Keywords

Right is right, and wrong is wrong, and a body ain’t got no business doing wrong when he ain’t ignorant and knows better.

—Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)

Introduction

In this chapter I critically consider the socio-cultural production of ignorance and denial, or agnosis (Barton and Davis 2018), in how our Western culture understands motherhood and specifically the “good mother,” and how that agnosis intersects with governmentality and law. I delve into the context of how the ideology of “intensive motherhood” reinforces unequal unpaid labour burdens between parents who are gendered male and female in opposite sex unions, in addition to bolstering white supremacy. Additionally, I seek to uncover how constructs of the “good mother” reinforce social expectations that re-inscribe women’s subordination in the home and perpetuate women’s inability to succeed in the paid workforce. I trouble the binary, opposed discoursive categories of “good mother” and “bad mother” by critiquing how women’s efforts to adhere to standards of intensive motherhood propel them into oppressive situations that agnosis masks. Looking at Canadian divorce and child custody law, as well as other areas of formal regulation, I look at how the operation of law contains assumptions that oppress women because they are masked by the ideology of “intensive motherhood.”

Simultaneously with being an academic and a lawyer, I am identified as a woman and a mother of four, which means of course that the project of this chapter is both personal and political. When I was a little girl growing up in Alberta, on the Canadian prairies, in the late twentieth century, we used to call being fooled, tricked, conned, or duped, being “snowed.” Snow seems productive as a metaphor to use in this chapter as I write this in January in Canada, in the midst of yet another COVID-19 lockdown during which my four children are being “homeschooled,” or at least schooled online, where all around me women, and yes, some men, but disproportionately women, are leaving the paid labour force, or suffering mental health crises, crushed by the competing demands of motherwork and paid work to give up on their ambitions.

I am a white woman, which means I was a white girl, a settler grandchild inheritor of the land of pioneers on the prairies, named after Becky Thatcher, the female protagonist of Mark Twain’s novel, Tom Sawyer (1876). The novel was ahead of its time in many respects, not least for depicting strong female characters and criticizing slavery. It also portrayed an iconic instance of what we, when I was a kid, would call the act of snowing, and what theorists would call the production of agnosis. In the “fence scene,” Tom Sawyer, having been tasked by his Aunt Polly to whitewash their fence as punishment for doing mischief, snows his friends into doing it for him. They didn’t call it snowing in the Mississippi, but there was a hotter climate, not a world filled with winter and snow.

Tom Sawyer not only did not whitewash the fence himself; he turned the situation around by getting several of his friends to paint the fence for him. In fact, he got them to pay him for the privilege. Through this episode, Mark Twain offers us a comical portrayal of a child doing what culture and discourse do: produce a reframing of a situation so that ignorance of actual facts is constructed. Generally this advantages some and disadvantages others, just as it was of benefit to Tom, and not to those who painted the fence, to get the work done, except they never even realized it.

Commonly, in North America and Europe, mothers are tirelessly, desperately, whitewashing that fence, snowed into thinking our parenting labour is not work, and that any struggles we have attaining unattainable standards of intensive motherhood while achieving a “beach body” and career success are our failings as women. This is not as simple as Tom Sawyer’s childish trick, not entirely, it is discursive work not deliberately done by particular men, at least not solely and generally. It is culturally constituted ignorance, discursive work done by operation of particular logics intersecting with power (Barton and Davis 2018). Culturally constructed ignorance of the crushing labour burdens associated with motherhood specifically in relation to their unequal distribution between parents in heterosexual “nuclear” families both reaffirms economic calculations in which unpaid labour, disproportionately done by women doesn’t “count” (Waring) and constructs motherwork as a privilege. I like the metaphor of snowing as an image for agnosis. Snow covers over things, makes them look clean, blankets and muffles sound, and looks magical. Mothers are considered to be magical too—angelic, always patient, labouring in love. Snow is dangerous. It is cold, and, if you are buried under it, as in an avalanche, you can suffocate. It is also apt from a critical race theory perspective, that the fence Tom Sawyer was tasked with painting was being whitewashed, that snow is white, and that being snowed under is being covered by a blanket of whiteness. Constructs of the Good Mother are raced and classed too—in our society, the “good” mother is always already white; anything that diverges from whiteness is seen as less than it.

