Betsy Hoody is an independent consultant who has spent her career working in philanthropy on women's rights and feminist organizing. She lives in south Minneapolis where she coaches girls hockey, plays hockey, and is always in search of a good sauna. The views expressed are her own.
It's no secret that women showed up in extraordinary ways to resist the federal occupation in Minnesota this past winter. As we approach Mother’s Day, I find myself reflecting on the role that moms played in organizing our resistance. For weeks and months, everywhere you turned in the Twin Cities, you bumped into a mom organizing in her community. Moms arranged safe transportation to get immigrant children to school and adults to work. We created popup food shelves in school hallways. We raised hundreds of thousands of dollars in mutual aid support and figured out streamlined ways of distributing it on the fly.
As a mother of a seven-year-old in Minneapolis, I regularly witnessed the labor, grit, and brilliance that moms brought to the seemingly impossible challenges that came when thousands of federal agents invaded our communities. I know a mom who began accepting food donations on her porch, coordinating with a local popup effort to distribute to families in need every weekend. A mom who woke up at 3 a.m. every Tuesday for months to drive two immigrant adults to their job two towns away. A mom who coordinated transportation for over 150 kids to a local elementary school, sorting through a daily maze of logistics in two languages. A mom who walked the streets outside her child’s school every afternoon, logging each ICE vehicle that circled the school into an observation database. A mom who took her love of communal singing into the Singing Resistance movement. Countless moms who signed up as grocery shoppers and drivers, learning the needs and preferences of their “buddy families” along the way.
We did this work with a mother’s touch. We learned the favorite music and snacks of our riders, bringing whatever ease we could to tense rides that often included a passing ICE vehicle. We organized art supply drives, so that kids stuck at home could have something to do. We dropped off cakes for kids’ birthdays when immigrant families weren’t able to go to the store themselves. We asked what do you need and did our best to meet those needs, calling on friends for support when the load was too heavy to carry alone.
The media took note. I read several articles about mothers’ organizing power over the last several months. Many took a tone of surprise—“The Unexpected Resistance to ICE: The Soccer Moms of Signal” from the Strib or "How ‘Wine Moms’ Entered the Conversation About ICE" from the New York Times. Some aimed more directly to belittle, such as Fox News commentators calling us "Chardonnay Antifa." “I wish!” a friend wrote to me. "As if we have time for a glass of wine in all this.”
All of this reporting left me unsettled. While I appreciated the work to document women’s roles in resisting Operation Metro Surge, I couldn’t help but wonder at the overarching tone of incredulity. Who did they think organized, well, virtually everything else in their community? Show me a good thing in your neighborhood and I’ll show you a mom who helped make it happen. School fundraisers. Neighborhood potlucks and block parties. Local caucuses. Youth sports tournaments. Church dinners. All of these happen, regularly and without fanfare, thanks to the labor and organizing power of women working together.
Mothers were ready to go, in other words, because we already spend so much of our days organizing our families, neighbors, and communities. In fact, the mutual aid response in Minnesota leveraged the relational infrastructure that powers women’s organizing. School responses relied on PTOs and other parent groups. Neighborhood rapid response grew out of WhatsApp groups and, as we lovingly refer to them in my house, moms’ threads—small group chats of local mothers.
The fact that women poured an unfathomable amount of uncompensated labor into mutual aid response is not at all surprising; it mirrors the unfathomable amount of uncompensated labor and care that we pour into our families and communities every day. At the societal level, we ignore, trivialize, and undervalue women’s labor, especially the care economy so often performed by mothers.
The labor, organizing, and care of immigrant mothers is especially invisible and undervalued; it has been virtually absent from the media narrative on moms’ resistance. (Sahan Journal's lovely “Mamas of Cedar” profile is one notable exception.) Yet the bravery and organizing of immigrant mothers has been most critical to our resistance. I’m thinking of mothers who worked tirelessly to keep their families and communities safe in the most dire of circumstances. Mothers who coordinated with volunteer lawyers to get their husbands out of detention, while themselves trapped at home to avoid a similar fate. Mothers who spent their evenings calling other immigrant families to get them signed up for rent and transportation support. Mothers who managed the emotions and fears of their children, while also creating meals from a random smattering of donated ingredients and managing their children’s virtual learning. Mothers who were willing to reach out to ask for help, trusting strangers with their most precious cargo and building deep relationships along the way.
In our surprise at mothers’ competency, we fail to see women—and mothers in particular—in their totality. The women who organized mutual aid didn’t just bring the skills and perspectives that we have earned as parents (though yes, those were essential). We also brought the experiences and expertise earned through our full lives. The mothers referenced throughout this piece are also teachers. Social workers. Product designers. Cooks. Business owners. Psychologists. Lawyers. The power of our response was fueled by us bringing our whole selves—all of our skills and perspectives—to our mutual aid and resistance efforts.
Minnesota isn’t unique in this. Social movements have long been fueled by the power of women’s organizing. See the civil rights movement. The climate justice movement. The movement to end gun violence, where just this week Moms Demand Action celebrated a win when the Minnesota State Senate passed a bill outlawing the sale of assault weapons. More often than not, women’s roles in these movements have been trivialized and ignored in mainstream reporting.
This Mother’s Day, let’s turn a new page. Celebrate mothers in our wholeness. Value the labor and care we invest in our communities. Recognize us as the leaders and organizers that we are.
Our collective future depends on it.
