Being a mother is hard.
Being a mother in America is even harder.
Why? Because in America motherhood has become a political football—and moms have been forced to take sides
Policy and pop culture have been used to keep moms divided, offering two opposing versions of the ideal woman—a Girl Boss or a Tradwife.
And while the culture wars get all the attention, moms pay the price. . .
We are the only industrialized nation without guaranteed national paid leave.
We are the wealthiest nation that invests the least amount of money into care.
We have the highest maternal mortality rate in the industrialized world.
We are raising kids in a culture that devalues the work of mothers.
You’d think women would unite around these issues.
But instead every decision mothers make, from feeding their babies to choosing their child’s books, divides them into political tribes.
MOTHER explains how we got here,
and what we can do to fix it.
Activist + Author Reshma Saujani will dive deep into the often shocking, little understood history of motherhood in America.
Armed with an understanding of how we got here, she’ll embark on a revelatory journey to talk to mothers from all walks of life.
She’ll speak to mothers in rural areas and moms in the city. She’ll have round tables with working moms and stay at home moms, moms of color and suburban ‘Karen’ moms. The conversations will traverse class, race, and culture, in search of what unifies mothers. Because bringing moms together is the only way to fix this.
Will Reshma succeed in finding A NEW WAY FORWARD?
Let’s turn back the clock 100 years—from 2025 to 1925.
It’s post-WWI, and industrialization is kicking in. Women now have the right to vote and they are entering the workforce, and leaving their families to do so. This new independence sparks concern — will women stop having children? And who will raise the children they do have? So, to encourage childrearing, (and to put women back in their place), the concept of the “perfect mother” is popularized. She is an unattainable ideal—all giving, with no life outside her children and her husband—but she became the gold standard: dividing moms, informing policy, and creating the cracks in motherhood that we still see today.
But the new right to vote also had a flip side, brewing a political revolution. It culminates in the 1960s and 70s as activists like Gloria Steinem and Dorothy Pittman Hughes lead the fight for gender equality and civil rights. We see advances around Title IX, the Equal Rights Amendment, the Equal Pay Act, and of course, Roe v. Wade.
But with progress comes a backlash. Enter Phyllis Schlafly, the pioneer of the STOP ERA movement. Schlafly was instrumental in getting Reagan elected, and wrote the playbook for the modern Conservative woman: she is a traditional wife and mother who sees feminism as a threat to the American family, a movement that minimizes the importance of motherhood. Like today’s Mom’s of Liberty, this argument is used to mobilize mothers during elections.
This deep divide in motherhood hinges on the same question raised at the turn of the last century:
what makes a good mother?
Act 2:
The divided state of modern motherhood
The question of what makes a good mother still rages today.
Mothers are in the workplace in record numbers. They are succeeding in education, and in business. They are changing norms and breaking glass ceilings. They are also cracking under the pressure of ‘having it all.’ And some experts believe their children are also suffering.
In 2024 millions of women voted for an administration they say represents the ‘true American feminism’—one that appreciates them as mothers first. Millions of others were left feeling that they are being dragged backward—and their freedom is being taken from them
It is clear that women do not agree on what is wrong with motherhood. But they do agree that something is wrong.
Reshma will unpack the many factors that hold mothers back. She will dive, clear eyed and unbiased, into the quagmire and get to the heart of what all mothers truly need.
ACT 3:
Rebuilding + Radical Change
One realization becomes clear: all moms need a village. Throughout the film we discover how the culture wars have distracted mothers from their true needs as the village has slowly been dismantled in America.
In this final act, we will examine how to rebuild the support system mothers need.
What happens, for instance, when the government supports childcare? Does guaranteed maternity leave make having a child easier? (The answer is yes—easier, healthier, better for business and better for society).
THE TEAM
Raeshem Nijhon | Director
Rae is an Emmy, NAACP, Critics Choice and IDA Award nominated filmmaker and founder of Culture House - a Black, Brown and Women owned media company and cultural consultancy. We create film and television, immersive experiences, content for brands and oversee cultural consults for the creative and corporate sectors across content, events, campaigns and programming and curation. Raeshem is a Director and Executive Producer of the Netflix Top 10 docu-series, Ladies First, about women in hip hop. She is an Executive Producer of The Hair Tales, a premium doc series for Onyx/Hulu about Black hair and beauty hosted by Tracee Ellis Ross and EP’d alongside Oprah Winfrey, Growing Up, a doc-narrative hybrid series for Disney+ with Brie Larson, about revisiting our adolescence and Black Twitter for Hulu, directed by Prentice Penny and in partnership with Conde Nast. Her film (as Director), The Agreement, a feature documentary about the UN Sustainable Development goals following Deputy Secretary General Amina Mohammed was selected to premiere at the UN General Assembly 2023. Raeshem works closely with the United Nations Department of Partnerships to champion the Global Goals through her work and advocacy. Raeshem sits on the board for the New York Center for Communications, an organization dedicated to bringing more diversity to the media and entertainment industry, serving over 4500 students from 185+ colleges and universities annually. She serves on the Creative Council for EMILY'S List and is an active member of Brown Girls Doc Mafia and the Dell Women’s Entrepreneurship Network.
