In Doing It All (Seal, May), journalist Ruby Russell explores the idea of single motherhood as a means of social change. Russell spoke with PW about her evolution as a parent, the climate crisis, and the power of connection.
What was the impetus for this book?
Becoming a single mom wasn’t something that I’d ever aspired to or expected. I’d thought of myself as a feminist, but I held un-feminist ideas and assumptions—that the only way to do motherhood was with someone and that romantic partnerships were going to be the big fulfilling thing in my life. Single motherhood was a series of revelations, and I had a lot of questions: Why is single motherhood treated as if it’s always a mistake, or a misfortune, or a hardship? How have we not managed to free motherhood from the heteronormative nuclear family? The book attempts to answer those questions. I looked into histories of motherhood—stories of women who mothered outside the nuclear family or found alternative ways of managing. We’re not an anomaly; not enough people are framing single mother–led families as a challenge to patriarchy.
Which feminist schools of thought influenced you?
Motherhood didn’t fit into the feminism I was raised on. White, Western, second wave and post–second wave feminism has been focused on escaping motherhood. I learned a huge amount from reading the literature of and by the reproductive justice movement, like Revolutionary Mothering by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, China Martens, and Mai’a Williams. The wages for housework and welfare warriors movements are also traditions of feminism that center motherhood, community, connection, and care over individual rights and freedoms. That’s the kind of feminism we need now. We’re not going to even things out so long as we look only at individual rights. We have to look at our responsibilities as well.
How does your experience as an environmental journalist inform this book?
At the start of industrialization, we divided labor into reproductive, feminized, domestic labor and productive, masculinized, waged labor. Reproductive labor required the complete negation of the self for other people, whereas productive labor demanded zero fucking social responsibility. When we’re told that it’s “our responsibility” to fix the climate crisis, we’re asked to cut back consumption. We’re dumping all of the responsibility for fixing problems generated by industry onto the domestic sphere. In recent years, people have started to criticize motherhood itself: Is it socially responsible to have children? My argument is that it’s the productive sphere that is causing the problem here. Motherhood, beyond one half of a bi-gendered pair, is the force we need to tackle the scale of the crisis.
How do you define, as you term it, “the social power of single motherhood”?
Single motherhood drove me to be socially connected. Doing it all is simply not possible. I made new friends, new bonds, new connections. I asked for help across households and relationships. If we did family differently, motherhood is no longer a moment for closing in and withdrawing; the family and the domestic becomes a hub of social connection. Single motherhood has an inbuilt drive for connection.
