for my next restaurant. when we all come together, my restaurants, my partners, and the community amazing things happen. to me, that's the membership effect. good morning from new york, happy mother's day, i'm chris hayes, local officials in yemen say u.s. drone strikes killed 11 al qaeda militants yesterday. that claim could not be independently confirmed. the odds are i higher that you'll be stopped and frisked for doing nothing wrong in new york city, special will if you're a black man. the "associated press" reports that the numb of stops and frisks rose to 203,000 in the first three months of 2012. mayor bloomberg, our invitation to appear on the program is still open. i want to start with my story of

the week, towards a real nanny state. there are two big differences between last mother's day and this one. one political, the other personal. the political difference is not only does this mother's day take place during an election year, it hits a few weeks after motherhood, the value of mothers and women's work more broadly were at the center of a news cycle. hoping to revive this theme ann romney wrote an op-ed called three seasons of motherhood. it extolls the crown of glory that all mothers wear. the personal difference for me of course is the birth of my daughter. today i'll be celebrating mother's day with my own mom and the mother of my child. so much about the birth of one's first child is vivid and indelible. almost as if it happened in another country you briefly visited and might go back to. there's one moment that stuck with me that i think about a lot in the context of our national political conversation about mothers and children and social opportunity and hard work.

it's the terrifying surreal moment when you leave the hospital. crossing the threshold into the fresh air, bearing this tiny creature toward a waiting car and you think, this is it. there's no one there to say good-bye or to, do you need a ride or do you need help. i was doing this with someone i love and have known for 15 years, we had a car and jobs and money in the bank account and i was heading home to an apartment where my mother-in-law would be waiting for us to offer her help and guidance and expertise. it was still absolutely terrifying. the message at that moment from the hospital from the society was, you're on your own, and i felt overwhelmingly grateful for all the privileges and resources i had access to that were there to support us as we tried to keep this little creature alive and thriving. ann romney in her story wrote that she never even held a baby until she had her own. so you can imagine the first day

my boy was born, i felt woefully unprepared. like me, ann romney had someone there to help her, her mother, who stayed with her for two weeks. when she left, romney said i cried like i was the baby. ann romney was one of the lucky mothers, i kept imagining what crossing the doors of the hospital would be like if you were 24 years old and single with no family nearby to help. and a job that paid just enough to make ends meet. but didn't give any paid family leave. what do we say to those mothers? and what do we as society say to those children? mostly nothing, good luck. work hard, this is what equal opportunity looks like. it doesn't have to be this way. in britain, a health visitor, a certified nurse checks in with you about ten days after your baby is born. they and the national health service provide contact information. if you're a single parent an agency will help facilitate child care arrangements. in france, mothers have the option to go on paid job leave months before the baby is due.

nurses regularly visit the homes of newborns and it costs the parents nothing. in estonia, women get four and a half months paid maternal leave guaranteed. in fact paid maternal leave is the norm across every industrialized nation. at home we have the family medical leave act, passed with a great bit of fan fare and over significant opposition, which grants employees to take unpaid protected job leave 12 work weeks of leave in a 12-month period for the birth and care of a newborn. a recent survey found 40% of working mothers took six weeks or fewer of maternity leave. 12% took less than two weeks. given that, it's not surprising that its annual state of the world's mothers report the ngo save the children found the u.s. ranked 25th behind hungary and belarus, we rank 45th in mortality rate and have a worst

rate of pregnancy-related death than any other industrialized nation. we also have scarce access to day care and pre-k, we come dead last among industrialized countries, behind malta in our policy to facility breastfeedings, the u.s. underperforms on its rankings, while places like brazil and the czech republic overperform. norway, iceland, sweden, belgian and the netherlands. even while social democracy is dismantled, that remain as broad consensus that mothers should not be on their own. that a right to maternal leave is a basic part of citizenship and what the state owes each of its new citizens is nurture and support. this was famously derided by margaret thatcher as the nanny state. a rallying cry to leaded torys and dismantling of the social democratic features of england in the 1980s. conservatives still throw around

