The Global Motherhood Report Card, Revisited

Save_the_Children,_Westport,_CT,_USA_2012

A few days ago, I received an urgent email from Senator Gillibrand. Okay, maybe it wasn’t actually from the personal email of Kirsten Gillibrand and maybe it wasn’t any more urgent than her other emails about legislation, newsworthy topics, or appeals for support to her PAC. But, nevertheless, this subject line came across my inbox from her Gillibrand for Senate people:

“This made my jaw drop.”

I opened the email to find out what could be making Senator Gillibrand’s jaw drop. It turns out that it was a statistic taken from the NGO Save the Children’s annual report on the status of motherhood, “State of the World’s Mother Report 2015”, a subject that I had posted on a few months back. The report uses a number of indicators to determine the best/worst places in the world to be a mother. As it was when I last posted on the matter, city slums are the worst geographic locations to mother children in the world. Poor sanitation, malnutrition, disease, and overcrowding are contributing factors to the high incidence of maternal and child deaths in impoverished urban areas. Something worth mentioning has changed since my last post on the report, however: in 2014, the US was ranked just 31st in a list of the best and worst countries to be a mother in, down from 6 in 2006. Now, in 2015, we are even lower, having dropped to number 33. This is what has Senator Gillibrand’s jaw dropping.

The Washington Post took the data from the report and visually mapped it out, available here, showing the best and worst places to be a mother around the globe. At number 33, we’re still among the better countries, but it’s certainly not anything to brag about. Perhaps the reason The Washington Post has taken notice of this report is because it points out that among capital cities in richer countries, Washington, DC has the highest infant mortality rate. The infant mortality rate in this city is an average of 7.9 babies for every 1,000 live births. The averages in cities like Oslo or Sweden (ranked 1st and 5th, respectively, in the report) are around 2.0 babies per every 1,000 births. The report attributes this to the huge gap between rich and poor in DC. Life expectancy overall differs greatly between the city’s richest and poorest populations.

The report uses cities like Phnom Penh in Cambodia as case studies for how they have drastically cut down their infant mortality rates. According to Save the Children, promoting skilled birth attendance, incentivizing training for midwives, and more widespread communication pathways to spread public health messages have contributed to the decrease in infant mortality rates. However, applying this model won’t offer the same solutions to the US, so how can we better support mothers in our nation? Cue Kirsten Gillibrand.

Following her email’s line about jaws dropping was a plea to support a number of female candidates currently running for office, with the hope that electing female representatives will bring about better conditions for mothers in our country. The five indicators used by the State of the World’s Mother report to determine ranking are maternal health, children’s well-being, educational status, economic status, and political status. As part of the political status factor is measured by women’s participation in politics, Senator Gillibrand sees a unique opportunity in turning our less than sterling rank around. She believes (as do I) that the more women we elect to office, the more likely we will see laws codified that support mothers and close the poverty gap in our country – things like higher minimum wage, paid medical leave for mothers, better reproductive care, and expanded access to affordable child care and universal pre-K.

But don’t just trust Save the Children, Senator Gillibrand, or me. As with anything, find out more for yourself. Read the full report here: http://www.savethechildren.org/atf/cf/%7B9def2ebe-10ae-432c-9bd0-df91d2eba74a%7D/SOWM_2015.PDF Check out what politicians are saying about maternal health and women’s rights. Follow the status of the Millennium Development Goals put out by the UN: http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/ And be sure to tell us what you think!

Written by: Jenny Nigro, MoM Online Intern

Mom is a Dirty Word – Needs Our Support [CLICK]

Mom_Is_A_Dirty_WordDocumentary Explores “Motherism” and Anti-Family American Public Policy, Kicks off Indiegogo Campaign Drive
Gettysburg, PA — June 1, 2015— Feature documentary “Mom Is a Dirty Word” explores how the media, pop-culture, and lack of family-friendly public policy make being a mom in the United States more difficult than ever. Through interviews with experts, moms, and dads, the documentary explores why the “Mother Ideal” of the 1950s hasn’t changed despite the fact that most families must now survive on dual-incomes.

“Mom is a Dirty Word” is the cinematic vision of director Samantha Rife. A wife and Mom of two, Ms. Rife has conducted interviews with experts and caregivers for the last year, raising questions women often consider privately, but rarely ask out loud. Ms. Rife’s questions to her interview subjects include: “Do Mothers sacrifice their identity for their children? Is this their choice, and if so, must Fathers make this choice as well?” And, “Why is the United States the only industrialized nation not to guarantee paid maternal and parental leave?”

“Mom is a Dirty Word” investigates the gender bias of caregivers that has been perpetuated for decades. Explains Ms. Rife, “Much has changed since ‘Leave it to Beaver.’ In the 1960s, only 20% of women worked outside the home. Today, mothers are either the sole or primary source of income in over 40% of households with children under 18. Yet our media, pop-culture, and public policy reflect just the opposite. Even today, the “Ideal Mother” is a loving, unassuming housewife while the “Ideal Father” is the primary breadwinner. No wonder mothers feel like they’re being pulled in all directions.”

