Photograph from Manual training: Play Problems for Boys and Girls (1917) | William S. Marten / The Macmillan Company / PD US
At a political moment in which the far right sounds alarms about falling birthrates, blaming everything from feminism to oat milk for what they see as a civilizational decline, and the left wing focuses on defending the individual’s right to choose, it’s imperative to understand that the act of parenting (and caregiving more generally) is not just a private matter, but a radical opportunity to challenge the systems that benefit from isolation and invisibility. Care, when made communal, teaches us how to live differently and how to demand differently.
We didn’t evolve to parent in silos. We evolved to care in networks. And when care is made visible, shared, and taken seriously, it becomes more than just a moral good. It becomes a force of resistance. In other words, sharing care doesn’t just help individuals—it redistributes power.
To mother in defiance of the status quo is to reject the idea that love should replace structural support. It’s not just about tending and nurturing; it’s about naming care as labor, and insisting it be valued, distributed, and defended. To mother, whether one has given birth or not, is to insist that care work must be seen, supported and shared. It’s to reclaim caregiving as a collective responsibility—and a tool for structural change. It’s to recognize that a better world might just begin in the way we care for one another.
In the 1970s, scholar Nancy Chodorow argued that mothering isn’t wired into our biology; it’s a set of patterns, learned and passed on, generation to generation. That idea cracks open the door to change. If care is socially and psychically reproduced, then it can also be reshaped. It’s a living practice. And it can be restructured, radically, through shared intention.
Chodorow reminds us that children come to understand who mothers, and how, through the repetition of daily interactions. These interactions carry meaning, forming blueprints for future relationships. And if the culture we’re transmitting is one of isolation, burnout, and inequity, then we are overdue for a different model.
Sara Ruddick, in her groundbreaking Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace (1989), identified three core aims of caregiving: preserving life, fostering growth, and introducing children to the world. To meet those aims requires not just effort but a particular way of thinking, a discipline shaped by presence, responsiveness, and nonviolence. Ruddick’s vision isn’t about gender: Caregiving is not something only mothers do, or something all mothers do. It’s about how we relate to one another.
But caregiving, done with intention, has the power to cultivate a profoundly different ethic than the one that undergirds our current systems of extraction and punishment.
This form of maternal thinking, a practiced attention to vulnerability, connection, and growth, offers a political alternative to a world built on domination and profit. But its transformative potential is only fully realized when care is shared: when it becomes the foundation for collective, not individual, survival. When caregiving becomes a public, communal responsibility, it challenges the systems that exploit private suffering and call it strength.
And as evolutionary anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy has shown, shared caregiving (what she calls cooperative breeding) is hardly new: Human infants, utterly dependent beings, benefit from the involvement of grandparents, aunties, neighbors, older siblings. Building on this, Peggy O’Donnell Heffington’s recent book Without Children: The Long History of Not Being a Mother (2023),underscores that across cultures and across time, people without children of their own (often called “childless”) have always played essential roles in sustaining families.
Collective caregiving isn’t a utopian dream. It’s how humans have survived.
When we bring together the threads of Chodorow’s psychoanalysis, Ruddick’s ethics, and Hrdy’s biology, we see a common lesson: Care doesn’t have to be hidden, unpaid, or gendered.
The privatization of parenting in modern industrialized societies is a blip on the evolutionary timeline. But you wouldn’t know it from our policies or cultural scripts. Today, parenting is a high-stakes, high-cost endeavor, made harder by vanishing public services, unaffordable childcare, and the impossible demands of “intensive parenting.” These conditions aren’t just exhausting. They’re dangerous. They’re helping to drive a quiet crisis: rising maternal burnout, worsening mental health, and growing ambivalence about having children at all.
This is not a personal problem. It’s a system failure that asks individuals to do the work of a village and then punishes them when they can’t keep up.
This crisis was anticipated by political theorists like Joan Tronto, who reminds us that the caregiving labor propping up our world is most often done by those with the least support (working-class people, immigrants, and women of color), and Marxist feminists like Selma James, who observed, in cofounding the “Wages for Housework” movement, that the unpaid labor of mothers is the invisible engine of capitalism.
We cannot dismantle gender inequality while outsourcing the labor of care to those with the fewest resources and the least protection. A feminist future must take this seriously.
To mother, in its deepest sense, isn’t just to give birth. It’s to participate in the daily, difficult, sacred work of sustaining life. When that work is shared, it becomes a source of connection and strength. When it’s hidden or unsupported, it becomes a source of burnout, grief, and guilt. The path forward isn’t more self-sacrifice from individual parents. It’s more shared responsibility from all of us—because care, when collectively held, builds more just and resilient communities.
