What does it matter? I mean, we’re not talking about mothers, or women of color, or trans women, or any combination thereof, we’re talking about women, right? Allow this author to fervently hope that her readers recognize the logical fallacy in this statement, but just in case: the above implies that mothers, black women, trans women are not really or fully women. It constructs “woman” as white, and cisgender, and childless.
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My inbox is full of attacks on me for being a mother or which use my motherhood or my children against me. In these I am told, both explicitly and by implication, that I am less-than for being not just a woman, but a woman with children AND opinions. This is a maternity-specific form of misogyny, to be sure, but misogyny nonetheless, yet from the feminists who should support me — not even me specifically, but mothers at all — who purport to speak for “women” as a whole: resounding silence.