The feature documentary, now in the final stages of production, follows the various family-friendly public policies enacted in other democracies around the world; from paid parental leave, paid sick leave, to subsidized day-care, in stark contrast to the United States government that mandates none of the above. “Paid-family leave for parents, as well as paid sick leave is what both solo-parents and dual- income families require today,” says Ms. Rife. “We need public policy, not only to ensure parents can provide the care and support children need to thrive, but to provide policies that protect all families – from parents caring for special needs children to adults caring for their aging parents.”

“Mom is a Dirty Word” is seeking funding to film the final interviews this summer, 2015 and for editing and post-production for fall 2015. “Everyone is impacted by gender discrimination, bias at the workplace, or lack of family-friendly public policy.” Ms. Rife hopes anyone who is a mother or loves a mother will support the film. “Most people are surprised to learn that among democratic nations, the United States fails in almost every measure to support moms. And when you fail to support moms, you fail to support children, families, communities, and the economy. Moms need more support – and it’s going to take a lot more than a Mother’s Day Hallmark card. An investment in this film will make a difference.”
An IndieGoGo campaign will launch on June 1st to raise funds to wrap filming and fund editing and post production.
To fund the “Mom is a Dirty Word” Indiegogo campign, please visit: http://igg.me/at/momdirtyword

Find us at: http://www.momisadirtyword.com/
Follow us on: twitter @MomIsADirtyWord
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/momisadirtyword
Or Tumblr: http://momisadirtyword.tumblr.com/

About Samantha Rife:
Producer, Samantha Rife, has been on both sides of the net. While 8 months pregnant, Ms. Rife was laid off from her full-time employer. Since then, Rife has given birth to two children – and has negotiated between; SAHM to part-timer, to full-timer, and entrepreneur, while caring for her husband and brood.
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If you’d like more information about the “Mom Is a Dirty Word” Documentary Project, or would like to be interviewed for an opportunity for your story to be included in “Mom is a Dirty Word” documentary, email the director, Samantha Rife at momisadirtyword@yahoo.com.

M.A.M.A. & The Art of Motherhood [CLICK]

The Museum of Motherhood and the ProCreate Project are pleased to announce the launch of a new monthly international
exchange of ideas and art. M.A.M.A. will celebrate the notion of being “pregnant with ideas” in new ways. This scholarly discourse intersects with the artistic to explore the wonder and the challenges of motherhood. Using words and art to connect new pathways between the academic, the para-academic, the digital, and the real, as well as the everyday: wherever you live, work, and play, the Art of Motherhood is made manifest. #JoinMAMA

Gravidus for MOM
GRAVIDUS is a series of works instigated during the artist’s recent pregnancy whilst completing her MA in Art & Design at the School of Art in Birmingham. Inspired by the mould-making process, these works indirectly reference the changing bodily state during pregnancy.

The focus on process and manufacture plays a significant role in both the production of the work and its inherent meaning. Moulds contain both positive and negative forms within a singular, symbiotic unit; as objects of function, they are often overlooked and discarded during the casting process.

In GRAVIDUS I and II, the ‘mould’ captures the action of making within its internal space; whilst its large, solid outer form becomes an almost defensive structure. As the artist’s pregnancy progressed, the work changed in proportion, scale and use of material so that it references rather than simply depicts a stage in the mould-making process. By removing them from a purely functional role, the ‘mould’ is now elevated to the status of the casts they would once create. Utilising plaster and concrete as the main sculptural materials and wood and steel for the work’s display reflects their traditional and continuous usage within construction, architecture and sculpture due to their physical properties of solidity and resilience.

In GRAVIDUS, this enduring presence symbolises the universality of pregnancy, whilst the material strength reflects the personal feelings surrounding the relationship of female artists and the changing roles they come to inhabit.

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Please go directly to the Procreate Project for more about the art of Claire Hickey and to celebrate this new international exchange between M.O.M. and the Procreate Project. Go to our M.A.M.A. link to read the featured article each month.

Mad Men and The Way We Never Were

By, Jenny Nigro – M.O.M. Social Media Blogger

I took a trip over Mother’s Day weekend that wound up being extended by a day and a half due to severe weather over Texas. Traveling with my mom, we took a risk and decided to road trip to an airport in a city 8 hours away and hopped a red eye from there. In all the extra traveling, I missed watching the penultimate episode of Mad Men with the rest of America. My sister, with whom I spend about 80% of our frequent phone conversations dissecting the show, sent me a single text message after she watched.

Jen…MAD MEN.

Devoid of the emoji content that is typical of our text conversations, I knew that this was even worse than if she had sent me something like “Jen…MAD MEN” (sad face emoji, crying face emoji, Munch’s “Scream” emoji). When I finally was able to catch up, I sent her what I feel was an equally as expressive text.

BETTY.

(This is as good a time as ever to mention **spoiler alert**).