In this chapter, I look critically at how the hegemonic discourse of “intensive motherhood” intersects with the figures it produces of the “good” and “bad” mother produces agnosis about the work done by women, as well as implications of that to governmentality and law.

Intensive Mothering: The Good Mother and the Bad Mother

There is a proliferation of popular literature and discourse about “good” mothering practices, from magazines to advertising, to self-help books. The biggest discursive trick this construct plays is naturalizing the idea that any of the forms of labour expected of mothers should be taken for granted as their tasks to perform in capitalism, from child-rearing to other forms of work such as emotional labour. Popular writing about mothering that contributes to the ever powerful ideology of intensive motherhood produces a geography of ignorance, and more scholarship as well as accessible writing should peer into those gaps, scrutinizing closely what is unsaid and unseen socially in situations, in order to understand the cultural context (Croissant 2018).

One of the strongest social mechanisms for establishing the mother role was the hegemonic idea of intensive motherhood, constituting the figure of the Good Mother—which is a formula of the norms and the social and psychological demands of motherhood at any given time. In her classic book on mothering, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (Rich 1976) Adrienne Rich describes the Good Mother—which is still relevant in our times—as a person who mothers intensively, with no identity other than her motherhood, who finds deep gratification in spending a whole day in the company of small children, and as such is attuned to the needs of others. Intensive motherly love is unconditional love, devoid of egoism, unflinching, and endless labour, as is critically unpacked by Andrea O’Reilly (2021).

The opposed cultural constructs of the “good mother” and “bad mother” are discursive constructs that induce ignorance of the work women do to fit within it (Hager et al. 2017). Because motherhood is naturalized as a gendered identity and not understood as a set of tasks, a genre of work, the efforts undertaken by women to fit the requirements of the category of “good mother” and the impossibility of achieving the requirements of what would suffice to constitute goodness in the role of mother, are made invisible. The figure of the “good mother” masks unpaid labour: childcare, housekeeping, and emotional labour. This is largely a capitalist illusion in that it makes all unpaid labour invisible (Waring 2019). Economic calculations that disregard unpaid labour produce agnosis about tasks that are not remunerated, disproportionately work done by women. The agnosis about mothers goes beyond economics too, well beyond being ignored in GDP calculations, because the tasks involved in motherwork are not only not counted as economic contributions but naturalized and thereby rendered invisible as tasks.

Bad mothering is something that most of us assume we can recognize in all of its manifestations. It is abuse and neglect. It is failure to feed and failure to care that your child is not thriving. It is abandonment. It is immoral conduct that contaminates the worldview of the vulnerable child. It is emotional and psychological violence. In its most extreme form it is infanticide. Good mothers are not violent or neglectful. Good mothers nurture and care for their children. In these cultural expectations, fathers are largely invisible. It is a question not often asked: where was the father? Most importantly, good mothers and bad mothers are perceived to do different types of mothering and be different kinds of mothers. Thus, the failures of bad mothers are perceived to be in their maternal actions (or inactions) and in their identities, for which they alone are responsible. We rarely pay attention to the context within which women mothers, nor the structures that constrain their mothering choices. Instead, we focus our collective efforts on finding (and punishing) the bad mothers, so easily identified, we think, by the harm they bring to their children.

There is a diverse range of ways in which bad mothers are constructed. Single mothers, working mothers (overly) wealthy mothers who employ paid helpers, mothers who do not work outside the home, poor mothers, and mothers of obese children are only a few of the mothers so labelled in our social worlds. Mothers who drink, smoke, eat cold cuts, take cold medicine, exercise too much, exercise too little, eat the wrong fish, drink caffeine, paint the nursery, don’t get prenatal care, use a midwife, ignore the doctor’s “recommendations,” etc., during pregnancy are bad mothers. Mothers who are unemployed, on welfare, poor, or homeless are bad mothers. Indigenous or Black mothers, or immigrant mothers, are cast as bad mothers for “irresponsibly” having too many children. Mothers who work too much, travel too much, or stress too much are bad mothers. Mothers who give their children up for adoption are bad mothers. Mothers who don’t want the children they have but raise them anyway are bad mothers. Mothers with diagnosed mental health issues are bad mothers. Mothers who self-medicate to avoid mental health diagnoses are bad mothers. Mothers who self-medicate to deal with their mental illnesses are bad mothers. Mothers with disabilities are bad mothers. Mothers of children with disabilities are bad mothers. Mothers of colour or indigenous mothers—especially if they are poor or unmarried—should not be mothers, thus they are bad mothers. Single mothers. Non-heterosexual mothers. Too young mothers. Too old mothers. Too desperate mothers, living vicariously through their children. Too anxious mothers, worried about the welfare or achievements of their children. Too distant mothers, too selfish to concern herself with her children’s needs. Too busy. Too distracted. Too connected to social media. Too tired…