the term today, meant to evoke a government that acts like a meddlesome governoress, denying us our freedom and agency and full sentist. but the nan judge state is a fitting name for a state that gives mothers the support that a nanny can, relief, another set of hands, a set of watchful, trusted eyes. a society even without an romney's privilege or a big bank account, don't have to mother alope. as one of the millions of parents negotiating the difficult world of balancing work and parenthood, that kind of nanny state sounds mighty appealing. right now joining me we have jimmy lebay, contributing to the "washington post" blog, she the people. katy to "newsweek" daily beast. and eve ensleer, her most recent play is "emotional creature" and the v-day movement to end

violence against women and girls. and "newsweek" daily beast senior contributing writer, michelle goldberg, author of "the means of reproduction." this, can we start with this ann romney op-ed, i thought it was an interesting documentary for a number of reasons. as a political foray to i thinkal congratulated to revive conversation that was happening earlier, which i think was the first time that the romney campaign felt they were effectively making some sort of affirmative argument in gender terms, they were basically getting their butts handed to them for weeks and months over a variety of political battles over particularly birth control. then there was of course the moment when it completely unaffiliated democratic operative on cnn said something about you know, never working a day in her life. with a clear implication about not understanding this particular pull between

negotiating these two commitments. they manufacture the controversy which then died down and now seem to be reviving. michelle, why do you think this op-ed from the strategic perspective, why was it placed in the paper? >> well obviously part of it is that they are trying to revive this controversy. they have this new superpac ad about ann romney under attack for being a mother. it's amazing mere still milking this thing. this can't only be me who kind of initially saw ann romney as a neutral figure. but who is increasingly seeing her as someone who is insufferable for the way she's milking this thing. the op-ed was totally anodine, yes, motherhood is beautiful. i found that phrase, the crown of motherhood, really kind of creepy. not just because of its like somewhat you know -- it's kind of usually authoritarian

societies that give out the cross of motherhood, awards for big families, stalin did it, hitler did it. it plays into this thing where what we, we have this kind of compact in the united states where what we deny women in social support or status or kind of economic security, we make up for in sort of insip i had condescending praise. >> i think we do the same thing, it's funny, we do the same thing with troops, another kind of cultural figure where if you look at you know, we three tours of duty, average length of deployment is increased, longer wait times in the va. the substantive lack of support is by the hero worship. and there's a similar cultural role. one of the things i found interesting about the ann romney op-ed it reads a little like a hostage video, there's a certain

degree to which, through the subtext of it, she's talking about praising it. she is honest about the difficulties, right. in the part that i'm citing, she says the day my first boy was born i felt woefully unprepared, my mother took pity and stayed with me for two weeks, that wasn't enough. as she was preparing to leave, i cried like i was the baby. i told her i wasn't ready, i had no idea what to do. people often ask me what it was like to raise five boys, i won't sugar-coat it, at times i wanted to tear my hair out. i would return to boys, hoping the house was intact. >> there's a core of genuine desperation. because you know, it is super-hard, she was raising five boys. without as admitted by mitt romney, much help from mitt romney. >> and then she left me and i was like, i knew i had to tough it up.

i had to tough it and she had done it and she had been a good mother. i was thinking, is this what we have to do with motherhood, we have to tough it up. it's the whole american, cowboy mentality. you're left alone with a baby, you have no idea what you're doing, you have no money, you have no support, but you're going to tough it up. >> and not be coddled. you're going to figure it out on your own. it happens to be a live person you're figuring it out with. you know, that's the only problem. and i think it was an interesting data i read somewhere where they interviewed children about what they felt about working parents. and the interesting thing that came up with is they weren't disturbed by the lack of time that working parents, they were disturbed by how stressed and exhausted their parents were. and it really hit me. is that really how we want to bring children into the world with, that kind of macho, we'll be sitting there like brittle and terrified. >> it actually is.

we do want as a society, we want to bring children foo the message that you're on your own. where this line between the public and private comes down. that's the broader policy framework for this. framework for this. after this quick break.rn.

enjoy the show. you should have an option, just like with car insurance. that is a really great price. that's the gang, those are the five boys. i hate to say it, but often i had more than five sons. i had six sons. and he would be as mischievous and as naughty as the other boys. he would come home and, everything would just explode again. and that's the kind of energy that he would bring home and just get them all riled up again. you know, wrestling and throwing balls and just being a kid himself. >> the subtext in that.

