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Are White, Middle-Class Women the Unhappiest Mothers?
We seem to be the angriest and the most vocal. Here’s my theory why.
The title of this story should more accurately read: Are White, Middle-Class, College-Educated, Married, Heterosexual, Cisgender Women the Unhappiest Mothers? But that was kind of a mouthful.
I myself am a white, middle-class, college-educated, married, heterosexual, cisgender woman who has felt, shall we say, thrown for a loop by the realities of motherhood.
In fact, it’s the reason I started writing on Medium: to interrupt persistent cultural narratives about what it means to be a mother, worker, woman, and wife. When I became a mother, back in 2011, it’s not that no one was talking about motherhood — the Internet was buzzing with mommy hacks and mommy blogs. I even had my own short-lived blog on BabyCenter.com. But even though it took just a few keystrokes to find thousands of creative ways to pair cheese and carbs or to sneak veggies into smoothies, I found very little that spoke to any of the deeper challenges I was grappling with.
When I recently read this Vox article by Rachel Cohen, How millennials learned to dread motherhood, I felt both vindicated and defensive.
