Minna Dubin
“Mothers all over the globe are experiencing rage, and that’s because of a variety of social factors that oppress mothers, like patriarchy and capitalism, which exist globally. But America’s refusal to implement proper mothercare policy is so egregious that it causes rage to be more rampant here.”
“Mom Rage is a critical addition to the literature of mothering, compassionately exploring the ugly, rageful moments that haunt many of us even as we struggle to do right by our kids. Dubin invites us to consider our rage in the full context of a perverse, broken, contradictory, and cruel American system that fails families at every turn. I needed the compassion of this book, as well as its expansive look of what parenting can and should be.”
“The author’s candid appraisal of her own rage . . . and her penetrating insights make for captivating reading. It’s an astute account of how society fails mothers.”
“A cleareyed analysis of the intricate web of cultural and political challenges that make female-identified parenting nearly impossible . . . the author writes with humor, vulnerability, and a level of expertise that shape her narrative into a nuanced and convincing argument for justice.”
Minna Dubin is a writer, workshop facilitator, and occasional public artist in Berkeley, California. Her debut book is Mom Rage: The Everyday Crisis of Modern Motherhood (Seal Press, 2023), which grew out of a widely read New York Times essay. Her essays and reported articles on motherhood and identity have been featured in outlets like the New York Times, Oprah Daily, The Times, Salon, Lit Hub, Parents, Romper, The Forward, Hobart, and The Philadelphia Inquirer. She is the recipient of an artist enrichment grant from the Kentucky Foundation for Women, and has been awarded writing residencies at InCahoots, WordSpace Studios, Kentucky Foundation for Women’s Hopscotch House and Lacawac Sanctuary.
As a leading feminist voice on mom rage, Dubin has appeared on MSNBC, Good Morning America, The Tamron Hall Show, NBC10 Boston, and NPR.
Asked in an interview about the relationship between shame and mom rage, Dubin responded, “The messaging we get from media and even from our own friends and mothers tells us that we must perform motherhood in this one very particular way (always gentle, prepared, enthusiastic, never complaining or allowing our needs to surface because we should always be attending to our family’s needs first, etc.). This kind of motherhood is detrimental to our personhood, not to mention it’s also unattainable! But we’ve been indoctrinated with this messaging since we were children, so as mothers, we now put this pressure on ourselves. And when we inevitably don’t live up to these standards, and rage, it feels like we’ve gone against everything a mother “should” be, so we feel like the worst mothers in the world. The shame is huge. The problem with shame is it immobilizes us. It makes change impossible. We can’t problem-solve or get curious and investigate what’s going on if we can’t even talk about it because we’re so ashamed of ourselves.”
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