that was a video put up by the romney campaign. the subtext overwhelms the text. this line and that's the kind of energy he would bring home and get them all riled up again. i'm imagining you're a mother of five boys, getting them calm is basically the most difficult thing in the world. and you know, it's late at night and you have them all down and calm and then in comes dad and he's like -- >> i had six -- to me, that line it's amazing to me that the line i felt like i didn't have five boys, i had six boys, that's amazing that's not in a romney ad, and not in an obama ad. because it seems it's so incredibly damning. >> it sounds like it's 1950. it sounds so outdated. this is not the america that we live in today. and one of the things i find really disturbing about this image is, is that's not really what the american family looks like right now. one thing we would want to say, especially on mother's day, we're living in a country where when we look at women under 30, 53% of the babies born to them are born to single mothers. that is the majority of babies

born to women under 30 are born to single mothers. so that those kind of images are actually alienalienating to muc america. >> so this is the kind of ideal to which they -- they aspire. >> our society is falling to pieces, this is our world. but i think it's -- i think it's outdated and i think it's, i don't think it may be having a different effect. >> i wonder, that i think it's a really interesting point. i wonder if there's, i think there's a relationship between the degree to which the reality, the live reality of america families changes and changes and the political appeal of a model that is increasingly unattainable. those two things i think are very connected. if you look at things like teen pregnancy or rates of divorce, they're very high in the red states. those are the places to which --

and also along class lines, the elite and upper middle class have families that look more like the 1950s norm and you know, the working class and poor and even middle class have families that look less and less like that. that's, that plays all sorts of interesting roles i think in the politics. >> it's just setting up that kind of story dilution, like the leave it to beaver idea. so that the fact that your own life doesn't mirror that experience, then again makes you feel like you're somehow failing. or that you haven't lived up to this absurd notion that nobody is really living. i'm not sure any state anybody is living this because there's so much divorce and so much -- the kind of perpetuation of that notion of family. is very destructive to people who are struggling in very many different ways. >> and also there's a point to be made that you know, fathers are fathering more in america, they're spending time with their

kids. they're not an inconvenience to moms. when they come home it's like tag, you're it. take your child, i have a date with calgon. to me when i read that op-ed, i'm glad you brought up the crown thing because first thing i heard in my head was crown of thorns. but who -- holds moms in such esteem to which they are granted a crown of anything? mothers in this country do not have the luxury of i mean, esteem, you go into a restaurant, you see a woman and a baby, you go, i don't want to be there. it's comedy to talk about women and mothers on planes. we do not want to see families in this society at large. >> the fact that you would call like a kind of cheesy book from the '50s, mommy porn, that

you're suggesting it's cheap and a little tacky. >> we'll be doing two hours on "fifthty shades of gray" just a tease. one thing that complicates the picture and fascinating about this political terrain of mother hood of family, of women's roles to me the arc of progress is pretty clear for a certain period and then it gets very wavy and tangled. mitt romney's own mother ran for senate in michigan in 1970. lamented in her concession speech that gender worked against her. said it was disappointing to find that so many people close their minds just because i was a woman and told a group of students in 1971, mitt romney's mother in 1971, the role of women today doesn't begin and end with homemaking, a woman needs to contribute to society to make her life worthwhile. >> wasn't she a big supporter of

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♪ i love that song. we, i want to talk about the kind of policy framework that underlies this. the cultural conception of motherhood and family and what we do as part of the social contract, what i was talking about in the opening bit. nothing captures the fraught ideological terrain that is in conflict, that's being waged. the reason that the romney campaign thinks its an advantage to press this case, the reason they had ann romney place a op-ed is they think they have the better part of the argument about where the line between government and the public life

ends and private life begins. a perfect example are two books written, one by a prominent democrat, one by a prominent republican, hillary clinton wrote a book called "it takes a village" which got a ton of, it's a very, second producer was reading through it to find really crisp quotes. the book is a pretty anodynetome and rick santorum wrote an obvious response -- "it takes a family." that right there is the kind of division space. and it's the rick santorum conception of family that's dominant in so far as when you look at the political framework, right? >> one thing that's strange is that our imagination of what family is and the reality,

there's such a chasm and divide. we're oppressed by this pervasive fantasy in american culture which is not true in europe rand other places, where being a single mother in france and public life is not a big deal. but our stigmas and taboos here endure long after the sexual revolution, long after women have huge success in so many areas. i think the endurance of that kind of dissonance is sort of interesting. >> that plays into why part of why we can't, why we can't have nice things, why we can't have social democracy is the idea that the benefits would go to single moms, right? young black single moms, god forbid. >> it would go to them and encourage more people to live that kind of life because it wouldn't be so you know, because it wouldn't be so difficult. so you know, there's a