Our societies’ cultural and punitive use of the Bad Mother trope has moved into a complex political, social, and ideological label. The Bad Mother is not just the mother who is perceived to harm her child in some unambiguously wrong way. Her sister mothers, whose inferior identities in the social structure make them suspect, are struggling to fulfill their own motherhood obligations and proscriptions and in the process doing or saying things that may be perceived as harmful to their children. Such mothers also find themselves sucked into the maelstrom of the Bad Mother label. It is the stories of these mothers that our authors analyse in this volume, as they strive to broaden our understanding of the institutionalized intrusiveness of the Bad Mother trope into mother’s lives.

As is painfully evident in the COVID-19 lockdown context, the business and corporate world is ill-prepared for and unconcerned about mothers’ multiple socially mandatory responsibilities, or the cultural and marketing images that reinforce their self-blame and frustration, or even their children’s other parents who might share some of the burdens leading to the mothers’ crises. Mothers who are unable to simultaneously work from home, or in “essential services” full time while caring for their suddenly unschooled and un-childcare children are bad mothers. Many aspects of contemporary culture are complicit with societal institutions (particularly medical, legal, economic, and the media) that seemingly are designed to control and denigrate mothers’ lives through inadequate and/or punitive policies and practices such as our authors discuss in this volume, the film tells moms that the goal should be to work harder to be good, but to accept that they are bad.

The definition of a Bad Mother is determined and culturally structured in light of the definition of the Good Mother, a relatively new concept. The term good motherhood—instinctive maternal love—did not exist in Western culture prior to the eighteenth century, and it is the result of complex economic and political processes (Chase and Rogers; Forna; Gillis; Hufton; Rich; Smart). The historians John Gillis and Laurence Stone (1990) assert that until the eighteenth century women gave birth, but did not necessarily raise their children for status and economic reasons. Yet in the wake of massive social changes and demographic fears of widespread death of their children in the eighteenth century, a need arose to create a specific social agent that would care for children. This resulted in the creation of the mother role as it is known today (Forna; Ladd-Taylor and Imansky). This role determines that women are not only supposed to give birth to children, but also to raise them and take care of their education. The mothers’ social value and psychological welfare hinge on performing their roles in a socially and institutionally proscribed manner.

Rich was not the first nor the only person who observed the intensive ideal of good motherhood and criticized it as a mechanism of oppression. In effect, much early feminist writing on motherhood begins with Sara Ruddick’s critique of the cultural image of the Good Mother (Ruddick 1980). At the base of these studies lies the concept of the institution of motherhood. The term was first posited by the sociologist Jesse Bernard who determined that motherhood is not an inborn biological process but a changing social role composed of norms and a tradition of concern for and raising of children. Rich claimed that motherhood is a patriarchal institution that is managed and controlled by men who have legal, technical, and ideological control over all aspects of childbirth and motherhood (Rich, ibid.).

Ultimately, the Bad Mother trope arises out of our cultural inculcation into, and successful institutionalization of, the Good Mother. The Good Mother shapes the Bad Mother through its mechanisms of accountability to the expectations it holds. Consequently, the Bad Mother becomes an additional effective social and cultural mechanism of surveillance and control. Further, the Bad Mother helps us to sharpen our understanding and analysis of the Good Mother through the processes by which bad mothers and bad mothering are defined and, more importantly, regulated. Both labels are therefore bound to patriarchal motherhood and women’s oppression as mothers within patriarchy. Though our collection refers to the norms at the foundation of the Good Mother, our authors energize scholarship on the Bad Mother in order to better understand this less-researched cultural and social trope and its explicit power in the lives of mothers.

