnny beginning in 1984.

[Johnny Tillman]

She welcomed me into her home and in this sort of kind of chaotic scene, let me put it that way. First of all, some piece of equipment was going that kept shorting out my recorder and sometimes shorted out the microphone.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

You can hear it on the tape. Her daily domestic duties don't stop just because she's being interviewed. Johnny's house is bustling with activity.

[Johnny Tillman]

The washing machine was going. You know, the daughter came with her laundry to do the wash and the son came to do something else. And harmonica. Fats, her husband, was in the back room making arrangements for gigs.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

The interviews Schurna conducted are some of the only remaining records of Johnny from her early life to her catapult into activism.

[Rand Abdelfatah]

Here's what we know.

[Johnny Tillman]

I was born in a little place called Scott, Arkansas. It's about 17 miles north of Little Rock.

[Rand Abdelfatah]

She was born in 1926, middle of Jim Crow, a sharecropper's daughter.

[Gwendolyn Fowler]

She also worked in the field when.

[Rand Abdelfatah]

She Was five years old, her mother died in labor.

[Gwendolyn Fowler]

And then just trying to live a life without a mother, where you're probably the caretaker for your family.

[Johnny Tillman]

I learned to cook, learn to sew, learn to keep house pretty good, but don't really like it.

[Rand Abdelfatah]

She also worked as a domestic worker in other people's homes. But her dream was to be a blues singer.

[Johnny Tillman]

I always felt I didn't want to be a housewife. I didn't want to be no mother. I wasn't interested in being no homemaker. That wasn't my thing.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Eventually, she decided to move west to California.

[Gwendolyn Fowler]

She had six children by 1960. By the time she moved, even though.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

It hadn't been her dream, she was a mother.

[Rand Abdelfatah]

Once in Los Angeles, they moved into a housing project, Nickerson Gardens.

[Gwendolyn Fowler]

She's working at a laundry.

[Rand Abdelfatah]

But then she gets really, really sick.

[Gwendolyn Fowler]

And she can't work. And in the midst of that, also, she finds out that her daughter has been cutting school.

[Rand Abdelfatah]

At this point, Johnny had to consider something she dreaded getting on welfare.

[Gwendolyn Fowler]

She doesn't want to apply for welfare. She's heard terrible things about the experience of being on welfare in terms of, like, how caseworkers treat you. And she's like, I don't want any parts. But they're like, you can't. What are you going to do?

[Rand Abdelfatah]

So she does it. Johnny signs up for welfare, and right away she starts to feel the stigma she was afraid of.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

One Sunday, she overhears a lady from a nearby church complaining loudly about welfare recipients right outside of Johnny's housing project.

[Gwendolyn Fowler]

And she just talks a whole bunch of crap about people on welfare, how they're lazy and things like that.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

At that moment, something just clicked.

[Johnny Tillman]

That's what got you going? That's what got me going.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

She started to question why people thought she was some sort of criminal just for being on welfare.

[Rand Abdelfatah]

So the following Tuesday, Johnny started to organize with other mothers to form what would become one of the first welfare rights organizations in the entire country. Today, a hope of many years standing is in large part fulfilled. Before we can continue with Johnny's story, we have to take a step back to the beginning of what we call welfare.

[Johnny Tillman]

This Social Security measure gives at least some protection to 30 millions of our citizens.

[Rand Abdelfatah]

Federal welfare programs began with the 1935 Social Security Act. The idea was give cash to poor mothers with children. But historian Premilla Nadison says other ideas were baked into the program's DNA.

[Premilla Nadasen]

Well, the welfare system from the very outset was really centered on this idea that women and the Code word here was white women needed a man to take care of them, that they should not be in the workforce, that they in fact needed economic support from the state if there was not a man available to provide economic assistance and to support the family.

[Rand Abdelfatah]

The program reinforced the gendered division of labor. Men as breadwinners and women as mothers and homemakers. But it didn't recognize all women's work the same way. In order to qualify for these funds, families had to be considered suitable homes.

[Premilla Nadasen]

And this was very racialized. It did not apply to all women, which is why women of color were excluded from the welfare roles in the early years. In fact, there were always more white women on welfare than black women on welfare.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

In her first book, Welfare Warriors, Pramala argues that welfare was uncontroversial. Until the late 1950s and 60s, more.

[Premilla Nadasen]

And more women of color started applying for and receiving welfare assistance. And along with that, we saw a deep racialization of the welfare system as well as growing stigma and social isolation of welfare recipients.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

As more black women used welfare, there were more attacks on the system and all the women that needed it.

[Premilla Nadasen]

Mass migration of unskilled Negroes from the.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

South, deserted wives, sometimes turning to any.

[Rand Abdelfatah]

Man who comes along, and the self perpetuating breeding grounds of city slums.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

These fears would eventually crystallize into the.