connection, there's always been a connection between -- the extreme social conservatism of the right and small government conservatism. i feel like people really lost that when the tea party came on the scene and people thought it was a new lib tear yab force, because it was concerned with cutting the welfare states. but from the right this is a wholistic ideology. that the reason you need to encourage stable, self-sufficient families is otherwise the welfare state will have to figure in the gaps. and the welfare state is kind of in a lot of ways to them as much of a threat as the threat of sexual immorality. or that there's a symbiotic problem. >> and i feel with the "it takes a village" "it takes a family." sometimes the village is happier than a family. sometimes there's something miserable in sort of a conventional nuclear family and

the village model where you have kid who is like staying with their aunt and hanging out with friends and in a -- >> or in day care or in a more unconventional situation, that actually might be a better situation sometimes. one of the things that one of our problems in this country is that we've sort of put this idea of it takes a family above the kind of myriad varieties of human happiness that actually exist in the world. >> i think also, that the village is much more empowering to women fundamentally. when you isolate women and you say, you will be relegated to the nuclear family inside your house, inside your home where you will be essentially disappe disappeared, you have less power. when you are in a village, you can give your child to someone so you can do something else, you can think, you can breathe. >> the idea of it takes a family

is not always, but in many cases a religious one as well that says i am the master of my dominion of my home. i am the highest to god figure in this house and i will rear up my child in the way they want to go. when you have usually in this country, we have usually christian people who want to pull their children out of schools and home school them. they have the money to keep mom at home. >> homeschooling is the ultimate example of precisely the most radical vision of this where the line between public and private is drawn. >> and rick santorum -- home schooling. >> rick santorum talking about happiness, that's so key. one of the social conservative critiques that have emerged is that post second wave feminism makes women unhappy. the expectations, here he is in his audio book making this point. >> many women have told me and surveys have shown that they

find it easier, more professionally gratifying and certainly more socially affirming to work outside the home. than to give up their careers to take care of their children. the radical feminists succeeded in undermining the traditional family and convincing women that professional accomplishments are the key to happiness. >> rick santorum was confronted about this section of his book because it sounds quite alien e alienating. >> you think? >> there was a concern about this guy about the nominee and george step nop list asked him about that question of the book. >> what do you say to people who believe that those kind of comments are going to alienate women, make you an easier candidate to beat in a general election? >> that section of the book was co-written by my wife who is a nurse and a lawyer.

>> he throws his wife under the bus. >> who he notes was a nurse and a lawyer. mother and daughter politicians and i want to talk about politics, because it's a huge part of this. why do we have the politics, partly because there's not a lot of mother politicians in the grand scheme of things, we'll talk to mother/daughter politicians after this. tdd# 1-800-345-2550 let's talk about fees. tdd# 1-800-345-2550 there are atm fees. tdd# 1-800-345-2550 account service fees. tdd# 1-800-345-2550 and the most dreaded fees of all, hidden fees. tdd# 1-800-345-2550 at charles schwab, you won't pay fees on top of fees. tdd# 1-800-345-2550 no monthly account service fees. tdd# 1-800-345-2550 no hidden fees. tdd# 1-800-345-2550 and we rebate every atm fee. tdd# 1-800-345-2550 so talk to chuck tdd# 1-800-345-2550 because when it comes to talking, there is no fee.

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go for olympic gold and go to college too. [ male announcer ] every day we help students earn their bachelor's or master's degree for tomorrow's careers. this is your moment. let nothing stand in your way. devry university, proud to support the education of our u.s. olympic team. ♪ summertime ♪ and the living is easy i love that. >> i should note that today's bump-in music provided by the mothers of the staff. house republicans this week passed a bill to replace the automatic defense spending cuts agreed to as part of last year's budget control act with $300 billion in cuts to domestic spending instead. we should just be clear there was a deal that was struck to

