On Maintenance and Momfluence

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There have been many attempts to imagine ways of organizing care beyond the family unit. In the nineteenth century, Charles Fourier drew up blueprints for “phalansteries,” self-contained communities of around a thousand people who would undertake all the necessary tasks (children would be looked after in the “noisy area,” next to the carpenters and blacksmiths). The architect Jane Sophia Appleton designed kitchenless cities where everyone would be provided with free cooked meals. A major leader of the Russian Revolution, Alexandra Kollontai, proposed the mass roll-out of cooperative childcare centers.

In more recent decades, Frances Gabe thought about how to build “self-cleaning” houses and Shulamith Firestone dreamed of the “rediffusion” of care responsibilities across the adult population. Participants at the National Conference of Third World Lesbians and Gays resolved to “abolish the family” and dismantle proprietary parenthood in the struggle toward children’s liberation. The more radical wing of the U.S.-based National Welfare Rights Organization insisted that low-income people should receive a “wage” based on need, not work, nor maternal “deserving.”

In her essay “The General Strike,” the Italian communist feminist Mariarosa Dalla Costa (a founding member of Wages for Housework) stated the matter bluntly: “There has never been a general strike.” Dalla Costa was not just talking about the usual dynamic whereby girlfriends, wives, mothers, daughters, and nieces supported and sustained unionized industrial action by workers of all genders. She was pointing out, at the same time, that every strike that has ever been organized in the domain of mothering has relied upon (or even provided its own) scabs, lest human beings die otherwise. Someone has got to feed and tend to the babies, the very elderly, and the sick. This is the problem of what is currently called femininity: Much of it is “love”—work that should be bargained with as gender-work yet cannot be refused as life-obligation.

In her 2018 book, Like a Mother: A Feminist Journey through the Science and Culture of Pregnancy, Angela Garbes drew attention to America’s relatively high maternal death rate: “I’m not trying to scare you unnecessarily. While death in pregnancy and childbirth is rare here, it is nowhere close to rare enough.” Every year, Garbes noted, between 700 and 900 Americans die in childbirth, while almost 65,000 experience near-fatal complications. “Even more alarming is the racial disparity within these deaths: Black mothers are three to four times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white mothers.”

Despite the prevalence of the phrase “empowered birth” in pregnancy discourse, “mothers and expectant mothers have far less power than we should.” In fact, she continued:

The vast majority of resources on pregnancy and motherhood direct our eyes and minds to issues that don’t actually matter in the grand scheme of things.

The problems we face are much bigger: a culture in which men hold nearly all of the legal and economic power; a society in which whiteness is considered the norm . . . an economic system that relies on, but does not adequately value, domestic work that is performed overwhelmingly by women (or, if you prefer: patriarchy, white supremacy and American capitalism). It’s not what many people want to hear, but it is our reality: there aren’t any easy answers to questions about pregnancy—they are all political.

Garbes didn’t explicitly question or criticize the nuclear family, the work society, the privatization of care or the sex distinction itself, as a 21st century Kollontai or Firestone might have done. Like a Mother was, after all, a pregnancy memoir. But she did inveigh against racist obstetric injustice, the paltriness of U.S. family leave, and institutional ignorance of the postpartum perineum.

Her 2022 book, Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change, in contrast, tells the story of her transformation during the pandemic from indignant pregnant woman to “sensual” and “financially privileged” mother of two. She wasn’t alone, she thinks, in learning to stop worrying and love reproductive labor in 2020. In lockdown, mothering became many people’s “most urgent and important work.”

She was surprised at how satisfying she found it: “Ever since . . . high school I’ve wondered what ‘real work’ is, and sensed that my understanding of it was out of step with the world. I never really wanted to be a professional; all I knew was that I wanted whatever I did to matter. I believe writing matters, of course, but nothing has ever felt more real to me than the work of caring.” This bravely points to the core of the feminism of Fourier (who invented the term feminism, as it happens). It expresses the feminism of all family-abolitionists worth their salt who came after him, too: namely, that it is precisely the valor, joy, and privilege of caring-labor that must be unleashed.

Unquestionably, mothering, writ large, is one of the most important, desire-satisfying labors there is. To quote the Marxist feminist theorist Emma Heaney, “To darn a sock is the highest calling.” That’s why, however, sock-darning’s true nature must be extracted from the prison of “housework,” via what Firestone would call the “rediffusion” of responsibility for it across the whole world, destroying its violent assignment to “women,” and working-class immigrant women in particular.

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Essential Labor touches on that last aspect, at least. Garbes gestures toward a critique of international markets’ reinventions of colonial, as well as gendered, patterns in the provision of care: Like millions of Filipinos, Garbes’ parents emigrated to the U.S. to work in healthcare. (Since 1960, more than 150,000 Filipino nurses have immigrated to the United States.) Unfortunately, Garbes ends up repeating her mother’s intense identification with the apparently transhistorical dignity of housework, swooning over its messy, intuitive, edifying beauty, without once contemplating the possibility or imperative of collective refusals à la Dalla Costa.

She praises a TED talk by Ai-jen Poo, president of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, in which Poo “encourages us to emulate the many domestic workers who ‘cross cultures and generations and borders and boundaries’ and whose jobs are to ‘love and they care and they show compassion no matter what.’” Femininity—no matter what!—is the dirtiest and most important work there is. Garbes’s own mother, Josefina, puts it like this: “You know the story of Mary Magdalene, who washed the feet of Jesus and dried them with her hair? I’m like her sister, Martha, the one who was so busy around the house and said: ‘Jesus, why don’t you stop talking and let Mary help me clean up?’ Well, I’m Martha. I’ll do the dishes. I’ve always been like this... Maintenance [is] the core. It’s everything.”