[Premilla Nadasen]

Myth of the welfare queen racialized stereotype of a woman of color who had multiple children out of wedlock, who was lazy, who was interested in living off of other people's tax dollars.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Johnny Tillman was aware of this tainted image of welfare recipients long before the term welfare queen was officially coined.

[Gwendolyn Fowler]

That's why Governor Reagan can get away with slandering welfare recipients, calling them lazy parasites, pigs at the trough and such. We've been trained to believe that the only reason reason people are on welfare is because there's something wrong with their character.

[Rand Abdelfatah]

And that's what brings us back to the moment that sparked Johnny into action. Johnny saw how at every level, from the Governor of California, Ronald Reagan, to church ladies, mothers on welfare were seen as less than. So she started organizing other mothers in.

[Premilla Nadasen]

Their living rooms, in their housing projects, in their kitchens when they're waiting in line and welfare, they begin to talk to their neighbors.

[Rand Abdelfatah]

Groups like Tillman's were popping up across the country pushing for a few key better worker training so they could re enter the workforce, affordable childcare, a right to dignity and privacy.

[Premilla Nadasen]

There was something very famously known as the midnight raids, where caseworkers would show up in the middle of the night and search A recipient's apartment or home, looking for some kind of evidence of a man who was present, maybe a man's shoes or a man's razor in the bathroom. And if they found anything, it would be grounds to cut the recipient off of public assistance because presumably the man would be able to support, support her and her children.

[Rand Abdelfatah]

And for Johnny and many of the women she organized with, it also meant addressing the fact that US society didn't value black motherhood or even allow for it.

[Premilla Nadasen]

Black women were never allowed to be full time mothers to their children. They were always expected to work. They were expected to work during slavery, they were expected to give birth under slavery only to have their children sold from them. They were expected to work in the post reconstruction period. They were vagrancy laws that were passed in the south during this time that insisted that black women, former enslaved women, in fact, enter the job market. Everything in our society has worked against African American women actually being able to stay home and take care of their own children.

[Rand Abdelfatah]

That's why Johnny first organized as ANC Mothers Anonymous. Being a mother and defining what that meant was key to the struggle because the value of motherhood wasn't a flat rate system.

[Premilla Nadasen]

For them to call themselves mothers and to insist on public assistance as mothers was in fact a radical reclamation of a role that they had been historically denied from the days of slavery.

[Rand Abdelfatah]

Unlike the white led feminist movement, which in the 60s was pushing for the choice to work outside the home or to not have children, many black mothers wanted the choice to stay home and raise a child. And as the movement grew into the national welfare rights organization, Welfare Mothers began to expand their cause to include everyone.

[Gwendolyn Fowler]

We put together our own welfare plan called Guaranteed adequate income, which would eliminate sexism from welfare. There would be no categories, men, women, children, single, married kids, no kids, just poor people who need aid.

[Premilla Nadasen]

In 1968, the amount they requested was $5,500 for a family of four, which was well above the poverty line at that time. It was a fairly high amount.

[Rand Abdelfatah]

And they saw it as something that would ultimately help more than just black mothers on welfare or even women.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

And the idea caught on.

[Premilla Nadasen]

Martin Luther King endorsed a guaranteed annual income.

[Rand Abdelfatah]

We must develop progress that will drive.

[Johnny Tillman]

The nation to a guaranteed annual income.

[Premilla Nadasen]

Richard Nixon proposed before Congress a guaranteed.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Annual income federal minimum would be provided the same in every state.

[Premilla Nadasen]

And so there was widespread discussion in the 1960s and early 70s about the possibility of the federal government providing an income floor for all poor people in this country.

[Gwendolyn Fowler]

Maybe we poor welfare women will really liberate women in this country. As far as I'm concerned, the ladies of the NWRO are the frontline troops of women's freedom. Both because we have so few illusions and because our issues are so important to all women. The right to a living wage for women's work, the right to life itself.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Imagine for a second if this idea of a guaranteed annual income had actually become reality. Maybe we'd have significantly fewer families in debt, fewer kids unable to afford school lunches, fewer people living on the streets. But in the end, this idea faded.

[Rand Abdelfatah]

By the mid-1970s, another idea had come to dominate the public conversation, an idea that consolidated all of the stereotypes Johnny had been fighting against for decades into one. The Welfare Queen. And it caught on like wildfire. Thanks to that, Governor Johnny had called out, who was now running for president Ronald Reagan.

[Johnny Tillman]

In Chicago, they found a woman who holds the record. Her tax free cash income alone has.

[Rand Abdelfatah]

Been running $150,000 a year. The myth of the Welfare Queen seemed to prove what a growing number of lawmakers believed that welfare made people dependent. In the battle of ideas, the myth won out and it stuck.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

In 1996, President Clinton dismantled the Aid to Families with Dependent Children and replaced it with a system we have today, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or tanf.