The Bad Mother is unpacked in a growing body of scholarship. From Ladd-Taylor and Umansky’s edited volume “Bad” Mothers: The Politics of Blame in Twentieth-Century America to Thurer’s The Myths of Motherhood: How Culture Reinvents the Good Mother and Caplan’s The New Don’t Blame Mother: Mending the Mother–Daughter Relationship, scholars have embraced the need to critically analyse the construction and the effect of the Bad Mother. My own 2017 book collaboration with Tamar Hager and Michelle Hughes-Miller contributes to this scholarship as well. In considering the Bad Mother image, however, most feminist research on motherhood presents specific cases of mothers who abused, abandoned, neglected, and even murdered their children (e.g. Douglas and Michaels; Forna; Rich), while avoiding generalized description of the figure, which continues to largely be defined as the “other” in comparison to the Good Mother.

Demeter Press has greatly contributed to our understanding of the bad mother label by publishing several volumes in recent years that deal with specific aspects and contexts of this social and cultural construction. In The Mother Blame Game, edited by Reimer and Sahagian (2015) the editors consider how the narrowing of standards of good mothering broadens the construction of the Bad Mother as we assess the outcome of our parenting: our children. Whenever we question the source of our children’s mishaps or misbehaviours, mother-blame is there as a ready explanation. Editors Minaker and Hogeveen in Criminalized Mothers, Criminalizing Mothering take a different approach, highlighting the systems of control that surround and (sometimes) imprison mothers for situations often beyond their control. Yet the mothers so criminalized are not powerless, and sometimes envision themselves as good or “good enough” mothers, rejecting the Bad Mother label for their mothering practices. Also put forward by Demeter Press are volumes where the Bad Mother appears, unbidden, such as in Disabled Mothers: Stories and Scholarship By and About Mothers with Disabilities edited by Filax and Taylor, where several chapters bemoan the labelling and stigmatization that occurs of mothers with disabilities.

So what do we know about the Bad Mother and about bad mothers, from all of these sources? We know that bad mothering is ubiquitous, because mother-blame permeates our social worlds. We know that bad mothering has been defined and punished around the world. We know that the Bad Mother, however, is not constructed the same in all social contexts nor in all locations. So the discursive presence of widely held assumptions about bad mothers, while expected, may mean different demands and different accountabilities for different mothers with different positionalities (e.g. race, ethnicity, sexuality, bodies, etc.) in different locales.

Mother-blame is frequently the mechanism by which the Bad Mother trope is applied. Mother-blame arises from an assessment of harm or risk which requires a surveillance culture within which such assessments can arise, and individuals or entities willing to assume the role of experts to designate behaviours as risky or harmful. Thus, mother-blame necessitates a standard by which mothers can be compared—contained in the Bad Mother trope—and individuals invested in enforcing it. Conversely, mother-blame may also arise from identity claims that have little to do with harm or risk but much to do with our gross discomfort with difference. Mothers of colour, mothers with disabilities, queer mothers, impoverished mothers, indigenous mothers—all these groups and many others have faced disapprobation not because of their actions as mothers, but because of their identity and social status as mothers who do not fit the narrow racist, classist, gendered, ableist, and heterosexist standards of idealized motherhood in Western culture. Such mothers’ burden to mothers, to be valued in their mothering, and to resist the Bad Mother label is then more difficult (at times, impossible) because their identities and their failures synergistically intersect to mark them within the surveillance culture.

There remain gaps about what the Bad Mother construction does culturally and discursively. While some research has discussed bad mothers, the characteristics of this label are complex and context-specific. Scholarship has not yet fully explored how institutions like the law, medicine, or the media transform this ideology into social control over mothers, often with disastrous consequences. In other words, we are still working to identify the processes by which the Bad Mother is used by state actors, cultural channels, and other officials to designate and punish bad mothers. More research should be done into the surveillance culture within which mothers live, including how we maintain it within an evolving social context and ongoing resistance to the Bad Mother label. Unpacking the gendered and intersectional aspects of surveillance is key to assessing the social psychology and the sociology of these interactional, power-driven dynamics. Most importantly, I would like to see more thinking and writing about under what conditions resistance to discursive production of agnosis, control and regulation in relation to mothers, can be effective and transformative.

