Many social justice organizations continue to presume that a child-free, unencumbered activist is the default--and perhaps the ideal. It's why no one bats an eye when meetings last five hours, protests are dangerous, and spaces are hostile to children. You can't have a diverse, intersectional organization that excludes mothers. Exclusionary practices hurt marginalized mothers, particularly poor ones, the hardest.
Eighty-one percent of women eventually become mothers. So as I've repeatedly hammered in this blog, if you care about women, you need to care about mothers. Most social justice organizations don't intentionally exclude mothers. But as any caring activists should know, if you're not being intentionally inclusive, you're keeping people out.
Addressing the many unintentional ways social justice organizations exclude mothers makes activism accessible to a much broader coalition. That means more effective movements and more rapid change.