[Rand Abdelfatah]

The new bill restores America's basic bargain.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Of providing opportunity and demanding in return, responsibility. Under tanf, less families receive less cash assistance, and as its name implies, the help runs out even faster than before. But even though welfare was largely dismantled, Johnny helped spark a revolution of ideas that questioned who got to be a mother and challenged the very core of the nuclear family ideal that powers American capitalism.

[Sylvia Federici]

That money that women on welfare were receiving was actually the beginning of a wages for housework.

[Rand Abdelfatah]

Coming up, what happens if the homemakers of the world unite?

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Afferenze Italia State Sentendo True line dal ene Pierre.

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[Rand Abdelfatah]

THE DOTING HOUSEWIFE.

[Sylvia Federici]

I knew that I was not born in a perfect world. I knew that there was a lot of injustice, a lot of struggle, and life was precarious. My name is Silvia Federici. I was born in 1942, in the middle of World War II in Parma, Italy. My mother would speak about what it meant waking up every night in the city, seeing the sky turning red, a sign that the bombing would start soon, and then running with two little girls, running, running, running to the nearby fields and square walked there for much of the night. I think those accounts are partially one of the reason why I decided never to have children.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

After the war. Sylvia remembers watching her mom, this brave woman who protected her and her sisters from bullets and missiles, fight a different battle day after day after right in their living room.

[Sylvia Federici]

You know, my father was a teacher and he was the one bringing home the money. And my mother was a full time housewife. I remember my father telling my mother that she was not being paid because their work was not real work. And my mother would complain, I'm working, I'm working, I'm working. And not being appreciated.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

What her mother called work, her father called natural love.

[Sylvia Federici]

As I started growing up, I made a big struggle, you know, not to become a housewife.

[Rand Abdelfatah]

A housewife. In the Post World War II era, as the myth about welfare mothers was starting to crystallize, so too was this myth of the doting, selfless housewife who was fueled by the power of love. A myth that crossed borders and traveled wherever capitalism did. Sylvia grew up half a world away from Johnny Tillman. But soon she would cross paths with the welfare Mothers movement and help launch another movement that would take the cause of paid housework beyond class, race or welfare status. An international movement for housewives everywhere to recast caretaking as labor, not just love.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

And it all began when Sylvia flew to Buffalo, New York on a scholarship to study at a college there.

[Johnny Tillman]

Pillage, brooding, murder and arson have nothing to do with civil rights.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

She arrived amid the long hot summer of 1960, when civil unrest was reaching a fever pitch.

[Narrator]

I have witnessed police officers striking women.

[Sylvia Federici]

Listen, I was radicalized in the United States.

[Rand Abdelfatah]

Racism is an excuse use of capitalism. And we know that racism is just.

[Sponsor Message]

A byproduct of capitalism.

[Sylvia Federici]

In 67, 68, this was the height of the student movement. So basically I was catching up. I was reading about American history, I.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Was reading about slavery, reading about Marx and feminism.

[Rand Abdelfatah]

Meanwhile, she was still keeping an eye on things back in Italy.

[Sylvia Federici]

I was reading some of the material coming out of the student movement in Italy.

[Chelsea Conoboy]

In order to see the housewife essential, it was first of all necessary to animal briefly how capitalism has created the modern family and the housewife's role in it.

[Sylvia Federici]

This article called the power of women and the subversion of the community by this woman that I didn't know, called Maria Rosa Dalla Costa was a turning point. The fact that the majority of women, you know, in the history, the last 4, 500 years of capitalist have been engaged primarily in activities that have not been recognized as work.

[Rand Abdelfatah]

This article put into words what Sylvia had known from the time she was eavesdropping on her parents Conversations that the work housewives do is not only hard but essential to upholding the economic system.

[Sylvia Federici]

They are essential for every kind of work that takes place in our society.

[Premilla Nadasen]

Women's labor of social reproduction, as feminists in the 1970s and 80s called it, is the work that really undergirds all other work.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Again, Pramila Nadasen and what they meant.

[Premilla Nadasen]

By that is that this is work that is vitally important to our economic system because women are producing the next generation of workers and are also keeping humans alive.

[Sylvia Federici]

Communities is a big factory, but it's a factory that does not produce cars or other gadgets. It's a factory that produces workers.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Momentum was building around these ideas both in the US and abroad. The same year Johnny Tillman published Welfare is a Woman's Issue, a movement called Wages for Housework was launched in Italy. Feeling inspired, Sylvia decided to start a chapter in the US.

[Rand Abdelfatah]

The Wages for Housework movement sat in an interesting political space. On the one hand, it could seem to be at odds with the mission of the feminist movement movement.

[Sylvia Federici]

The bulk of the feminist movement saw the solution, you know, to leave the home and to go and enter the male dominated jobs. Equal pay for equal work. I have nothing against that, but we always said this is not enough. Unless we do something with the question of reproduction, we are not going to be able to change anything.