Given the damage Good and Bad Mother labels have done to mothers over the past few centuries, understanding more about resistance, including its forms, its strategies, and its targets, would help us to envision a world where mothers are not unjustly prosecuted and judged and where the impossible demands of the Good Mother are themselves regulated by a collective awareness of context and rejection of standardization. To do this, we need to work towards an understanding of the intersections and agmosis produced by of patriarchal motherhood with other hegemonic discursive logics involved in capitalism, neoliberalism, and nationalism, topics that should be looked at critically in future examinations of constructs of the good and bad mother, and their relationship to agnosis and how it contributes to the imagination.

Mandatory Mothering: Governmentality and Legal Implications

Law, public policy and governmental administration, management, and operations significantly impact and shape mothers’ lives. Definitions of the Good and Bad Mother are discourses with governmental effects (Foucault), shaping and curtailing the conduct of those actors identified as mothers, both culturally and legally (Rich 1976). No clear, bright line can be drawn between formal and informal means of regulation of mothers. Legal regulation has its moral and cultural content, while moral regulation can and often does invoke the law (Glasbeek). Popular culture, too, can act as a source of governmentality inasmuch as it informs popular understandings of law that have themselves a materiality (Sarat 2011), affecting what laws are enforced, through reporting rates and choices made to commence civil legal action. Where mothers are formally governed through processes of public policy and law, official texts intersect with cultural understandings of who mothers are and normative assumptions about who mothers should be and how they should behave. Many social researchers have critically unpacked how performing gendered expectations of self-sacrifice and submissiveness is mandatory for mothers. While the obligation to mandatorily perform “good” motherhood is imposed on all mothers, it is more possible to attain for some than others, and this inequity is made manifest in the operation of the law.

While, as Foucault’s work makes evident, the governmental effects of informal mechanisms of social control should not be underestimated (1978), it would also be a mistake to underestimate the power of law and other formal discourses of regulation (Golder and Fitzpatrick). Formal mechanisms by which mothers govern and are governed are of tremendous significance to study in large part because of their important material effects. Formal mechanisms of regulation can restrict mothers’ liberty, affect their access to resources (e.g. social welfare funding), and remove their children from their care. As such, formal mechanisms of government significantly impact and shape mothers’ lives, and in particular impact the lives of mothers living at the margins. Formal laws are often crafted, interpreted, and enforced, in ways where cultural understandings and agnosis about mothering and motherwork are assumed.

Formal regimes for child welfare law are ubiquitous throughout Western democracies. While these regimes claim explicitly, in varying ways, to set up formal regimes to protect children from harm and support their “best interests” (Bala et al. 2004), these are legislative and regulatory regimes that attach the concept of the “good” or “bad” mother to legal obligations. They define and constrain who is recognized legally, ultimately, as the mother of a child by empowering the state to remove children from their parents if there is a need to protect them. Thus, child protection laws have, by operation of their processes, the power to strip a mother of her maternal status by finally making her child a state ward or ruling the child is to be placed for adoption (Bala et al. 2004).

The existence of child protection regimes is hard to critique—who, after all, would speak against protecting children? However, there are important ways in which these regimes are often problematic. Research has shown legal regimes for child welfare to involve power differentials and have a disproportionate impact, across jurisdictions, on financially underresourced, racialized, Indigenous, or otherwise marginalized mothers. Expectations of what a Good Mother would do and how a Good Mother would act are naturalized and too often not critically scrutinized as requiring active labour, as well as financial resources. Decisions on whether to report protection concerns, and how to deal with them, are made in these systems by social workers, health care providers, educators, and community members, as well as lawyers and judges, rendering the systems vulnerable to any discriminatory attitudes prevalent in those communities (Bromwich, “Still Wearing Scarlet?” 2017).

