100 Years Later – We Are Trying to Get to DC Too
Melaney Lubey
A circa 1918 file photo of women demonstrating at the White House demanding voting rights.
Credit: Associated Press
By Melaney Lubey
Mom Congress Working Mothers Caucus Co-Moderator & Chief Impact Officer, DailyKarma
I should be in DC right now, but I’m not. 2020 was to be our year—the Year of the Mother— coupled with the centennial of our winning the right to vote. We had some celebrating to do.
I keep looking at the calendar and seeing the words “MOM CONGRESS” at the top. I didn’t delete it. I like the reminder. It reminds of normalcy, of passion and “what if”s.
We would have just finished our day of advocating on the hill, one that we would spend educating our elected leaders on the importance of maternal health and paid family leave. We would have changed minds, opened ears, refilled our own buckets.
Melaney Lubey and Dawn Thompson, of Improving Birth, at Mom Congress 2019.
I’m sure of it because we’ve done it before.
We convene to do more than raise awareness. We convene to push boundaries, to become better advocates, to hone our talking points and become expert orators. We convene for the community—to remember that our voices all join in a chorus demanding that we provide birthing people in our country the support they so desperately deserve.
What would we have moved forward this year? The possibilities feel endless.
The maternal health movement has made massive strides in recent years. Public opinion is shifting as the staggering maternal death rates rise; stigma surrounding perinatal depression and anxiety is lessened—and we are demanding WHY. We are a multi-generational movement of mothers, partners, grandmothers, sisters, and advocates who are tired of being traumatized by lack of care. And believe me, we are fired up.
Well, we were—until the world stopped with Covid-19. Now, many of us are faced with the day-to-day overwhelming realities of balancing childcare and work. The wee hours of the night that were once left for advocacy and change are now consumed with worry for the future, catching up on work, or searching for a spare moment to spend with our partners. We’re so focused on our day-to-day survival that while we may pause to pay mind to the overwhelming in-your-face disparities in how we support working families, we are too exhausted at the end of the day to do much else.
It’s the Year of the Mother, yet we’re exhausted. It’s fitting, isn’t it?
As we stare down the barrel of the centennial of women winning the right to vote—our centennial, a once-in-a-lifetime acknowledgment of how far we’ve come—I found a moment of remembering that like all things, this is cyclical. Our sisters who came before were also paused mid-fight due to the Spanish Flu, and it did not stop them. They reorganized. They adapted. They persevered. And that is what we shall also do. While the world is now paused, it will resume. This will pass and we will be changed.
The holes in our already broken system have become more apparent, and I’m confident that we will rise and use our collective pain and exhaustion as catalysts for an even greater change.
We should be in DC right now, but we’re not. We will be next year, however, and in the meantime, we will grow even smarter and more efficient with our advocacy, challenging ourselves to get creative and make sure we use our mom voices.
So, in those moments of overwhelm, call on our history—of the movements before—and rest assured that while we may be paused, we will keep fighting.