have penalties essentially that would cut against both political constituencies if the supercommittee didn't come to an agreement and the first thing the republicans in the house have done after the supercommittee didn't come to agreement is to welch on the deal. that's what's being proposed here. the reason they were supposed to be scared of the supercommittee not getting anything done is there would be relatively large cuts to defense. we'll still spend more money on defense than the next 20 countries combined. the cuts they're proposing is a one-to-one dollar transfer from these programs to the military include eliminating the federal social services block grant which provides hundreds of millions of dollars for child care every year. removing 1.8 million people from the federal food stamp program or s.n.a.p. which cut the number of extremely poor children during the recession in half. it would cut 300,000 children from the rolls of the children's health program and the bill would remove another 280,000

children from low income families from the free school lunch program. democrats have introduced a bill called the pregnant workers fairness act which would require employers could make reasonable workplace accommodation for pregnant women. this won't get the cover of "time" magazine because it's not as sexy as breast-feeding until they're four in the mommy wars. >> the buffett rule, we heard it was a scam it was only going to raise $50 billion and not going to put a dent in our budget crisis, but a lot of the items on this list, with $50 billion, you could eliminate the cuts to the block grant program. like suddenly kind of $50 billion becomes really important to cut out of the budget deficit when it's coming out of programs for women and children. >> i think there's a relationship between being able to pass those things as a republican and still say you're pro family.

if you skeefr of the responsibility for the family being the family itself. the responsibility of child care being internal to the household. this is not a contradiction, right? >> i think it's so much about what kind of society we want america to be. do we want it to be a nurturing society? it seems like just thinking about the program and reading about parenting and thinking about how we live in this culture, which is so capitalist and so consumer and so biased, nurturing is so antithetical to that, to say you want to live in a world where babies get taken care of, where teachers are valued, nurses are valued. it's really a way of reconceptualizing what this country actually is. >> that sounds from a conservative perspective, i'm giving the conservative argument response to that. i think in good faith, to the extent i can.

that's a society that incentivizes laysdiness. the model extends to the way that we think about parenting, right? the same way that we understand giving in to, you can over nurture your child, right? you can nurture them too much. >> some would argue that you can overnurture your child. and some would say, well, that's not the case. the world health organization recommends that children be exclusively breastfed if possible for the first six months of your life. how can you have social policy that says we want to have healthy children, decrease the rates of obesity and asthma in our children. but take yourself back to work after three weeks. because you've got yourself pregnant and it's all on you to do. that is a social policy issue that is backed up by science and we don't have policy in place to support that. >> i should note one aspect to the affordable care act, it requires employers to provide a

room for mothers to breastfeed, except for ones who have less than 50 employees. i want to bring in two women who have lived out these dilemmas. hannah pingry and her daughter, sheila pingre. i want to talk about the relationship between the kinds of policies we see and the social contract we which is very incomplete in how it responds to mothers and children and the fact that we don't have more mothers as politicians. it's a basic brute democratic fact of who we elect to represent us in state houses and in congress. >> sure, well i mean first of all, most people probably understand this, there aren't enough women in politics.

congress is now 17% women. where i'm from in maine, the legislature is less than 30% women. many of those have been mothers, but not all. we have politics still very male dominated. which means women's perspectives and mother's perspectives are very much left out. >> many of the issues you were just talking about, it feels like they're extending the war on women to the war on mothers and families. and i do think when you get you know, women who have been mothers, who are thinking about family issues, the cost of child care, the cost to feed your kid, what it takes to get a kid through school and educate them in college, women bring a different sensibility to that. there's no question, whatever party you're in. >> representative shelly pingre and hannah pingre, i want to talk more after this break.

♪ chances are ♪ 'cuz i wear a silly grin ♪ the moment you come into view ♪ congresswoman pingree, i want you to talk about how, how you got into politics. my understanding is that hannah played a role in it. but also when i think about right now, going through this myself, i have a five and a half-month-old daughter and people in my group, moms taken maternity leave, re-entering the workforce and me as a dad, figuring out time constraints, being present in my daughter's life and doing my job, politics seems like a 24-hour commitment. and i think there are social expectations of motherhood that make it hard to go to the local kiwanis club at 7:00 at night and be out of touch. i'm curious how you negotiated that. >> it's an important thing to