Across jurisdictions, there are invariably formal laws that systematize how kinship, that is, family membership, is reckoned and provide processes for determining who is legally recognized as a parent to a child, as well as who is entitled to have custody of, and access to, those children (Eekelaar and Thandabantu Nhlapo). These laws include legislative and regulatory regimes for marriage, separation, divorce, child support, custody, and access, as well as adoption.

Family law presents another set of laws and formal regulations that are connected to child welfare law and is a technology through which mothers’ foundational roles and status as mothers are formally governed. Through the machinations of family law, determinations are made as to whether mothers reside with, or even see, their children. Family law legislation, regulations, and processes also determine how much, if any, support children are entitled to from their parents, including their fathers as well as their mothers (which is significant as, in the majority of cases, children still reside with their mothers after parental separation) (Fodden 1999; Stone 1990). Finally, family law determines who is legally a child’s mother, and also affects the legal recognition of other familial relationships, such as who is assumed to be a child’s father, and what entitlements or obligations flow from those relationships. Through adoption law as well as family law more generally, legal determinations are made as to who a person’s legal parents are.

Another area of formal regulation that plays an important role in formally regulating mothers is the criminal field. The formal legal texts comprised by criminal law, as well as the processes, regulations, and other policies in place in the criminal justice and correctional systems of a jurisdiction are important mechanisms through which mothers are formally governed in overt and also in less obvious ways.

Mothers can, by law as a form of social regulation, be criminalized. They, and women overall, are criminalized and incarcerated at rates lower than men in general (Eldjupovic and Bromwich 2013), but their incarceration tends statistically to have a more significant and more immediately devastating impact on family units because mothers tend more often than fathers to have primary care and custody of children (Eldjupovic and Bromwich 2013). The criminalization of mothers relates to social (in)justice, mass incarceration, oppression, and marginalization. Pre-existing, widely assumed figures of the “unfit mother” are involved in how governmentality operates in criminal justice and correctional systems. When considering formal regulation of mothers, it is tremendously important to bear in mind mothers’ encounters with systems of control, confinement, and criminalization, as well as their experiences of care (Minaker and Hogeveen 2015).

In general, “true” criminal laws, or mala in se, are those provisions that assign legitimate penal consequences, stigma, and loss of liberty for breaches of what is understood by society to reflect its basic moral order (Saunders and Bromwich 2016). Like all other areas of law, criminal laws are different in different jurisdictions. The proportion of criminalized and incarcerated women in Canada’s Federal and Provincial custody systems is quite small relative to that of men (Minaker and Hogeveen; Eldjupovic and Bromwich). Other countries also consistently report significantly smaller proportions of incarcerated women, compared to men. However, while the rate of incarceration overall is increasing, incarceration rates of women are growing faster than those of men. In recent years, across many countries including Canada, there has been overwhelming growth in the numbers, both total and per capita, of incarcerated women. Racialized women are increasingly overrepresented in the criminal justice and correctional systems; in Canada, this concern extends especially to Indigenous women (Eldjupovic and Bromwich 2013).

It is also important to research how laws of expedience (or mala prohibita) (Saunders and Bromwich 2016) intended for general application specifically, differently, and uniquely impact mothers by reinforcing and reinscribing the assumed dimensions of, and possibilities for, what constitutes a Good Mother and what is involved in good mothering. These regulatory provisions are wide ranging, and can include zoning laws, laws about solicitation and prostitution (Bromwich and DeJong 2015) noise bylaws, regulations about breastfeeding, and school attendance requirements. These can even include international treaty obligations, including the Hague Convention on International Child Abduction, under which women fleeing abuse have not historically often been successful at seeking assistance in retaining their children (Bromwich 2013).

While the obligation to mandatorily perform “good” motherhood is imposed legally as well as socially on all mothers, it is both naturalized through a cultural process of agnosis and more possible to attain for some than others, rendering marginalized mothers vulnerable to criminalization and other penalties for breaching the law. This agnosis exacerbates the vulnerability of mothers at the margins. Women excluded from, unable to comply with, or resistant to, the stereotypical requirements of white, middle class, appropriately feminine, self-abnegating motherhood are more likely to be found to be legally “unfit.” Indigenous women, single mothers, and even working-class women have been excluded from the stereotype of the “good mother” and hegemonic understandings of motherhood (O’Reilly) in ways that render the construct of the “unfit mother” problematic as always already constructed in discriminatory, exclusionary, and oppressive ways.

