For Kristen R. Ghodsee, it was the moment she caught a glimpse of herself in the bathroom mirror between two stages of a job interview, bent under the hand dryer at an awkward angle that allowed her to pump breast milk frantically while drying leakage from her jacket.
For Amy Westervelt, it was waddling to the mailbox to collect a check, two weeks after the birth of her child, while congratulating herself on "emailing from the recovery room" to make "a big deadline 48 hours after delivery. No one I worked with even knew I'd had a baby. ... Power woman!"
Many women could share similar stories: moments when they realized that, under contemporary American capitalism, motherhood "kinda suck[s]," to quote Westervelt. Three new books—Ghodsee's Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism, Westervelt's Forget Having It All: How America Messed Up Motherhood—and How to Fix It, and Kirsten Swinth's Feminism's Forgotten Fight: The Unfinished Struggle for Work and Family—explore how and why our society is structured to make motherhood so hard. They explore efforts to redefine motherhood in different eras, places, and cultures; and what those experiences have to teach us.
[For more on this story by REBECCA STONER, go to https://psmag.com/economics/ho...od-easier-in-america]
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