Chappell Roan's Mommy Problem

It's Not What You Think

A celebrity had an opinion about motherhood last week so naturally the internet exploded. Some people castigated Chappell Roan as proof of everything that’s wrong with a sick, low-birth rate plagued U.S. Others dismissed her for being a childless woman and therefore clueless. And then of course, actual mothers were quick to jump onto one side of the motherhood binary or the other, like laying claim to the side of a ship they thought was less likely to sink. Motherhood is good! Look at me glow! Some screamed. Mothers are structurally unsupported so of course they’re exhausted and not very glowy! Others shrieked.

A photo of me reacting to the latest Motherhood Controversy

As usual, the entire “argument” rests on an agreed upon definition of motherhood, something Amanda Montei points out doesn’t exist and really never has.

“Motherhood” is a loaded term that we use to reference many things. To what might women even being referring when they challenge the merits of motherhood? The criminalization of pregnancy? The difficulties of navigating privatized childcare? Domestic inequality and the tragedy of heterosexuality? The centrality of the nuclear family? Reproductive violence and an absence of postpartum care? Racism and environmental disaster? Financial precarity and economic dependence on men? The presumption that they will endure a loss of their identity and career and social status, and wear it all with a smile?

When we say “motherhood,” most are talking obliquely about a range of social, economic, political, personal, emotional, psychological, and physical ideologies, scripts, roles, and issues.

The Chappell Roan dustup (honestly I can’t) is simply a reminder that the motherhood binary continues to be a third rail in feminist discourse. Conservative media outlets like Evie magazine and Candace Owens’ Club Candace rely on the gender binary so they can maintain and increase both capital and cultural relevance. In order to instruct women on happiness, Evie needs “woman” to be a static category. In order to scare women into following a rigid set of gendered rules, Club Candace must present deviation from those rules as an exercise in futility sure to end in personal tragedy.

Evie Magazine Has Company

Motherhood is an integral part of the right’s construction of ideal motherhood. And in order to brand and sell their version of conservative motherhood, Evie and others also rely on the false binary between “working moms” and “stay-at-home moms.” Like many binaries, the motherhood binary relies on a hardworking little network of baby binaries to stay strong, and this “working mom” vs. “stay-at-home mom” binary is perhaps the general manager of all these baby binaries.

The right leans on the looming specter of the sad and sour working mom in order to disseminate the incorrect and harmful belief that feminism means the denigration of domesticity and maternity and everything pretty and feminine and pink. Horrors! The tradwife is a construction built up mostly to cast the alternative to wholesale commitment to motherhood and wifehood (sterile cubicles! Handsy bosses! Sad desk salads!) in a frightening light. This alternative takes the shape either of a childless cat lady OR a frazzled and eternally unfulfilled working mom. While their lived realities might be wildly different, the right wants us to believe that both identities are anathema to a woman’s life well lived. Both are unnatural, both are doomed.

The tradwife could not exist without gender essentialism and misogyny. She is ideological, yes, but her supposed superiority is also aptly transmitted through imagery. Happiness is communicated through smiles, contentment is communicated through golden light, marital harmony is communicated through a couple embracing in the middle of a field, and familial bliss is communicated through a cozy kitchen tableau. The fact that she is made happy only by accepting her submission to a man and her “natural” propensity to be led is presented not as blatant misogyny but as romantic and harmonious complementarianism.

raisingmaidens

A post shared by @raisingmaidens

The image of the harried mother trying and failing to be happy at work and at home is colored by misogyny too. This mother is always wearing either pajamas or an uncomfortable looking business suit. The suit communicates adherence to the “unnatural,” “unfeminine” rules of the marketplace. The pajamas are simply meant to underscore the fact that the working mother’s life is PATHETIC and her plight is so extreme that she lacks the wherewithal to even GET DRESSED FOR THE MALE GAZE YIKES!!!! The working mom’s unkempt hair communicates lack of time and a startling lack of commitment to beauty norms. She holds a baby on one hip and balances a briefcase on the other. Importantly, both the baby and mother look miserable. No one is smiling. The mother is always alone. No partner exists. No friends or relatives or members of any sort of village exist either.

The fact that this photo is so well lit surely is a mistake.

The popular image of the working mom rests on the assumption that such harpies are unhappy because they’re trying to do too much at once, and that they’re pursuing careers at the expense of “what’s best for the children.” They are flying too close to the sun. They are attempting the impossible. Such hubris!

Mom rage is a dad problem

Financial reality is rarely a factor in the right’s articulation of a working mother. And if it is, they employ magical thinking. Sure, most families can’t survive on one income, but have you ever tried suffocating personal ambition, submitting to your husband, and making lemonade out of your husband’s insufficient paycheck because money and bills are only as important as you make them? How’s THAT working for “the children?”

Because “working mom” is one half of a binary, it must be as consistent and uniform as its tradwife counterpart. All working moms are overwhelmed. All working moms feel torn in multiple directions. All working moms are forever moaning about the impossibility of work/life balance. But here’s the thing. Not all working moms feel the same strain resulting from the juggling of career and home-life because (spoiler alert!!!!) not all moms are the same person.

Brittany Hugoboom (founder of Evie) seems to be thriving as a working mom. Hugoboom has built her entire brand on the understanding that mothers are “naturally” happier spending time with their kids than crunching numbers in an office. Despite the fact that her very existence as the editor-in-chief of Evie disproves this theory, Hugoboom is quite comfortable peddling her gender essentialist beliefs about work and motherhood to anyone who'll listen, including the New York Times. In a recent profile, Hugoboom told reporter Katie J.M. Baker that professional life just doesn’t vibe well with most mothers’ lifestyles:

Despite the years of labor she has put into building the two businesses, she insisted that she believed most women weren’t cut out for hard-charging careers.

