Motherhood rights and digital activism: An interview with Francesca Fiore and Sarah Malnerich,content creators of the account @mammadimerda

My first question is how and why you started your digital activism, and what are your goals for the future?

Francesca and I created the blog ‘mammadimerda’ in 2016. The blog was actually opened by Francesca, who already had two daughters before I had mine. We decided to talk publicly and online about our experience with maternity because we realized it was very different from what society and expectations depicted. We found ourselves tricked by motherhood: the experience that was supposed to be the best one in a woman’s life revealed itself to be a prison because society is still structured in a gendered way. The new mother finds herself at home with the infant, and the husband is out of the door working and not helping much. At first you try to adhere to the idealized mother image who is happy and forgetting her life as a woman, dedicating herself fully to the baby. Why did we try? Because we thought that it was what it was expected by us as mothers. However, we weren’t feeling well within the constraints of this model of idealized and intensive maternity. It was a cage, built to confine in one strict model the myriad aspects of motherhood and the different individual experience of maternity for every woman. As for your question about where we are heading, I don’t really know!

As a start, your blog expanded on Facebook and Instagram accounts followed by 200K followers, and you published three books. Why did you decide to expand on different media?

Well, we self-published the first book, titled Non sei sola. Fenomenologia di una mamma di merda (You Are Not Alone: Phenomenology of a Shitty Mom, Fiore and Malnerich, 2019) because we wanted to collect all the articles and reflections of our first three years of blog activity. The book was very successful within our community and raised the interest of publishing houses, who asked us to write our second book, Non farcela come stile di vita (The ‘I Can’t Make It’ Style of Life, Fiore and Malnerich, 2022) and then this year Angele del focolare (Angels of the Hearth, Fiore and Malnerich, 2023). Our friends suggested we do a theatre show based on the core arguments of our books, and we wrote the script with Scuola Holden instructor Filippo Losito. We realized that although we basically keep saying the same things, people need to hear them. The show has been doing great, and the dates are all full. However, there is no request in the Italian South, and we don’t know why. It seems that below Rome our sarcastic critique of the good mother image is not acceptable. The name itself, ‘mamma di merda’ (shitty mom), may repel people, especially if they are not familiar with our digital persona and our feminist approach to motherhood. For instance, at Sestri Levante [in Genova], we were verbally attacked by the right-wing mayor because of our themes.

Why do you think it happens? I mean, we are in 2023, most women don’t live like 1950s housewives, and we had the feminist and civil rights movement. Why is there still a need to bring up a critique of idealized motherhood today? Yet, you are still attacked for making fun of a maternal model that is supposed to be outdated.

I think in Italy the model of the sacrificing mother has not been discussed, problematized, and criticized enough. Sibilla Aleramo in the early 1900s talked about the problem with idealized motherhood, and the poet alda Merini did it too, but they were dismissed and considered crazy. ² Don’t forget that Italy is a deeply Catholic country, and the woman-as-mother in the Catholic doctrine has a central role. Just think about the current situation: the world is exploding, and in Italy we still fight about the ‘traditional family’. Nonsense! I believe that in Italy we don’t talk enough about the issues with motherhood. One example is the welfare system and the childcare services: welfare support is not equal for all working mothers, and childcare services such as daycare and preschools are not covering enough of the demand since there are limited funds available to create support for working parents. All this means that Italian society still considers childcare and child-rearing a woman’s job. Just think about the lack of resources for childcare during the 3 months that schools are closed. It is unbelievable.

It’s all interconnected indeed. The mother in Italy is seen as an untouchable icon of Italian self-sacrificing model, and functions as the ‘last taboo’, of Italian society, as Italian feminist theorist Lea Melandri once said (Melandri, 2015). This view of the maternal model may be one of the cultural reasons for the lack of welfare support for working mothers, as it implies that the primary caregiver for the child must be the mother. In relation to that, I would like to ask you about your activist campaigns in support of working mothers during COVID-19. In particular, you actively campaigned with the hashtag #noncisiamo (we are not here) to urge the government both to offer a monthly allowance for working mothers, who were forced to leave their jobs in order to stay home with the children, and to propose alternative solutions to the schools closing due to the pandemic. You also urged the government to think about women’s unemployment: even before the pandemic, Istat data revealed that 31.5 percent of unemployed women did not seek work for reasons related to motherhood and childcare, and 28 percent of currently unemployed mothers have left their jobs for the same reasons in the past seven years. How did the #noncisiamo campaign go? Did you obtain any practical results?

