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Commentary
We're asking the wrong questions about Michelle Wu
How could she? That was my first thought when I heard that Boston Mayor Michelle Wu is expecting her third child and had decided not to take maternity leave. It was two questions in one.
How could she — how would she — physically do it: Manage her own postpartum recovery while tending to a newborn and caring for her two older children, without taking a pause from her responsibilities running the city? And, how could she skip this opportunity to help shift the culture around parental leave, by taking the leave herself?
My next thought: How could I? Wu’s every decision is judged against the fact that she is the mayor of many firsts. But this decision should be hers, based on what’s best for her and her family. It’s not about how she can serve as the best possible spokesperson for working mothers everywhere.
These questions — all of them — were the wrong ones. The one we should be asking isn’t should she or shouldn’t she, but why does it matter?
Wu has used her position over and over again to challenge public perceptions of mothers in leadership. She is well-practiced in calling out the make-believe division between work and home life and in naming the many benefits mothers bring to the table, sometimes with babes in their laps.
Wu used her own experience as a new mother as inspiration for the 2015 ordinance she authored as a member of Boston’s City Council, creating the first paid leave policy for municipal employees. In 2017, when her second child was 3 months old and she was city council president, Wu wrote for CNN about breastfeeding during conversations with her staff and keeping burp cloths handy in her office: “I’m tired but grateful: choosing to blend parenting and public service has made me a more confident mother and a better legislator,” she wrote.
Wu has used her position over and over again to challenge public perceptions of mothers in leadership.
Still, Wu’s position today, in deciding how to manage her pregnancy alongside her duties as mayor (and the election cycle to come), does feel like a measure of the state of motherhood at work generally and in politics specifically. That’s because it’s rare.
It is rare by design.
Last fall, Rep. Lois Reckitt, the woman who had represented my neighborhood in the Maine House of Representatives since 2016, died with a year left in her fourth term. She was a powerhouse progressive and a longtime leader with the National Organization of Women – Reckitt left impossible shoes to fill. But when a special election was scheduled to fill her seat for the remainder of the term, I considered running.
I’ve been involved in organizing around local environmental justice issues, education funding and gun safety for several years, and my career as a journalist has given me a strong understanding of politics and policymaking, especially related to health care and support for young families. Plus, I had just been forced to explain to my two young children why their school was closed, as police officers searched for the gunman who killed 18 people in Lewiston, a city 45 minutes north of ours. I hoped to lend my voice as a mother of school-aged children to the debate over a slate of gun safety bills that were almost certainly headed for floor votes in the spring.
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As I talked with a representative from a neighboring district and with my former state senator, the logistics of elected office became more clear: The State House is an hour’s drive from my house. Votes run late into the night as the end of session approaches in the spring, when my work schedule and my husband’s, plus the calendar of end-of-school events, becomes nearly unmanageable in a regular year. The legislative pay for the session, then just under $12,000, wouldn’t have been nearly enough to offset lost income plus child care needs, which would be substantial and hard to predict.
I couldn’t see how we would make it work.
There are lots of mothers and other parents like me, who want to run, who bring a depth of professional and lived experience to the table, and who struggle to see a clear path to elected office. We’re the ones carving out volunteer hours when we can, zooming into school board meetings, passing city council agendas back and forth on text groups nicknamed “Leadership Barbies,” and sending off strongly worded emails to elected officials between dinner dishes and bedtime, between daycare drop-off and the first work meetings of the day.
About 18% of adults in the United States are mothers caring for children under the age of 18. Yet only about 5% of people serving in state legislatures match that demographic, according to 2022 data from the Vote Mama Foundation, which tracks the presence of mothers in elected office and advocates for policies that could help more to secure seats. In Congress, that figure is only slightly better, at about 7%.
I don’t believe mothers are inherently more worthy lawmakers than people without children. I do believe that they, by the very nature of their roles as mothers, have important perspectives to share on many of our most pressing problems, including health care costs, energy policy, food security and so much more — perspectives that can change the outcomes for people across society. Mayor Wu is proof of that.
It’s not enough to encourage mothers to run, or even to elect a few to higher office. It will take real structural changes to political institutions ...
A representative government, especially one in a country that claims to revere motherhood and that’s facing a swell of conservatism around gender roles, should work harder to make it possible for the people who play such a key role in the survival and development of society to actually be represented in decision making.
It’s not enough to encourage mothers to run, or even to elect a few to higher office. It will take real structural changes to political institutions that were not designed for caregivers’ participation.
For starters, Vote Mama advocates for lawmakers to receive living wages, with benefits, to make serving in public office possible for people whose families depend on them. Modernizing state houses could help too, so that lawmakers can participate in hearings and votes remotely and, when they are in the capitol, have access to lactation rooms and on-site child care.
By Vote Mama’s count, 33 states have changed election laws to allow campaign funds to be used to cover the cost of child care. Maine is not one of them, nor is Massachusetts. Bills to change this have been introduced repeatedly at the Massachusetts State House since 2017, without success. The latest iteration is now in limbo after the end of formal legislative sessions last week.
Had the Maine legislature offered lawmakers reasonable pay and the option to participate remotely when necessary, my decision about whether to try for Rep. Reckitt’s seat very likely would have been different.
The real question here is not, should Wu take maternity leave or shouldn’t she? It’s this: Will we give mothers real access to political office?
Then, perhaps, one family’s decision about exactly how to manage those newborn months won’t feel so much like a barometer by which we measure our own place in public life.