With all the winding down of characters’ arcs and simultaneous chaos erupting in Don’s life, it may be surprising to other fans of the show that I pinpointed Betty’s story as the one I felt saddest about. Or not? Betty has always been one of my favorite characters. In season one, she was practically a teenager, in both body and mind. For a mother to two young kids, housewife to a detached husband, and daughter to a newly deceased mother, the plea for retrospective bad behavior, “I didn’t have a roadmap” would be an understatement. We saw “the problem that has no name” rear its ugly head, which found her on her back at a psychiatrist’s office, only to have her confidences devastatingly betrayed there. In later seasons, it seemed like her naivety was transformed into shrewd coldness…directed mostly at her children. I remember reading an interview with January Jones, the actress who played Betty, in which she said that in the first season, viewers judged Betty for her unwillingness to do anything in response to her husband’s affair; in subsequent seasons, viewers turned on her for doing too much. Ice queen that she was, I still adored her. Naturally, my heart was broken when I watched the second-to-last episode of the series.

A show that normally draws a lot of hype, there was even more buzz in the air as the second half of the last season drew to a close. The Atlantic  blog posts an analysis of the show after each week’s episode. Countless bloggers threw in their own two cents about “the end of an era.” Perhaps the most poignant response to the gut-wrenching fate of Betty, however, was this Buzzfeed article entitled “In Praise of Betty Draper, Difficult Woman.”

January Jones as Betty in Mad Men
January Jones as Betty in Mad Men

I have to say, I was crying for Betty (and maybe myself) even before the reveal of the contents of the letter she wrote to her daughter, Sally, to be read the minute she passed. But the tears that came with Sally’s reading of the letter weren’t from disappointment in what some would see as Betty’s sloppy farewell to her teenage daughter, but rather, a deep reverence for the genuineness of her character. In processing a fatal illness in my own family, my sister offered my mom some insight to assist in her understanding of it: we assume (from TV and books, mostly) that people will experience tremendous transformations on their deathbeds and suddenly become the people we had always hoped they would. But in reality, when faced with their own mortality, people just become a deeper version of whoever they had been in life. In death, there’s regret, there’s pain, there’s urgency, but most of all, fear, so human nature causes us to retreat further into ourselves. This is what we see Betty do when she wastes crucial departing words bestowed upon her daughter by detailing the precise instructions for her internment. As the article points out, “She’s not terrified of dying, but of being presented, in death, in a way that betrays the image of precise propriety she’d spent years cultivating. That image, after all, is her life’s greatest work.” The fact that we see the Mad Men writers recognize this makes the experience of watching it that much richer.

Like the article suggests, Betty was a difficult woman. But it’s no wonder that she didn’t have a road map or more sentimental words to offer her daughter upon her death…because the root of that image of motherhood is a mirage when we look at it closer. In her book, The Way We Never Were, Stephanie Coontz discusses the myth of the 1950s family, derived from rigid gender roles imposed on Victorian America in the advent of capitalism. In pre-capitalist societies, people functioned interdependently with one another in communities. Love was not expressed or understood as occurring between two individuals. Notions of mothers as the sole purveyors of care and nurturance in the family were the effect of the rise of individualism that came with laissez faire economics. Men took on roles of self-reliance and independence in business, and women were expected to carry the torches of dependence and obligation in the home. As men contended with competition on the battlefield and in the office, women had to do their part by being June Cleaver in the home. Images of this type of social relation were created and treated as the natural order (by people like Don Draper, no less).

I’m fairly positive that my mother would watch that episode of Mad Men and see bits of herself and her mother in Betty. Henry Francis may have called it luck, but Betty’s knowledge of when to give up is a rare gift. She acknowledges that it has served her well before; just think of her marriage to Don. Sally’s fictional later-in-life therapist may say otherwise, but to me, Betty was no monster; she was the victim of an unseen social construct that has caused so many other women to feel similarly angry and powerless.  

After the series finale, January Jones posted a photo of Betty to her Instagram with the caption: “Please remember her like this. Strong. Proud. And afraid. She is everything I wish I could be.” I didn’t think it was possible to love the actress more, but my heart swelled in seeing the post. It was, after all, my all-time favorite still from my all-time favorite episode. It’s the episode where Don is courted by the bigwigs at a larger firm, who flatter Betty with the prospect of modeling in a Coca-Cola ad to lure her husband in. Betty goes through the trouble of getting her hopes up about re-igniting her modeling career, only to be told that the casting director decided to take the shoot in a different direction. Though Don knows the truth, he feigns surprise at Betty’s declared decision to remain a housewife. There is a rare moment of tenderness in the conversation in which Don compliments Betty’s parenting, likening her to an angel and lamenting the fact that he did not have a mother like her. Boosted by this overture, Betty goes out to the front yard in her nightgown the following morning, cigarette in mouth, and takes to the neighbor’s carrier pigeons with a BB gun – a stunt intended to send a message to the sour old man: don’t mess with my family.

So I hope that I have done right by January Jones. I hope that I have remembered this poor, beautiful, scared, strong, and proud creature in a way that the person who brought her to life would approve. As my sister comforted me when I broke down and told her that I’m not ready to let go of Betty, it’s okay to grieve fictitious characters. After all, it is the way we relate to their stories that makes it feel so real to us.

And of course, I’ll always have Netflix…and January Jones’ Instagram.