Garbes writes that when she asked her mother’s views on “maintenance” she was paying homage to the artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles, whose 1969 “Manifesto for Maintenance Art” reframed domestic work as art to draw attention to its low status. Josefina and Ukeles, Garbes implies, speak with one voice: Both women remind us that “those who mother are the sanitation workers of bodies—handling the refuse, the filth and putrescence, living in the stink.”

But Josefina’s views and Ukeles’ are not the same. For Ukeles, “maintenance art” was a utopian oxymoron: the point was to denaturalize care (“maintenance”), hopefully to overthrow the dichotomy between it and artistic production. Before writing her manifesto, Ukeles spent 11 months shadowing sanitation crews on 16-hour shifts; her exhibition involved cleaning the gallery itself. Under capital, she wrote, creativity is generally part of a “death instinct,” while reproduction is a “drag” that “takes all the fucking time” even as it represents “the life instinct.”

Garbes writes from the assumption that children belong to their one or two parent-authors who, regardless of sex or racial position, live in happy private nuclear units alongside other such families. The oppressive structures of patriarchy, white supremacy and American capitalism can be mitigated by acts of reciprocity between these units: “I want to give and receive, to always be swapping Tupperware and food, all of us crowded together like curvy lumpen mangoes in a baking dish.” Is neighborliness between middle-class couples really a vector of “social change”? (She also suggests making permanent the U.S. pandemic Child Tax Credit provision.)

In Essential Labor, the answer is yes. The clash between art and maintenance can be overcome even before the world shakes off capitalism: “I want more friends, more casual impromptu hangs, more dropping by with dinner, more walking and talking and advice sessions, more kids underfoot, more asking for and saying what we need, more hands to carry heavy boxes, more laughing and cackling and snorting, more children farting at the dinner table, more of what makes life messy, less painful, more sweet.” She wants, in short, more free time—and so do I. My name for that desire, though, is communism.

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Maternal memoirs aren’t a new genre, but publishers have tended to prefer certain representations of the experience (or “institution,” as Adrienne Rich called it). The feminist theorists Jennifer Nash and Samantha Pinto explain that the market-dominant version in recent decades has been the ambivalent “white, middle-class mother,” with her titillating, unthreatening articulation of dissent (titles include Motherhood: A Confession, Screaming on the Inside, and Send Me into the Woods Alone). On the other hand, insofar as the industry is even interested in non-tragic narratives about mothering as a person of color, the preference is for the celebratory and affirming: The Boy We Made by Taylor Harris, Mama Bear by Shirley Smith, Becoming by Michelle Obama, and, in 2022, Essential Labor.

The more established nonwhite Western mother memoir deals, as one might expect, with state violence against Black children (especially boys). To quote Nash and Pinto, the Black maternal bereavement memoir is the “photo negative” of the ambivalent white momming memoir, in which the loss is “of autonomy, of erotic selfhood, of time, of boundaries between self and other.” Anguished Black Lives Mamas are acceptable to the culture when they offer words of healing and promote interdependence, sociality, and the transformative labor of Black mothering.

“Is there space for maternal unhappiness in the black feminist theoretical maternal archive?” Nash asks in her essay, “The Political Life of Black Motherhood.” Is there space for “accounts of motherhood that find mothering profoundly unradical, perhaps even tedious, exhausting or upsetting?”

Garbes—like many advocates within the new “care” turn—seems convinced that mothering’s progressive character is assured. Organized political activity and redistributive policies aren’t, then, absolutely required. “As much as some of us might hope to burn down the capitalist system . . . we don’t need to wait for revolution to incorporate principles of abundance into our lives,” she writes:

Dropping food off for friends, watching someone’s kid for a few hours, trading some light finish carpentry for an hour of massage, growing herbs on your windowsill or vegetables in your garden. This is caretaking and it is labor . . . if we changed our relationship to it—even ever so slightly—yes, our finances might contract, but our emotional lives might expand in ways we can’t yet measure or know.

While Garbes isn’t literally selling anything, the voluntaristic wholesomeness of the above passage is not entirely un-reminiscent of some of the communitarian fantasies one sometimes finds among online momfluencers, in particular in the mix of #tradlife, a usually alt-right—also hippie-adjacent—aesthetic trend on social media, starring neo-pioneer “tradwives” going “back to the land.” Nor is the support Garbes’ windowsill herbs receive from a figurative “man behind the curtain” all that different from the smoke-and-mirrors economics of tradwifery.

As Gaby del Valle points out in her dissection of Ballerina Farm—the farm-cum-momfluencerdom-empire of a Mormon mother of eight and ex-dancer named Hannah Neeleman, who has 10 million Instagram followers—the bread-baking existence of “simplicity and frugality” that Neeleman broadcasts on social media would be impossible in the absence of her husband’s “airline millions,” which go unmentioned in the feed. Garbes, despite talking about the shrinking bank-balance associated with the good life, seems to be ultimately in a similar boat: “I don’t like the very gendered fact that I am dependent on my white husband’s salary.” Oh.

This excerpt, adapted from Femmephilia: Love Letters to Trans Mermaids, Queer Mothers, and Marilyn Monroe by Sophie Lewis (Haymarket Books, 2026), appears by permission of the publisher.