Conclusion

In this chapter, I have looked critically at how popular and cultural understandings of the mother and mothering snow us into thinking traditional constructions and practices relating to motherhood are not oppressive, not unequally attainable, and that unpaid caregiving labour is not work. Our cultural discourses and logics foster this agnosis, a culturally produced ignorance about ongoing inequalities those identified as mothers face.

The construct of the “good mother” has tremendous social power in masking unpaid labour of many kinds—childcare, other caregiving, domestic work, and emotional labour. The construct of the “good mother” produces agnosis about the violence its socially mandatory requirements—do to the lives of actual women, children, and families. The construct induces culturally enforced ignorance (Barton and Davis 2018) about the nature of work and power relations in the private sphere. The notion of the “good mother” fosters agnosis about oppressive conditions that are unequally felt across race, socioeconomic status, and gender, and this agnosis can have criminal and other legal consequences.

I think I was named after Becky Thatcher because she was no shrinking violet; as far as female personae in nineteenth-century books written by men go, she was not a terribly conceived character. She was Tom Sawyer’s worthy adversary. Notably, she is absent from the fence painting episode, and she does not fall for Tom’s flippant engagement proposal. Consistently, Becky Thatcher didn’t get snowed. I find that hopeful. And, where the agnosis produced by cultural constructions of the “good” and “bad” mother and the hegemonic discourse of intensive motherhood is concerned, as well as the absence of unpaid labour from economic calculations, we don’t have to be. Snowed, I mean. As I look out the window of my house in this January COVID-19 lockdown, I write this hopefully. We don’t have to be endlessly snowed in, snowed under, rendered ignorant of, and complicit in, unequal relations of power and harm.

With the benefit of maternal feminist theory and the participation of women in large numbers in developing feminist literatures in fields such as economics, law, and business, the ignorance that has been made about the authentic struggles inherent in the lived experiences of those identified as mothers can be unmade. We can build a better social order that is fairer where parenting, childcare, and childbirth are concerned.

This chapter would be fundamentally incomplete if I didn’t also mention that I like snow. Living in Canada, having grown up on the prairies, I have ambivalent feelings about snow. Snow is a useful image to think about here because snow is complicated and tricky to understand with one word, and so is motherhood. People who live in snow-filled worlds understand its complexity. Mothers, like me, can and do often love our children without limit, although mothering is incredibly hard. They say that the Inuit have 50 words for snow, and this isn’t quite correct: there are multiple Inuit languages and they have differing lexicons (Robson 2012). However, in essence, it is true that Inuit groups have many ways to describe snow. Hundreds. Many more than 50 (ibid.).

There is a growing body of literature on maternal ambivalence (O’Reilly 2021) and snow is a useful metaphor there too. There is the snow you frolic in, skiing, tobogganing, skating. There is parental joy. There is so much love. There is fulfilment. There is the snow that is hard packed and forbidding and squeaks when you touch it, at −30 Celsius. There is choking, blizzarding snow. There is 2 AM colic and there are teenagers yelling at 2 AM fifteen years later that you are useless and they hate you. There is the crushing burden and insurmountable task of motherhood too. Mothering, and parenting, are challenging and complicated tasks. If through academic critique and collective action we are able to unmake our cultural ignorance about the intersections of parenthood and gender, if the Bad Mother label eventually loses its social, political, cultural, legal, and psychological power, we might find ourselves seeing that complexity more clearly, where neither the Bad Mother nor the Good Mother tropes structure the experiences of mothers and such labels are not applied to our lives. Instead, we might find humane recognition of the challenges of parenting, the need for social, political, and economic support of mothers, and a rejection of oppressive efforts to marginalize those mothers whose identities already are suspect in this often unkind and unequal world. We might find, in other words, a “mother” and a “parent” and a “father” without oppressive and judgemental modifiers or iconic statuses. I dream of, and work for, this social and political vision, for all the flawed mothers, like ourselves, who struggle for respect and support in the midst of this pandemic January’s punitive, surveilled, and ignored mothering world, under the snow.