As the right embraces “AWFUL” as a new slur, outspoken moms are emerging as its most threatening, and targeted, group.
This story was originally published on The Contrarian.
Last week, my column explored the misogyny directly heaped on Renee Nicole Good—the Minneapolis resident, wife and mother shot and killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent—and highlighted the anti-woman actions taken by immigration enforcement agents over the past year.
Since then, the right wing manosphere has quickly absorbed the lexicon of AWFUL: “Affluent White Female Urban Liberals.” Move over childless cat ladies, there is a new broad in town. The movement hell-bent on extolling the virtues of tradwife life has now set its sights on “organized gangs of wine moms us[ing] Antifa tactics to harass and impede” ICE, according to the talking heads at Fox News.
Sigh, MAGA. There you go again, mangling the plotline. Don’t you know? Motherhood has always been political, embedded in acts of resistance, from Reconstruction to women’s suffrage through the rise of the Civil Rights Movement. In the United States and around the world, mothers have organized, stood their ground and placed their bodies on the line for time immemorial.
Last week, as the nation debated what kinds of women rise up, civil rights activist Claudette Colvin died at age 86. Arrested in 1955 at age 15 for refusing to give up her seat on a segregated Alabama bus, nine months before Rosa Parks did the same, young Colvin’s public persona was ahead of her time. Reportedly, national leaders had hoped she might be a fresh face for the movement, but ultimately worried she was, well, too wine mom. She had a baby at 16 and, according to the Smithsonian magazine, “words like ‘mouthy,’ ‘emotional’ and ‘feisty’ were used to describe her.”
The century roared on, and so did activist mothers. Girls Who Code and Moms First founder Reshma Saujani recently posted a video highlighting an array of groups that have shaken the status quo with mom-centric organizing—from Mothers Against Drunk Driving, which dominated in the 1980s (ask a suburban Gen X-er about smashed up cars at high school sporting events, talk about scared straight), to Moms Demand Action, the largest nationwide grassroots network formed to take on gun safety in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook school massacre in 2012.
The accusation that some mothers serve the nation (The Contrarian reported last year on the Trump administration’s Nazi-esque consideration of medals for women with at least six children) and others are anathema to its safety and stability is not just inaccurate: It is a deliberate strategy of the authoritarian.
Of course, what Republicans really want is a world in which women—wives, moms, childless cat ladies, even menopausal grandmas—have no public voice at all. They know that women register to vote and cast ballots at higher rates than men, and that Black women show up at the polls and support voter mobilization efforts in even greater numbers.
Just this week, Republicans in the House and the Senate resurrected the notorious Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act which passed the House in 2025 but stalled in the Senate. Among its provisions, it would make it harder for anyone who changed her name, including many married women, to register to vote. Think that is an oversight? Ask Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who reposted a video of pastors calling for repeal of the 19th Amendment and patriarchal household-style voting.
Moms’ public outrage has every reason to scare Republicans. Empirically, women’s role in protest is a direct avenue to more robust democracy. Harvard Kennedy School Professor Erica Chenoweth wrote a two-part series for Foreign Affairs and Ms. magazine, “The Patriarchs’ War on Women,” making the case that 20th-century mass movements demanding independence and democracy “were more successful at achieving their aims when women participated in larger numbers at the front lines. From the Philippines to Brazil, from Tunisia to Argentina, from Chile to Sudan, ‘people power’ movements were more likely to usher in sustained democratization when at least 25 percent of their participants were women.”
The fate of women’s rights is inextricably tied to the future of democracy. As it turns out, when moms—and all women—mobilize, we are best-suited to help achieve both.
In her recent viral New York Times column, “The Right Is Furious with Liberal White Women,” Michelle Goldberg wrote, “I have more ICE whistles in my house than I can count, because my neighbors are constantly handing them out, most recently at my daughter’s dance recital. Similar bourgeois mobilizations are happening all over the country.”
But what is happening right now appears to be far more palpable.
Rather, I think this Minneapolis mom better nails it:
“Women have always been told the same thing, especially moms. ‘Stay home, be polite, don’t get involved, don’t ask questions, be pretty and don’t pay attention.’… Here’s the problem with that. Mothers do notice. We notice when our neighbors are afraid to leave their homes. We notice when our schools and daycares are asking for ICE protocols. And boy do we notice when real families are being impacted while the rest of the world looks past it.”
Which brings us back to Claudette Colvin. Before her death, she told reporters that her activism and her ability to claim her seat on the bus felt like “Harriet Tubman’s hands pushing me down on one shoulder and Sojourner Truth’s hands pushing me down on the other shoulder—saying, ‘Sit down, girl!’”
Let us all now stand up in her image and honor. Brave women, bold mothers, wine and all, are truly our nation’s institutional spine and moral backbone. We drink at dusk and ride at dawn!
