Welcome to the Wades, Slate's podcast about gender, feminism, and today, motherhood. Every episode, you get a new pair

of feminists to talk about the thing we can't get off our minds. And today, you've got me,

Bridget Cholte. I'm a journalist, author of Overwhelmed, Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the

Time, and Director of the Better Life Lab, the Work Family Justice and Intersectional

Gender Equity Program at New America. And you've also got Angela Garbus, author of Like a

Mother, and the new fabulous book, Essential Labor, Mathering as Social Change.

Angela will be joining me after the break. But first, let's talk about motherhood.

In the United States, we're often told that being a mother, a parent, a caregiver, is the most important work in the world.

The language we use in politics, in advertising, the media and national discourse reveres mothers and caregiving,

with politicians boldly proclaiming that we are a nation

of family values. And at the same time, that same conversation, the same cultural norms and

perspectives trivialize it or ignore mothers as invisible altogether. Mothers and caregivers,

as fully realized human beings, are virtually absent from many of the movies and TV shows that shape our culture.

And when they do come into view, mothers often show up as mommy bloggers, bad moms, exhausted and trying to get away from their pampered kids,

or mean girls on the playground arguing endlessly about the proper stroller, or they're caught up in

stereotypical no-win mommy identity wars about whether one should devote themselves selflessly

entirely to one's family or selfishly choose to go work outside the home, as if mothers have a

choice. Most don't. In truth, the reality for mothers is quite different.

Those same politicians who extol the virtues of family values and proclaimed to value mothers and

care, it turns out that they only value the kind of mother who can exist in mostly privileged

white, middle, and upper class circles, the kind who can live a

life that many of these politicians, majority male, white, and increasingly octogenarian, did or do,

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