Our third print issue is out soon. Subscribe today to get your copy in the mail, or for digital access.
Editorial
Editorial Introduction: Mother's Little Helpers
Features
The Left Should Leave Daycare Advocacy to the Libs
The insistence on "affordable daycare" as a viable solution to the problem of childcare reveals a consistent devaluation of gendered labor. It might also negatively impact children themselves.
Witches, Midwives, and Nurses, 50 Years On
In their groundbreaking pamphlet, Witches, Midwives, and Nurses, Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English railed against a medical system that suppressed and sidelined women. Some fifty years later, the radical anti-authoritarianism that guided the women's health activism of a previous era is increasingly powerless against&emdash;and sometimes even an accelerant for&emdash;the ongoing commodification of healthcare.
In Pursuit of the Family
Some of our biggest social crises could be solved by a major investment in one of the smallest social institutions.
Trad Mad
Meet the Uberwench, the Hot Chick, and the Troll, just three of the lovely ladies from the online world of trad wives. Beyond the grifts and lifestyle porn, there is an objective truth to trad, perverted through the algorithm though it may be: most women want meaningful work, family, and a home.
Lists
Our Top Ten Movie Moms
We love our moms, and we love our movies. It's Damage's top ten movie moms. (Plus one because Almodóvar loves his moms, and plus another because RIP Shelley Duvall.)
Essays
Frozen Freedom
Artificial Reproductive Technologies like egg freezing are on the rise. For the professional-managerial class women who can afford them, they provide an uneasy freedom that stimulates ambivalence about motherhood, paralysis about mating, and compulsion around costly procedures.
Dog Moms
Today, pets are superseding children and replacing human partners. It goes without saying that men are dogs, but what does it mean that dogs are now men?
Mothers Don't Grow on Trees
A popular book about "Mother Trees" cloaks its misleading claims in the beloved metaphor of motherhood. But as the need for public trust in ecological science increases, we can ill afford to substitute moralistic storytelling for the scientific method.
The Guardian That Never Sleeps
For almost ninety years mass anxieties about kidnapping and child abuse have driven the development of surveillance technologies focused on seeing and hearing children. How might these technologies impact the relationships between mothers and children?
The Paranoid Style of Motherhood
Child abuse conspiracies are rife at present, but they predate QAnon, and they even go much further back than the conspiracizing that gave rise to QAnon.
Working Mother
The radical pamphleteer Susannah Wright does not fit neatly into the contemporary feminist imaginary. She is a woman these feminists would like to forget: a woman who understood her class allegiances and fought for the universalism of an objective, shared reality.