Reshma Saujani | Executive Producer
Reshma Saujani is a leading activist, the founder of Girls Who Code, the founder and CEO of Moms First, and the host of My So-Called Midlife with Lemonada Media. She has spent more than a decade building movements to fight for women and girls’ economic empowerment, working to close the gender gap in the tech sector, and most recently fighting for the structural changes moms need and deserve including affordable child care and paid leave. She is a New York Times bestselling author of several books including PAY UP: The Future of Women and Work (And Why It’s Different Than You Think), Brave, Not Perfect, and the Girls Who Code book series. As a leading voice on women’s empowerment, her 2023 Smith College Commencement speech on imposter syndrome has more than 18 million views, and her influential TED talk, “Teach girls bravery, not perfection,” has more than 54 million views globally. In 2024, she launched My So-Called Midlife, a podcast with Lemonada Media that quickly entered Apple’s Top 10 show chart, reached #1 in Health and Fitness, and was named one of the best new podcasts of the year by TIME magazine. Reshma began her career as an attorney and Democratic organizer. In 2010, she surged onto the political scene as the first Indian American woman to run for U.S. Congress. Reshma lives in New York City with her husband, Nihal, their sons, Shaan and Sai, and their dog Steve.
Tan France | Executive Producer
Tan France has been a successful fashion designer behind-the-scenes for over 15 years, before stepping nto the spotlight as the star of Emmy-winning Netflix hit reboot Queer Eye. Surrounded by an all new cast, France is the witty wardrobe wiz leading the charge in the fashion department and is ready to make America fabulous again one makeover at a time. This experience is so much more than just new clothes to the British born fashion advisor however, it’s about real-life issues, changes and acceptance on all sides. Following the global success of Queer Eye, Tan released his NY Times best-selling memoir Naturally Tan, and also produced and starred in the feature documentary Beauty and the Bleach.The film is inspired by Tan's own experience as a child, when he tried to lighten his skin with bleaching cream, and aims to unearth the truth about colourism, where one is judged not only on the colour of their skin but by the shade of it, and how that perception impacts people worldwide. Tan is also a proven interviewer, having co-hosted the 2024 SAG Awards, and also hosting the hit YouTube series Dressing Funny, which features him making over his celebrity friends Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Nick Kroll, Miranda Sings, Pete Davidson, and John Mulaney. Tan also hosts a new global fashion design competition series for Netflix called “Next in Fashion” that is sure to solidify Tan as the one the most influential tastemakers in the world.
Ashley York | Producer
Ashley York is a journalist and filmmaker who is committed to a feminist approach. She has worked on Academy Award®-winning teams and on projects that have won top honors and premiered at the Sundance, Los Angeles, Berlin, and SXSW film festivals. She produced "My Kind of Country," a new music documentary series by Reese Witherspoon and Hello Sunshine for Apple TV+. She also produced HBO's Emmy-nominated documentary series, "We're Here," which won the Best Episodic Series award at the 40th International Documentary Association. Her film, Hillbilly, won a London Foreign Press Award, the Grand Jury prize for Best Documentary at the Los Angeles Film Festival, and a Michael Moore Award for Best Documentary at the Traverse City Film Festival. She directed and produced the Netflix Original Documentary Tig, an Official Selection of the Sundance Film Festival, Hot Docs, IDFA, the Istanbul Documentary Festival, and Outfest. Her work has been recognized for its commitment to highlighting women and girls and received an Emmy Award nomination in the category of New Approaches to News and Documentary Film as well as the Governors' Award from the Academy of Arts & Sciences. She has collaborated with the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, the International Crisis Group, and the Alliance for Media Arts + Culture. She was featured in Variety as a “filmmaker to watch.” Her most recent film was commissioned and on display at the Smithsonian.
Donna MacLetchie | Producer
Donna is the Chief Content Officer at French Tuck Media. She is an experienced entertainment executive and founder of multiple businesses, with a demonstrated ability to create content in an ever-shifting environment. Donna founded and ran a very successful mid-sized television production company. She’s been on the buying side, the selling side and the producing side, and in all that experience have found a strength in recognizing what content strategy is deeply reflective of a brand, realizing that vision for others, and executing that vision through exhaustive attention to detail. She has deep experience leading and motivating creative and logistic teams, mentoring, managing and cheerleading them to their greatest successes. Her leadership is governed by extensive individual experience producing content as an Executive Producer, developing show concepts, writing, directing in the field, overseeing logistics, leading production crews, and managing celebrity talent.
