The United States Is No Country for Mothers. (Not Yet.)

Reshma Saujani, founder and CEO of Moms First, onstage at the 2026 TIME Women of the Year Leadership Forum in West Hollywood, Calif., on March 10, 2016. (Amy Sussman / Getty Images for TIME) This is part of a new miniseries FEMINIST 250: Democracy’s Feminist Future, a special Ms. series examining the next chapter of American democracy through a feminist lens. As the nation approaches its 250th anniversary, the series explores how women and marginalized communities have shaped democratic progress, what lessons history offers for the challenges ahead, and how a more inclusive, representative and equitable democracy can be built for the next 250 years.

Universal childcare is how the United States finally stops leaving half the country behind. It is not a radical idea. It is the bare minimum that a democracy owes the people doing its most essential work.

When my parents arrived in the United States as refugees from Uganda, they came with $12 in their pockets and a belief in this country’s oldest promise: If you give America everything you have, it will not leave you behind.

I grew up holding that belief. I ran for Congress and built Girls Who Code on it. And when I became a mother, I realized that promise was never meant for us.

Motherhood in America is impossible by design. It is a feature, not a bug.

Work ends at 6 p.m. School pickup is at 3 p.m. Over half of Americans are in debt because of the cost of their childcare. A quarter of new mothers go back to work two weeks after giving birth, still bleeding, because they have no other choice. And when we can’t hold it all together, the culture stands ready to reprimand us: You should have planned better. You should have chosen differently. This is your fault.

It is not your fault.

… Childcare is the load-bearing wall. It is the single largest household expense for families with young children, exceeding rent and even college tuition in most states.

Parents, teachers, childcare workers and community members hold up signs during a press conference at Nokomis Daycare Center in Minneapolis on Dec. 31, 2025, amidst right-wing attacks against the childcare center and others run by Somali Americans, at the hands of right-wing content creators. (Alex Kormann / The Minnesota Star Tribune via Getty Images) Mothers have been getting conned since the ink dried on the Constitution. Abigail Adams told her husband John to remember the ladies when he was drafting this country’s founding documents. The founding fathers chose not to. “All men are created equal.”

And for the ladies, power only by proxy of motherhood. Raise patriotic sons. Sustain the republic. Just don’t ask to be part of it, and don’t ask for help.

For the past 250 years, we have lived with the consequences of this original deception. And every time mothers begin to organize, gain ground or push for structural change, we are handed a culture war to distract and divide us so that we do not succeed.

In 1971, Congress passed universal childcare with bipartisan support. President Richard Nixon (R) vetoed it, calling it a threat to the American family.

Childcare was, as Hillary Clinton deftly explained to me, “an issue they wanted, not a problem to solve.”

… Women do not want to raise babies in a country that pushes their family’s heads under water instead of pulling them out.

The fight for the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s failed because the conversation around our rights was manipulated into a referendum on what makes a good mother.

The Mommy Wars of the 2000s revived this debate and pitted working moms against stay-at-home moms.

Today’s culture war is no different: We ask women to choose between being a tradwife or a girlboss—two unrealistic, unattainable options that don’t reflect the economic reality of most American women.

Same con, new costume.

We have lost decades of political energy to these distractions. We are the most educated generation of women in American history, and yet we have the lowest labor market participation. Around 500,000 women left the workforce last year because of the cost of childcare. We have shortages of nurses, teachers and social workers—critical roles that artificial intelligence cannot replace. Our birth rate is at a historic low, not because of birth control or feminism gone too far, but because women do not want to raise babies in a country that pushes their family’s hea