Seven Angry Moms

Frances Willard, Who Fought To Turn Mothers Into Voters

Frances Willard was the president of a massive women’s organization, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, at the end of the 19^th century. Under her watch, the group pushed not only for temperance but for women’s suffrage, and worked to tackle issues like clean water and prostitution. In fighting for the vote, Willard argued for what she called the doctrine of “home protection,” suggesting that women should obtain political power to further their goals of “careful nurturance, womanly virtue, and love of family,” as Willard biographer Ruth Bordin put it. Willard was not herself a mother and never married, but she realized that presenting women’s rights as rooted in their special status as nurturers of children would make her radical social ideas much more palatable to a conservative culture.

May Wright Sewall Collection/Library of Congress.
Mother Jones, Who Fought for Her “Boys”

Mary Harris Jones, aka Mother Jones, the fiery 19^th-century labor organizer, once corrected someone who called her a “great humanitarian.” “I’m a hell-raiser,” she replied. After losing her husband and four children to yellow fever, she became involved with labor organizing, helping lead strikes throughout the United States, giving rousing speeches, and often getting jailed. Jones cultivated the image of herself as a righteous and impassioned maternal figure, often referring to workers as “my boys.” One newspaper wrote of her in 1900: “It is a big brood she mothers, a big, toilsome, troublesome brood … swarming in mills and factories and sweatshops.”

Bertha Howell/Library of Congress.CREDIT:
Women Strike for Peace: Pissed-Off No-Nukes Moms in Flowered Hats

Women Strike for Peace was founded in the early ‘60s in response to fears over nuclear testing, including the concern that radioactive fallout could contaminate the milk that American children were drinking. “Pure Milk Not Poison” became one of the group’s slogans. Historian and activist Amy Swerdlow has written that the group’s image was of “outraged moral motherhood.” Swerdlow observes that at a time when “the press and the public tended to dismiss peace advocates as either ‘commies’ or kooks,” the image of “respectable middle-class, middle-aged ladies, wearing white gloves and flowered hats, picketing the White House,” confounded and charmed observers and helped legitimize the anti-nuclear argument. (In a profile one of the group’s founders, a newspaper reporter noted with some puzzlement that her subject “did not talk like a feminist.”)

CREDIT: Phil Stanziola/New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection/Library of Congress.
The MADD Moms Who Changed Our Drinking and Driving Laws

In 1980, Candy Lightner, whose 13-year-old daughter had been killed by a drunken driver, founded Mothers Against Drunk Driving. The aptly acronymed group quickly found a grassroots following, and in less than two years it had 100 chapters across the country. MADD’s creation story—a grieving mom singlehandedly dedicating herself to saving other children’s lives—prompted a great many press accounts and a made-for-TV movie. Within a few years, the group’s activism had stiffened penalties for drunken driving and raised the national drinking age to 21. At left, MADD volunteer Janet Priewe attends a rally outside the U.S. capitol in 2000.

CREDIT: Photograph by Michael Smith/Newsmakers via Getty Images.
Cindy Sheehan, Who Gave George W. Bush Hell on Behalf of Her Soldier Son

Cindy Sheehan, who would come to be known as the “Peace Mom,” took up camping outside George W. Bush’s Texas ranch in 2005 after her son, a soldier, was killed in Iraq. Sheehan’s bravado, her stamina, her public relations savvy, and her personal story quickly turned her into a symbol of the anti-war movement, and hundreds of supporters joined her protest.

CREDIT: Photograph by Brendan Hoffman/Getty Images.
Cindy McCain, Who Gave Barack Obama Hell on Behalf of Her Soldier Son

During her husband’s 2008 presidential run, Cindy McCain mostly stayed in the background, standing by her husband’s side and limiting her own speaking appearances to scripted events. But on one occasion close to the election she erupted in a display of righteous passion, invoking her son’s military service in Iraq to criticize Sen. Barack Obama’s 2007 vote against financing the troops. “The day that Sen. Obama decided to cast a vote to not fund my son while he was serving sent a cold chill through my body, let me tell you,'' she told a crowd, which responded by booing McCain’s opponent.

Photograph by Scott Olson/Getty Images.
Sarah Palin, the Alaskan Mama Grizzly

Sarah Palin’s call for a “mama grizzly” movement during the 2010 midterm elections was a bit of genius political theater, invoking motherhood, patriotism, and something like feminism on behalf of conservative female candidates such as Nikki Haley, Sharron Angle, and yes, Michele Bachmann. Like Bachmann, Palin has suggested that motherhood sparked her entry into politics. “I was just your average hockey mom and signed up for the PTA,” the then-Alaska governor told a cheering crowd at the Republican National Convention in 2008, before veering off into a metaphor about pit bulls. From that moment on, Palin has made her role as mother to five children an integral part of her public identity as a sort of everywoman superwoman.

Photograph by Mario Tama/Getty Images.