Judith Stadtman Tucker is the founder and editor of The Mothers Movement Online, a website devoted to gathering and analyzing information about issues important to mothers. I interviewed her via email just after Mother's Day 2005.
-Amy

mamazine.com: How did you spend Mother's Day this year?

Judith Stadtman Tucker: This is going to sound pretty pathetic, but I spent most of Mother's Day working. My kids (I have two sons, ages 12 and 8) had taken turns being sick the week before so I had some catching up to do. Also, the weeks around Mother's Day are the busiest time of year for those of us in the motherhood field; organizations working on family policy and work-life issues often time reports for release around the Big Day, and there's usually a flurry of lifestyle stories and news reports on mothers and motherhood to keep up with.

I should add that every day is sort of Mother's Day in our family. My husband and sons are very aware of the work I do and why I'm doing it. We've had our share of conversations about women's equality and gender stereotypes around here. There is a great deal of consciousness about the value of my work around the house, so I don't feel in dire need of a sentimental occasion to honor it. However I did receive a gift certificate for a half-day at the spa and my husband did a whole week's worth of laundry over Mother's Day weekend—both of which were urgently needed and deeply appreciated.

mamazine.com: What do you wish could be different in mothers' lives by Mother's Day 2006? 2010?

Judith Stadtman Tucker: I would really like to see key mother's issues— paid parental leave, a minimum of seven days of paid sick leave for all workers, expanding the FMLA to cover more workers for longer periods of time, universal pre-school for 3 and 4 year olds, quality health care for uninsured and underserved mothers and children, and raising the minimum wage— at the forefront of the national dialog before the next presidential election. So by Mother's Day '06, or shortly thereafter, I hope we'll have a new direct action organization in place to facilitate grass roots activism on legislative issues and create a clear new frame for the motherhood message. There are so many activist mothers who have their hearts in the work of securing social and economic justice for mothers, but we still lack the level of organization and resources we'll need to propel the mothers' movement to the next level.

In the short term, I hope we'll be able to raise awareness about the motherhood problem and how it plays out in lives of women who mother in the United States. By 2006, I hope every mother in America knows that the U.S. is the only economically developed country in the world that does not provide parental paid leave. I hope everyone knows that the U.S. has the highest rates of maternal and child poverty, and the highest rates of infant and maternal mortality, compared to our peer nations. I hope it becomes common knowledge that this is not just an unfortunate coincidence or the results of some women making bad choices; it's directly related to the inadequacy of our nation's social policies to support working families—and it's absolutely, positively true that every mother is a working mother.

By 2010, I hope more states will have followed in California's footsteps by implementing paid parental leave. Realistically, I think this could happen—but historically, there's been strong opposition from influential business groups to any legislation for family and medical leave, so it's likely to be an uphill battle. At the very least, I hope we'll have a vibrant mothers' movement underway, and I hope women will be meeting up and talking to others in their communities about what needs to change and how we can change it. I also hope that by 2010, and preferably much sooner, work-life issues will be seen as a central part of the progressive agenda, rather than a fringe issue or a women's issue. At its core, the mothers' movement is about how well we care for people in our society, and I can't imagine anything more central than that.

mamazine.com: Who are some of the mamas you look up to, and why?

Judith Stadtman Tucker: Elizabeth Cady Stanton is one of my great heroes. This is a woman who had seven children, who lived at a time when married women had few legal rights and no political power. Her cause was ridiculed by the press and dismissed by the public. Even many women of her day were offended by the suggestion that they should have equal rights. But Stanton had a vision of justice, and she worked tirelessly for over fifty years—fifty years!—to move the world closer to that vision.

There are other mamas of the past I look up to—Eleanor Roosevelt and Frances Perkins, who was the first woman to hold a cabinet position and who, as FDR's Secretary of Labor, helped draft the Social Security Act and the Fair Labor Standards Act. Roosevelt and Perkins were women whose visions were shaped by their time—they had different ideas about how to help mothers and children than the more egalitarian objectives we have today. But their achievements were remarkable.

Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey (D-Petaluma) is doing some wonderful work; she recently reintroduced The Balancing Act, a bill that would provide paid time off for working parents to care for their families and improve the quality and availability of child care, to the 109th Congress. I also really admire Judith Steinberg Dean, who insisted on maintaining some semblance of a normal life when her husband was a front-runner in the Democratic primaries.

mamazine.com: What led you to start the MMO?

Judith Stadtman Tucker: Before I launched the MMO, I spent a couple of years working with the national advocacy department of Mothers & More, a membership organization that provides a national support and advocacy network for mothers. We were working very hard on articulating what I now call the "motherhood problem" in a way that would be compelling to Mothers & More members, and I was doing a lot of background research on social, economic and workplace issues that affect the well-being of mothers (this was before Ann Crittenden's The Price of Motherhood was published). I discovered there were many, many high quality resources available—at no cost, on the web—that address the issues of why and how women incur disproportionate economic penalties when they become mothers, and why it's so difficult, especially for mothers, to integrate paid work and parenting. But these resources weren't all in one place; I had to hunt them down. I came to the conclusion the mothers' movement needed a clearinghouse for this kind of information to support mothers and others who might need data to back up their activism, or who might want to become more knowledgeable about the issues. And I felt the MMO should be an independent project with the freedom to set its own editorial agenda. As far as I'm concerned, information really is power—the motherhood problem is not just a figment of our imagination, it's extremely well documented. Just assembling this information with an open-source philosophy—"Here it is: it's free! Take it!"—still feels like a profoundly revolutionary act.

The first edition of the Mothers Movement Online was published in April 2003, and the site very quickly evolved into something closer to a journal format, with personal essays and commentary, and critical analysis of motherhood in popular culture, as well as summaries of relevant data and research. It's incredibly rewarding work— even though the operating model might best be described as a "negative-profit" model. It's been both gratifying and exciting to learn how many mothers— in the U.S., and around the world— are starving for a serious conversation about motherhood as a social issue, and as a feminist issue. I hear from many new readers that they've been looking for a resource like the MMO for a long time.

mamazine.com: What advice would you give to a friend pregnant with her first child?

Judith Stadtman Tucker: My first piece of advice would be to burn that dog-eared copy of What To Expect When You're Expecting. You never know what to expect when you go into the labor and delivery room, and no amount of reading and instruction is going to prepare you for how powerful and humbling the experience of childbirth is. So just forget about the damn birthing plan— well, don't forget about it, but just be aware that there is very little about the process of giving birth you can actually control. This is just as true if you're giving birth at home or in a high-tech hospital setting. A better guidebook for first-time mothers would be titled Expect the Unexpected or Go With the Flow.

I'd also tell her that it's OK if she doesn't feel overwhelmed by love for her baby the moment she lays eyes on her, or if she finds breastfeeding less than transcendently blissful, or if she really would just like someone else to take care of everything— including the new baby— for a few weeks while she gets some rest. I'd say there are many ways to be a good mother, and every mother has to learn to tune out the chatter of canned parenting advice and figure out for herself what her way is. And I'd say that motherhood is really hard and sometimes scary when your children are small, but it does get better and easier as they get older. I'd also tell her to try to find other mothers, either in her community or online, who won't judge her or try to shut her down when she tries to speak her truth about motherhood. And I'd tell her if she finds it difficult to balance paid work and motherhood, it's not because she's doing something wrong, it's because our society is doing something wrong.

mamazine.com: What are you reading right now?

Judith Stadtman Tucker: I've usually got several books going. Right now I'm reading Kathleen Gerson's No Man's Land, which is about her study of fathers' involvement in child-rearing. I'm also reading Michael Lerner's Surplus Powerlessness, which has to do with why we believe it's impossible to change society, even though we have more power than we think we do. And I've just started a great book, Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood by historian Steven Mintz. What Mintz describes so clearly is that our notions about what it takes to raise children well are based almost entirely cultural ideals, and not on a fundamental sensitivity to the baseline needs of children— when you look at the history of childhood and child-rearing in the U.S., it's obvious that the "irreducible needs" of children are completely open to interpretation. As someone whose goal in life is to deflate the ideal of intensive mothering, I find that reassuring.