Everything associated with motherhood has been coded as faintly embarrassing and less than — from mom jeans to mommy brain. And yet for a female politician, to be a bad mom has been disqualifying, and to not be a mom at all is to be understood as lacking something: importance, value, femininity.
Can She Do it All? The Female Politician as a Bad Mom:
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/16/magazine/wendy-davis.html?_r=0
Motherhood has often been seen as an impediment for female candidates, particularly for young moms that are expected to be the primary child-care takers for their families. “The conventional wisdom was that having young children was a problem, an obstacle,” Susan Carroll, a scholar at the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, told the Atlantic. “For men running for office, [having a wife and children] just showed that they were wholesome and normal … For women, I think families, particularly children who are still school age, were seen as an additional set of responsibilities. Voters would look at a woman who was running for office with kids and say, ‘Well, how’s she going to Washington? Who’s going to be taking care of the kids?’”
In a 2017 study, the Barbara Lee Family Foundation, a nonprofit combatting gender inequality in politics, found that voters still have doubts about a woman’s ability “to balance the competing priorities of their families and their constituents,” particularly when their children were young.
After Wayne Slater of the Dallas Morning News published an article that framed Democratic candidate for Texas governor Wendy Davis as a negligent mother in order to pursue her education and political career, and that she used her husband for his money. He claims that “Wendy [Davis] is tremendously ambitious. She’s not going to let family or raising children or anything else to get in her way.”
Bristol Palin accused fellow teen mother Wendy Davis of being a bad mother because her ex-husband took care of their children while she was at law school. Palin wrote:
Is everyone paying attention? This woman is the hero of the Left? A woman whose ambition and ego were so big she couldn’t have both a career and kids at the same time.
Portraying a female candidate as a bad mother is common way to undermine them. Partly as a result of concerns like these, “women tend to start their political careers later than men, after their children are grown, and so have less time to position themselves politically,” wrote Wendy Kaminer.
Nancy Pelosi has noted the relationship between motherhood and the timing of women’s political careers. In 2012, when Luke Russert asked Pelosi whether her insistence on continuing to lead her party crowded out younger leaders, she said: “I came to Congress when my youngest child, Alexandra, was a senior in high school. I knew that my male colleagues had come when they were 30. They had a jump on me because they didn’t have children.”
Childless Female Politicians:
Childlessness, or being single or widowed, means there is no perception of being a bad mom, no domestic responsibility a female politician would be dropping the ball on. But women running for president have to also be likable, the risk of being cast as chilly and unfeminine is real.
California senator Kamala Harris’ doesn’t have children, which puts her within a long tradition of women in politics (including Margaret Chase Smith, and Elizabeth Dole). Harris takes pains to mention that her stepchildren call her “Momala”; her Twitter bioreads, “U.S. Senator and candidate for president. Wife, Momala, Auntie.”
The risk of being not taken seriously is particularly high for young, childless politicians. Fox News Tucker Carlson wondered, about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whether “someone who’s never even raised children gets the right to lecture me about morality.”
Vote for Me because I am a Mother–Embracing Motherhood:
In March, the Maryland gubernatorial candidate Krish Vignarajah made her case to voters in an ad featuring a shot of her breastfeeding her daughter intercut with photos showing her family and various moments from her political career. She ended the video with a simple appeal: “I’m a mom. I’m a woman. And I want to be your next governor.”
With a historic number of women running for office this past year, many candidates made a similar pitch. Moms not only sought political seats, but sought them explicitly as moms.
“I’m a mom. I’m a woman. And I want to be your next governor.”
Krish Vignarajah https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czGXjMMi-_g
Kelda Roys, running for governor of Wisconsin, put out a similar campaign ad, in which she talked about her efforts to ban a chemical prevalent in children’s products. The Texas congressional candidate M. J. Hegar put forward her own take on motherhood last month in a campaign ad that quickly went viral. “I’m an Air Force combat veteran and a mom,” she says as the video begins to show her life through a sequence of doors: with her family; to a helicopter she flew in Afghanistan; to the houses she lived in with her mom, a survivor of domestic abuse; to legislative chambers. She shows voters the doors that she had to open in order to build a career and a life as a mom.
Though negative perceptions of mothers linger in politics, some obstacles are beginning to fall. In April, after Tammy Duckworth became the first senator to give birth while in office, the Senate unanimously voted to allow babies under 1 year old onto the floor during votes for the first time. Less than a month later, the Federal Election Commission ruled that female candidates could use campaign funds to cover child-care costs in some cases, a result of a push from the New York House candidate and a mother of two Liuba Grechen Shirley.
Jill Greenlee, a professor of politics and gender studies at Brandeis University, suggests that the role of motherhood in politics might be moving toward normalization. “As things become more common, they also fade into the background,” she says. “If we have lots of women holding office, some of whom have younger kids, it might be more entwined in politics. There could be more institutional changes to accommodate this role. But it also may become less of a big deal.”