Before answering, I want to point out something that bothers me deeply. Even in feminist activism, the feminist mother is seen as a second-class feminist. I feel that sometimes feminist women who decided to have children are blamed for ‘giving in’ to reproductive instincts and they are not ‘good feminists’. To go back to your questions about the results of our campaign, it did not go well. Italy is a very conservative, traditional country, especially when we talk about family and schools. When we decided to campaign for the reopening of the schools during the pandemic, or at least to find alternative solutions that would help parents in childcaring, we were attacked even by teachers. In the past three years we also campaigned to reconsider the three months of school summer break, with the hashtag #lascuolanonvainvacanza (school doesn’t have vacations). We campaign along with Weworld, an independent Italian organization active in 25 countries, including Italy, that focuses on projects concerning Development Cooperation and Humanitarian Aid to guarantee the rights of the most vulnerable communities, especially women and children. Every year Weworld collect thousands of complaints about the current Italian school calendar. Italy, indeed, has the longest school summer break in all of Europe—14 weeks. We believe that for boys and girls such a long break actually turns into loss of skills, and increased inequality and school dropout rates, especially among those from more socioeconomically and culturally disadvantaged backgrounds. Indeed, not all boys and girls can participate in recreational and socialization activities during the long summer break, and Italy lacks affordable summer centers. Moreover, the long summer break makes it even more difficult for parents to reconcile work-life balance, and this is true especially for working mothers, as we have seen already during the COVID-19 pandemic. Every year we try to open up a conversation on the topic, and every year we are attacked because ‘that’s Italy and things are always done this way’. If you look at the social media comments of our posts on the matter, most parents and teachers are against any change, even if some changes would be better for the child’s wellbeing. The reorganization of school summer vacations was also listed as one of the points in the center-right political program, but nothing has happened yet [Italy currently has a far-right majority government n.d.A].

It is very difficult to propose any change in this country and often motherhood rights are not considered worthy of the time. A small victory though that I want to underline is the campaign #giustomezzo in 2020. ³ #giustomezzo was a collective effort of many feminist groups that worked together, and we were able to make requests also on motherhood and parental rights, such as more funding for kindergartens and childcare. We were able to obtain some of our requests in 2023, but not all of them. ⁴ For instance, the Italian Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR) assessed the introduction of the Gender Impact Assessment and the inclusion of gender procurement principles in contracts, as #giustomezzo had asked for, but the funds for kindergartens and childcare facilities, as well as those for women’s entrepreneurship, are less than what we expected. Anyway, if you don’t pay attention, nobody would care about these themes. Why it is that @mammadimerda, a satirical social media account, must become an activist movement? Where are the politicians? Where is the press?

I would like to press you more on that. You already said that @mammadimerda was born as a satirical blog and then evolved into a social media account, becoming more and more involved with social and political issues related to motherhood and women’s rights. How do you feel about that?

We feel good about that because we care about social justice and women’s rights. But activism is also time consuming, emotionally fatiguing, and takes time away from our job as content creators and authors.

We constantly oscillate between ‘but why are we doing this!’ and the feeling of ‘let’s change the world!’

Have you noticed changes in your community from your beginning to today?

Yes. We started with light, comedic sketches about motherhood and then, during the COVID-19 pandemic, turned our account into a more activist one, and the community became more and more engaged in women’s rights issues. We would like for our community to meet even in the physical world. We would like for our community also to take over some activism and help us create a better environment for mothers and women in general.

Do you feel you have a responsibility in carrying on social media activism, besides the production of satirical contents?

In a way yes, but w e don’t want to preach. We prefer to foster dialogue with our community.

I also try not to comment on everything and post my opinions on news and current events only after careful consideration because social media amplifies everything, and we still want to have control over what we say and produce. The content creator is a job, and it requires attention, engagement, and focus. And like many other jobs, it is important to never lose sight of a healthy work-life balance. For these reasons, lately we have decided to focus more on activist campaigns (for instance, one with UNICEF) and less on brandable content productions.