Keira Knightley has penned a frank, uncompromising essay about the bloody, crusty, torn-vagina reality of giving birth—and the societal pressures to cover up that reality. But you wouldn’t know it from the ensuing media coverage, which has cast her as a MEAN ANGRY FEMINIST MOMMY criticizing PERFECT MOM Kate Middleton.
On Monday, Jacinda Ardern, prime minister of New Zealand, brought her baby along to the U.N. General Assembly for the Nelson Mandela Peace Summit. The sight of a baby with a pacifier popped in her mouth was an odd one amid a sea of business attire—and, as such, it’s made headlines. “At just 3 months, she is said to be…
A couple months ago, I bought some Pampers diapers for my baby and opened the box to find the unthinkable inside: a highly pleasant design. Gone were the Sesame Street characters that had at every diaper change reminded me of the ever-advancing creep of commodified childhood. Instead, there was a range of…
Aretha Franklin’s family wasn’t charmed by the eulogy delivered at her funeral, which can only be described as a rancid stew of respectability politics with a side of “black on black crime” bullshit and a dash of “this is why I don’t go to church anymore.”
In July 2017, Sarah Huckabee Sanders replaced the perennially flustered Sean Spicer to become the second White House press secretary under Donald Trump. The appointment made her the third woman to occupy that position, some 10 years after Dana Perino served under George W. Bush. Though expected, her promotion was…
There is a man, who has never breastfed a child, with some opinions about how women should breastfeed their children. David Whitley, a reporter for the Orlando Sentinel, has a cute li’l op-ed piece out today about how breastfeeding activism has gone too far. Moms are now baring their breasts to feed their infants with…
On Wednesday, The Guardian reported that New Zealand’s prime minister Jacinda Ardern, the first pregnant world leader in almost 30 years, arrived at Auckland hospital to give birth to her first child, according to a statement from Ardern and her partner, Clarke Gayford.
The effervescent and very pregnant Cardi B. is on the cover of Rolling Stone, draped in black taffeta and the tender kiss of Offset, the father of her soon-to-be born child. In the story, written by Vanessa Grigoriadis, Cardi discusses her impending motherhood and the kind of mother she hopes to be. Unsurprisingly, it…
The unnamed narrator of Sheila Heti’s new contemplative new novel Motherhood is ambivalent about having children. She never envisioned herself as a mother and still can’t quite see herself as one. But, now in her late 30s, the question of motherhood nags at her, demanding an answer. “Time is running short on making…
There was a moment in the first few months of my son’s life when I caught a glimpse of perspective about my sleep-deprived desperation. I remember it as the middle of the night, but it might have been the middle of the afternoon—the black garbage bags we had duct-taped in a patchwork quilt of gloom over each of our…
When Cassidy Green learned that she was pregnant, she and her husband didn’t discuss cribs, co-sleeping, or even diapers. Instead, they worried about more basic and immediate challenges, like whether Green would be able to spend more than a few days with her baby. Green was in prison, nine years into a 15-year prison…
The Federal Election Commission has ruled that a New York woman running for Congress can use a portion of her campaign funds to pay for childcare.
The Senate is expected to change its rules to allow Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) to bring her newborn onto the chamber floor, Politico reports.
We already know that the so-called “motherhood penalty” plays a key role in the persisting gender wage gap. Now, a new unpublished study suggests an age-related catch: When women in opposite-sex marriages have their first baby before the age of 25 or after the age of 35, they eventually catch up with their husband’s…
Charlize Theron’s latest movie reunites her with screenwriter Diablo Cody and director Jason Reitman in Tully, which isn’t explicitly a sequel to Young Adult, but might as well be.
In 1994, a nationwide study conducted by the Department of Health and Human Services found that “black children were more likely to be taken from their homes than white children, even when the type and severity of the alleged abuse were the same.” The numbers from that study are staggering, revealing a pattern of…
I first met musician Martha Wainwright last year when her older son Arcangelo was in the same kindergarten class as my older son Jesse. We have younger sons about the same age too, and we live in the same neighborhood in Montreal. I remember seeing her once at the grocery store before we’d formally met. She was…
Nearly one out of every five mothers—18 percent—regrets the name she picked for her kid and would choose differently if she got a redo. Oops!
Here’s what I knew about Bad Moms before heading to the movie theater this weekend: that it’s called Bad Moms, that the poster has some ladies on it raising the roof and that those ladies are actresses I don’t actively dislike: Mila Kunis, Kathryn Hahn and Kristen Bell. Now, having seen the movie, I also know that the…
At 20 weeks pregnant, I started to feel like I was losing my mind. Not only was I leaving my phone and keys everywhere, a habit I regress into whenever I’m balancing more than I can handle, but worse, I began making the kind of mistakes in my pop culture writing I’d be horrified to find in someone else’s drafts:…
