6 | The Double Bind of Green Motherhood 🥀

How our culture privatizes environmental carework onto mothers to support the status quo.

I'm back! I left for an adventure with the family, camping across the magnificent country of Costa Rica. I can't tell you how meaningful it was to have an actual trip after many years of staycation and to have been held by one of the most biodiverse places in the world. While I was gone, I got some exciting news about the publication of my article on green motherhood, which seemed very appropriate. 

I'm excited to share "Untangling the Double Bind of Carework in Green Motherhood: An Ecofeminist Developmental Path Forward" with you today. I'm so thankful to the reviewers who helped shape the article into its current (but never final) form, and for the conversations I had with Dr. Aurelie Athan in early drafts that helped form my thoughts. 

Here’s a preview:

The article introduces the ecological domain back into matrescence to make sense of green motherhood as a developmental distortion and theorize a path forward. I'll spend a couple of letters on this article since it is so long, but I think it's important to recognize the danger of green motherhood ideology in the first place…

A GOOD Mom is a GREEN Mom

Western culture's predominant form of idealized motherhood is the "good green mom." The good green mom is charged with cleaning up after the corporations and governments who are poisoning our communities in their pursuit of profit with a particular form of (what I call) environmental carework. Environmental carework is human-centered, focused on individual nuclear families, and highly gendered, as its wheelhouse is the domestic sphere. 

At first glance, green motherhood looks great… which is why it's seductive for distressed mothers. It makes us feel like we are successfully managing environmental risks for our children. It makes us feel earthy, connected, even crunchy! We all know how "natural" motherhood is pushed on us as a specific experience we should strive to attain. But despite the looks, green motherhood in action as environmental carework poses several problems. Here's how I break it down:

Intensive

Environmental carework is intensive—what Sarah Ray calls mothers' "third shift"—adding to our culture's already intensive (and unsupported) expectations of modern motherhood. Naming intensive mothering, Susan Hays established that mothers are expected to perform incredibly resource-taxing parenting strategies that threaten maternal wellbeing for children's (supposed) healthy development. In the environmental context, the carework can look like all kinds of things, from cloth diapers, natural clothing, organic diets, homemade food, wood toys, zero waste, efficient appliances, etc. You know green motherhood because you are living within its set of beliefs. It is the "proper" system of beliefs all mothers are disciplined into, even though not all mothers can or want to practice it. 

Ineffective and Dangerous

Green motherhood is causing harm to mothers, our families, and our ecosystems. In what is known as the "double bind" of green motherhood, mothers' environmental carework promoted is ineffective and dangerous. This ideology, which often hides behind greenwashing, makes it difficult for mothers to fully embody their shifting environmental values and mature psychologically. Here's what it actually does:

1. Developmentally, green motherhood decenters actual mothers from their own maturation in motherhood. It centers (as capitalism often does) on expert service providers and products that promise they have the answers to managing this risk.

2. Green motherhood drives "safe" consumption since mothers step into identity in Western cultures through consumptive practices. The Western lifestyle that centers on consumption is causing our ecological crisis. Individualized green wasteful practices harm the planet regardless of whether that consumption is organic or natural. And much of the safe (er) consumption is tied to greater maternal workloads. I always hesitate to give examples as I know some of these practices are important to us in our mother's work, but cloth diapering is an obvious one that creates more labor for mothers.

3. We know the mental health consequences of intensive mothering, and the stress added from the third shift of environmental carework for mothers is a risk to maternal mental health. Here's how I explain this risk on page 6: 

Solutions?

This article I originally wrote in 2021 was me working through my anger at how mothers' shifting environmental ethics, which is so beautiful and the subject of my current research, is coopted by our dominant culture. In future letters, I'll share my approach to understanding and supporting mothers around green motherhood. Today, I invite you to reflect on green motherhood ideology overall and how it might function in your life.

Thank you!

Excited to be back writing you again. Please reply or comment with any questions or thoughts, as I love to hear about how this work resonates.

It can help to think about green motherhood as a set of beliefs marketed to us as we become mothers, as it was first identified by researchers in consumer sciences looking at eco-conscious messaging in pregnancy magazines. As new mothers look around for solutions to our often-rising environmental concerns, our dominant Western culture will present the green motherhood approach as a solution.

My clients have told me naming green motherhood was like putting on a set of glasses that helped them see their world in a new way… meaning they see green motherhood messaging everywhere. I think this is great! Seeing green motherhood for what it is can allow us to become more critical in engaging in environmental responsibility issues. It can also help us move from what is often a reactive response (since the ideology preys on ecodistress) to one rooted in our actual environmental values.