[Rand Abdelfatah]

On the other hand, while it seemed to maintain traditional family values, the conservative call of the day, it's more important than ever for our families to affirm an older and more lasting set of values. Sylvia believed compensating housework could actually spark a revolution in gender roles.

[Sylvia Federici]

We saw that demand, that struggle as a transition, not as an end point. That would begin to change the power relation between women and men, women and the state would change the way society looks at the work. Once the work was considered work, men would do it too. Men could also do it too.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

And just as the welfare rights movement understood the power of narratives, of the words they used, the Wages for Housework movement made sure to keep things like care and love out of the conversation.

[Premilla Nadasen]

The welfare rights movement didn't use the language of care. And the Wages for Housework movement actually wrote very critically of the language of care. And I'm sure that Sylvia Federici told you this. If you give me a minute, I can find a quote from her.

[Sylvia Federici]

They call it love. We call it unpaid labor, and we say it is unwaged work. They call it fragility. More smile, more money. Nothing will be so powerful in destroying the healing virtue of a smile.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Now you might be thinking, where does that leave love? Don't we care for the people we love because, well, we love them? And would paying someone for that care diminish the value of that love?

[Rand Abdelfatah]

According to Sylvia, true love and care requires a collectivist mindset where work is equally shared and valued. It takes a tribe. And just like the maternal instinct, the language of love can be a cover for all the ways our society makes the work of mothering atomized, individualized, and increasingly impossible. Propping up these myths about motherhood and preventing real change from taking place.

[Sylvia Federici]

The whole issue of maternity is turning into a nightmare.

[Premilla Nadasen]

We have to talk about growing economic inequality, the gap between the rich and the poor. There are a lot of people for whom it is a question of daily survival. We have to talk about the role of federal support. It is not just a question of how an individual feel. It's a question of our public sector. We live in a society that, despite the pandemic and the platitudes about care, we deeply undervalue care work.

[Chelsea Conoboy]

We're failing. I mean, truly, in a sense, we're sort of saying, like, okay, the time is up now. Now, pay us. Give us paid leave and financial stability and affordable, accessible childcare and health insurance that actually meets our family's needs. Or maybe we won't do this. We won't do this.

[Rand Abdelfatah]

I have to admit, while working on this episode, I have had that thought a few times. Why do people do this? Why am I doing this? Because objectively, I'm with Chelsea. Things don't look great. The lack of government support, the unrealistic expectations, the hours of work that many people still don't consider work. It makes me pretty mad, honestly. And yet I made the conscious choice to have a child. Maybe you can never really be ready for a metamorphosis. You just transform and learn to live in that new normal, even when you know that normal doesn't mean predestined. Maybe because you know that it doesn't have to be this way. And the mothers that I know are incredibly resilient. They find a way, and they can be the most incredible support system. So maybe there's some hope in that. Maybe when everything else fails, that is the thing we can fall back on each other.

[Premilla Nadasen]

What's been incredibly inspiring for me is to see people around the country who are actually finding alternative ways to care for themselves and to care for one another. And I cannot stress enough to you the value of that kind of of kind of community based care, or what I call radical care. The building blocks of human society are our connections to one another, our ability to develop deep, meaningful relationships, our abilities to provide care when somebody needs it, our ability to be cared for when we need it.

[Rand Abdelfatah]

That's it for this week's show. I'm Rund Abdelfatah.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

I'm Ramtin Arablouei and you've been listening to Throughline from npr.

[Rand Abdelfatah]

This episode was produced by me and.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Me and Lawrence Wu, Julie Kane, Anya.

[Chelsea Conoboy]

Steinberg, Yolanda Sanguine, Casey Minor, Christina Kim.

[Rand Abdelfatah]

Devin Kadayama, Sasha Crawford, Holland, Amir Mershi. Thank you to Olivia Chilcote, Devin Kateyama, Sasha Crawford, Holland, Christina Kim, Anya Steinberg and Lawrence Wu for their voiceover work. And a special thanks to all our listeners who shared your stories about what motherhood costs.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Thanks also to Johannes Durgi, Micah Ratner, Tamar Charney and Anya Grundman.

[Rand Abdelfatah]

The interviews with Johnny Tillman were conducted by Scherner, Berger Gluck for the Feminist History Research Project and were donated as its collection to the California State University Long Beach Library Archive.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Fact checking for this episode was done by Kevin Voelkel.

[Rand Abdelfatah]

This episode was mixed by Josh Newell. Music was composed by Ramtin and his band Drop Electric, which includes Anya Mizani, Navid, Marvi, Sho Fujiwara and as always, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write [e-mail] and if you don't already, please follow us on Apple, Spotify and the NPR app. That way you'll never miss an episode. Thanks for listening.

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