There is plenty in this world to feel enraged about, from the looming climate catastrophe and pernicious social inequality, to smaller things like littering and sloppy grammar. If you happen to be a mum, you can likely add to that list some very specific gripes, including the corporatisation of childhood (the empire that is Peppa Pig—don’t get me started), the endless wiping, dabbing and mopping, and, of course, “momikers,” the cutesy names society generates for us: yummy mummy, wine mom, mumtrepreneur.
Fittingly, the latest addition is “rage mom.” Its Americanised spelling flags its provenance but its transatlantic resonance has seen the term embraced by everyone from Telegraph columnists to Patty Murray, the highest-ranking woman in the US Senate, who may, she concedes, be more of a “rage nana.”
The rage mom, we’re to believe, is a political force to be reckoned with. Her fury has built over a turbulent summer stateside, just in time for the presidential election. She has had it up to here with months of shouldering homeschooling along with her customary burdens: the bulk of both the household chores and the childcare, all while trying to hang on to her paid job. Now that schools have reopened, she’s spending her newfound downtime waving Pinterest-worthy placards at protests and posting about social injustice on Facebook.
Most of us could probably use the energy boost of some rallying slogans at this point. But the odd thing with this movement’s members is the way they have willingly “mommified” themselves. The idea that mums might have election-turning clout is not new; but it used to be the spin doctors rather than the mums themselves who embraced the labels. In New Labour’s heyday, Tony Blair’s strategists dreamt up “Worcester woman,” an archetypal middle England 30-something mother-of-two, while George W Bush appealed to “security moms” in his post-9/11 re-election campaign. Rage mom isn’t even alone in the 2020 campaign: Joe Biden’s digital director seeks to target “suburban Facebook empathy moms.” What’s irksome is that, once elected, politicians have a habit of ignoring the policy areas that have left these mums incandescent with ire to start with, siloing off childcare, education and equal pay as “women’s issues.”
Underpinning these political momiker memes is the patronising assumption that mums are not, by and large, political. In reality, maternal activism has a long and charged history. Let’s not forget the mothers who joined the peace camp at Greenham Common. Mothers in India were also pivotal in the fight for justice following the 1984 Bhopal gas disaster, while Las Madres (Mothers) de Plaza de Mayo advocated for the “disappeared” children in Argentina during the nation’s Dirty War in the late 1970s, and the Mother’s Front was founded by Tamil mothers in the nineties during Sri Lanka’s civil war. Today, Moms Demand Action advocates for gun control in the US.
Motherhood really is motivating for activism. Whether it’s the environment or poverty, there’s nothing like having a child to give you skin in the game, and as anyone who’s ever given birth knows, it unleashes almighty emotions. Maternity gives women a certain moral authority that society remains troublingly reluctant to attribute to their childless sisters. Female rage is acceptable so long as it’s mum rage. (Think how differently “rage feminist” strikes the ear.)
Paradoxically, so many of these mum archetypes derive their momentum from lingering taboos—mums aren’t meant to sip a glass of chardonnay while still on shift (and when is a mother ever not?), or to give in to righteous fury. Maybe that’s why so many mothers embrace these nicknames: they take a swing at the sentimentality and idealism that still clings to child rearing.
Or at least, some mums do. I’ve always viewed those exclusive mum-only cliques who’d hog the pavement, three prams abreast, with mild horror (which didn’t change when I acquired a pram of my own). And as a single mother by choice, these momikers don’t fit my experience. Instead, they seem to refer overwhelmingly to one type of mother—married, comfortably off, suburban. With her affinity to the Black Lives Matter movement, the rage mum may see herself as being more inclusive than her predecessors, but there’s still something narrowing (not to mention grating) about so cheerfully pigeonholing your own politics on the basis of gender and procreation.
Ultimately, these matricentric monikers are bound to belittle. To appreciate the true potency of maternal wrath, we’d do better to look back to the original “rage moms”: goddesses like Durga and Demeter whose power was mighty; they didn’t need a “Wonder Mom” T-shirt to feel licensed to use it.
