MOM RAGE

A frank, feminist examination of the hidden crisis of rage facing American mothers - and how we can fix it.

Mothers everywhere are weathering a silent crisis - facing structural inequities and severe public pressure to be the perfect parent, they're expected to magically fix everything and to suffer in silence when they can't. The pandemic didn't cause this crisis, but it exacerbated existing problems, ratcheting up the pressure and the burden placed on working mothers.

For the first time, Dubin exposes mothers' anger for what it is: a structural issue that we need to talk about and figure out how to deal with, not sweep under the rug. Blending a feminist rallying cry with practical advice for mothers, Mom Rage will appeal to both readers of warts-and-all parenting books like Jennifer Senior's All Joy and No Fun and Carla Naumberg's How to Stop Losing Your Sh*t With Your Kids, as well as to readers of manifestos that explore the power of female rage like Soraya Chemaly's Rage Becomes Her and Rebecca Traister's Good and Mad.

Mothers aren't supposed to be angry. Still, Minna Dubin was an angry mom: exhausted by hard, thankless full-time parenting work and feeling her career slip away from her, she would find herself screaming at her child or exploding in anger at her husband. Despite the pressure she felt to suffer in silence, Minna chose to talk publicly about her experiences, kicking off an international conversation about a rage that, it turns out, nearly every mother has experienced. Mom Rage is Dubin's groundbreaking work of reportage on the national crisis of mother rage - what it is, where it comes from, and how we can all learn to work through it.

As Dubin reveals, mom rage is a global phenomenon, but it's particularly acute in countries where mothers are expected to manage physical care, education, and emotional support for their children; household and administrative labor for their families; and their own careers, all with little to no institutional support. Adding insult to injury, mothers' struggles go largely unacknowledged and unvalidated, making them feel like their rage is a personal failure caused by being a "bad mom." This sense of guilt is only exacerbated by the intense public scrutiny that mothers (especially poor mothers and mothers of color) are subject to. Dubin assures these readers that they're not alone. She shares her personal story of understanding and eventually overcoming her rage, and includes interviews from women experiencing mom rage across the spectrum of race, gender, sexual orientation, and class. She then breaks down the research on rage, emotional intelligence, anger management, and motherhood to give women accessible tools to alleviate their burden and issue a call for broader social reforms.

Mom Rage is a no-holds-barred excavation of the crisis of mother rage and a call for women to let go of their internalized shame and guilt, resist the patriarchy, and reclaim their lives.

Minna Dubin is a writer whose work has appeared in?The New York Times,?Parents,?The Philadelphia Inquirer,?The Huffington Post,?Romper?and?SF Weekly. Her artwork on motherhood has been exhibited at the San Francisco Public Library, The Museum of Motherhood, and the Mom Egg Review, including her public art project #MomLists. She has appeared on Good Morning America,?MSNBC Live?and beyond to discuss the issue of mom rage.?She lives in Berkeley, California.