How Motherhood Was Established 'to Keep Us Powerless' — and How Moms Can Change That

If you’ve been following along with the fight for childcare in America for a while now, you’ll be familiar with Reshma Saujani — the activist who famously stumped Trump back in 2024 when she had the chance to ask him about advancing legislation to make childcare affordable. His fumbling non-answer went viral.

“Their team knew that he was going to get asked a question about childcare, and I think it showed the lack of respect to moms and around the issue, that he couldn’t even prepare a coherent response,” says the founder and CEO of Moms First, which fights for paid leave and affordable childcare.

She’s also the executive producer of the new documentary No Country for Mothers which, after a three-year effort, is in the midst of a national screening tour.

“I think that the point of this film is to really show the administration exactly what American families are living through, and that he’s wrong about what it is that they want,” she says, referring to a more recent Trump comment about how it’s more important to fund the military.

“They don’t want foreign wars, they want childcare,” Saujani says, “and I do think that politicians are going to pay the price in the ballot box in the midterms.”

The multi-hyphenate — Saujani’s a lawyer, best-selling author, one-time Congressional candidate, founder of Girls Who Code, and mom of two sons — started the grassroots Moms First movement in response to the pandemic’s disproportionate effect on American mothers, including herself. The film, a three-year effort which follows her around the country as she gets other mothers’ stories, is an extension of that — especially as it makes its way around the country for public screenings that started in New York City and continue through cities across the country this summer.

Part of what the doc examines is the way our country does not honor motherhood — something made clear through the systems we create and who we prioritize, which Reshma believes is a problem of design.

“The way motherhood was established is structured, in many ways, to keep us powerless,” she says. “The basic example I always give is, like, why does the workday end at 6 and school pickups at 3:30? Why do we know that childcare has been broken since the inception of when women started working, but we just refused to fix it?”

It’s all why she felt the film was so important to make — to show that “our division and our distraction, which is intentional,” is preventing moms from getting the structural changes we need.

“Because I do believe that we are more powerful than we know, and I think they [the powers that be] know that, which is why we keep introducing culture wars, because our division is a necessary requirement for oppression,” says Saujani.

She points to all the binaries that divide moms and cause in-fighting, which weakens collective power.

“You either breastfeed or you don’t breastfeed. You vaccinate or you don’t vaccinate. You’re a MAHA mom, you’re not a MAHA mom. You’re a boy mom, you’re a girl mom. I think the binary is important in order to maintain a division,” she says. “‘I’m only going to give you two options, and you’ve got to pick a side.’ When the reality is, is most of the time, for most things, most moms are kind of in the middle.”

It’s why Saujani stresses the importance of finding common ground.

“I think that’s why we made this film, by showing that we all kind of want the same things,” and by showing how “judged” every mother in the film felt, whether they are career women, dedicated stay-at-home-moms, or somewhere in between. The power, she says, comes from recognizing that we all face the same battles.

“That’s why the way that we’re distributing this film is very intentional,” she says. “We haven’t sold it to a streamer so you can watch it on Netflix by yourself. We, we want you to watch it in community.” And preferably, she stresses, by watching it with someone who you may have judged in the past, or who you think differently from when it comes to many of these issues.

Because the idea that community is “recognizing there’s more that unites us than divides us” may seem “very trite,” she says. But it also happens to be true — especially for moms. It’s something Saujani believes is evident anytime we are having a rough day with our kid and look another mother in the eye, recognizing that she’s had a tough time, too.

“It doesn’t matter who she voted for or who she prays to you,” she says. “There’s just a common sense of identity that I think is very unifying.”

It’s why, Saujani says, we are “so close” to getting the childcare issue resolved, especially when looking at the positive steps taken in New York, New Mexico, Vermont, and Kentucky.

“I think Moms First has had a relentless communications campaign over the past three four years that childcare is the linchpin of affordability — you know, when 55% of parents are going into debt because of the cost of childcare and are literally one bad day away from financial ruin,” she says, and feels confident that people finally understand that this “isn’t a personal problem,” but a structural, economic, and policy-based one.

“So, I think the movement is just getting bigger,” Saujani says. “I think this film shows what’s possible when we come together, that we can win these big things