“I think when most women try to do that, they fail,” she said. “Then they feel upset about it, when it’s not really in their nature.”

Do you feel “upset” about America’s treatment of women and mothers? Lol, sorry bitch, criminalized abortion and prohibitively expensive childcare is JUST NATURE!

Whether it’s “in their nature” or not, most American mothers don’t really have a choice about whether to work waged jobs or not, and even mothers who end up focusing on childcare (either by choice or financial necessity) occupy what Neha Ruch calls the “gray zone.” I would be remiss in failing to point out that gray famously exists within the black/white binary!

Ruch is the author of The Power Pause: How to Plan a Career Break After Kids--and Come Back Stronger Than Ever, and she frequently denounces the supposed chasm between the “working mother” and “stay-at-home mother.” In a survey of over 2,000 people (both mothers and non-mothers), Ruch found that the majority of survey respondents envisioned someone like June Cleaver when asked for an illustrative example of a stay-at-home mother, and someone like Michelle Obama as being representative of a working mom.

But these same respondents proved how reductive this binary is when it comes to their own lives. Ruch’s survey “revealed that one in three ‘working’ mothers were planning a career pause in the next two years, and one in two were considering a downshift in working hours.” Ruch continues. “We also know that 90 percent of women currently at home aim to eventually return to the workforce. We are each making the best choices for our families right now, and increasingly shifting between work and family in new, fascinating, and nonlinear ways.”

Ruch’s work clarifies that there is no such thing as one kind of working mom or one kind of stay-at-home mom, and importantly, it also highlights the reality that the categories themselves are nebulous and constantly in flux. At some point during their lives as mothers, most moms are both/and.

And even in the dystopia of 2025, it is possible to be a mother who decries the systematic abandonment of all mothers, and still finds joy and value in both the labor of mothering and in professional work. Another shocking case of both/and! In this lovely piece by Rachel Hills for Vogue, Hills argues that getting to pursue both a career and motherhood has been a uniquely expansive experience, and has positively transformed both her relationship to caregiving and to work.

Work gave me a social and intellectual outlet that preserved my sense of self during a transition that might otherwise have felt crushing. Those hours when I wasn’t solely or primarily a mother allowed me to show up more fully—and more generously—when I was . . . Even my creative work feels freer now. Motherhood has given me the confidence to write more honestly, less preoccupied with how others might respond—understanding that what people might say about me on the internet has a limited impact on my daily lived reality.

Hills acknowledges the financial and mental stress of having to plan for summer vacations and she makes both work and parenting decisions she’d rather not be forced to make. She rightly blames a society that has been fundamentally shaped by a lack of respect, care, and financial support for mothers and caregivers for working mothers feeling sometimes burnt out. She also blames the widespread cultural expectation that mothers and caregivers continue to make extractive capitalism possible through their invisible, unpaid labor. Hills’ writes:

The answer isn’t to retreat into a sanitized vision of the past, where women were confined to one role and denied the chance to live fully in their ambitions and talents. It is to build a society that accommodates the choices women make—whether we work because we want to, or because we have to.

YES.

I relate strongly to Hill’s essay, and similarly feel so lucky to feel more fulfilled at work because of my mothering and more fulfilled as a mother because of my work. And sometimes work sucks. Sometimes mothering sucks. Sometimes I am shocked by the joy of raising children. Sometimes I experience a professional high that clarifies my sense of professional purpose. I am relentlessly beating a long dead horse, but could it be remotely possible that Chappell Roan expressing a single thought about a single subject does not encapsulate the ENTIRETY of her experience or viewpoint?! And furthermore, why does a pop start expressing her maternal ambivalence matter? It only matters if we think maternal ambivalence OR not wanting to have kids full stop - indicates something in need of fixing within society.

Listening to an episode of the podcast formerly known as Poog in which Kate Berlant imagines herself as a “mother of three” and finds the thought exercise uniquely hilarious, I cackled along with her as I did the dishes or cut the carrot sticks or walked the dog. I’m a “mother of three” but I also find it hilarious to imagine me as some sort of sitcom caricature, which is, I think, what Berlant was conjuring in her idea of a “mother of three.” She was not (I don’t think!) imagining an individual, she was imagining a stock character, a wearer of mom jeans and a driver of a minivan stuffed with soccer balls. I’m not a child-free comedian living in Los Angeles and occasionally rocking red carpets. I’m a mother of three in rural New Hampshire who goes to bed by 9PM. And I find the concept of me as a “mother of three” fucking funny. Because I’m me. I’m a mother. I’m a woman. But mostly I’m just a human being with a unique perspective and lived experience which preclude me from being defined by binaries.

A feminist utopia would be one in which there was no audience for think pieces about mothers’ work/life balance. Or essays about “choice feminism” as it pertains to tradwives. This rosy future would be one in which personal hobbies are not weaponized as ideological tools to convince (or force) women to stay in their biological lanes. A future in which the topic of maternal joy wouldn’t feel like a political landmine. This future would not confuse an interest in interior design with one’s interest in raising safe and loved children. Or confuse a love of canning homemade jam with a desire to become a mother. This utopian future would be one in which every woman’s freedom of choice was respected, even if those choices don’t adhere to a straight, conservative white man’s fever dream of the perfect woman. And this future would certainly be one in which a single celebrity expressing a single thought about the institution of motherhood wasn’t viewed as A Cultural Event, but rather the natural result of a person being a person. And having thoughts. And sometimes expressing them.