think about. when i was considering this, it was the furthest thing from my mind. i ran a small farm, we lived in a small town. and i took hannah to go hear pat schroeder speak. it was a big adventure, we heard pat schroeder, who was in congress at the time, one of the few women at the time, this was in '92, she said not enough good people running for office and somebody came up to me and said, you ought to think running for the state legislature. and it was the furthest thing from my mind. i was trying to put together my own working situation, our own family situation. i couldn't visualize it. and i turned to hannah and she said, you should go for it. it was an interesting kind of validation, as a mom, you worry about, i won't give enough to my kids. i had three kids, she was the oldest. so for her to say it to me, it helped me to have the opportunity to think about it to

say, maybe i could do this. in the end, i, just as you said, i've been forced to spend a lot of time away from home. sometimes i found i missed my kids more than they missed me because they were busy with their own lives. >> hannah? >> i was 14 years old, she wasn't changing diapers and my brother was a little bit younger, but you know, the three of us were thrilled for our mom, we got to go knock on doors and be involved in her campaign. which probably is how i got the political bug and why i got so involved in politics today. for me it was amazing to have a mom as a political role model. that's how we changed politics, to have more moms as political role models. >> i will say i was term limited from the legislature a year and a half ago and have a 14-month-old. it would have been an incredible

challenge to have speaker of the house with a young baby. there are some realities in politics, especially when you're at the highest level of politics and leading your party and caucus, that would be very difficult. and i could not imagine obviously having been, having a 3-month-old while being speaker of the house would have been very difficult. there are women in congress who have had babies. it's possible. my partner, my husband is very supportive and he's encouraging of the political work i'm doing now. to try to take chemicals out of children's products, but it is not an easy balance. chris, you know now, 5-month-olds, they like to make you in the middle of the night and they like to make you tired and they don't like it when you leave. there are a lot of special challenges for women who want to try to be in politics and have small children. >> i'm curious about how the conversation about supporting mom and supporting women and mothers relates to the legislation you've both been

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♪ woman don't treat me so mean ♪ i guess if you said so >> how does the conversation about women and mothers transfer into political arguments about policies is what i'm curious to hear from you, both. i want to give someone statistic that i feel that one of our producers found that to me embodies the challenges that parents of both genders face. this is child care. child care costs more than double public college tuition in new york. more than double public college tuition. and college tuition is not cheap. in 2010, the average annual cost of public tuition in new york was $5,790. child care is more expensive than public tuition in 40 states.

every mother who works outside the house has to find some way to make up those hours. it's a zero-sum gain. i don't feel we have a particularly robust political conversation about that as a political issue. absolutely true. you were talking about earlier, some of the budget cuts that we've been facing. just to sort of enhance this idea of the war on women going to be the war on mothers and families. and it's not a choice for most families today, whether or not you work outside the home and whether or not you bring in extra income, for a lot of single moms, that's the income that you need. without the support systems, whether it's child care allowance or for some families, just basic food and shelter, people can't make it in the workplace any more. the idea that this would be optional or that these are cuts we can make in a country that wants to be pro family or good on child development, it's crazy. >> we live in a state run by a

tea party governor and one of the cuts currently on the chopping block is significant cuts to the head start program. which is obviously a program for three and 4-year-olds to get a good start. but it's part of sort of a child care network. so we're obviously having a big conversation about child care costs, child care costs are acute. my husband and i are dealing with the cost of hiring a babysitter and it's significant and we do make decisions about how we're going to balance things and how we're going to manage it. and it's something that if you're working a low-wage job, i honestly don't know how people do it. the cost of child care and daily living expenses really are significant. >> one of the problems that i personally have as an american with the cuts to head start, is we see that these tend to be children who are of lower income parents, when you put them in school and you teach them, they do better academically later.

their parents tend to do better because they can go seek work, seek education. it is a policy issue when you show up, when you have children showing up to kindergarten who don't know their letters, who aren't read to, who can't write their name, and these are things that children and headstart learn. you save money later teaching the kids sooner and it's better for the family. why would you cut head start? >> i think it's important to say what you were saying before, when we say, when republicans say they're pro family, we're pro certain kinds of family. i think it's important to get behind the rhetoric and what does the language really mean. the language we use to talk about these things really shapes our thinking, it's not just words, it causes people to think about things in certain ways. the language needs to be interrogated. we're not talking about pro family, we're talking about pro some kinds of families. >> let's be clear, that's a myth

that there's these insular families today where people can just get off the grid and stay home. the truth is, almost everybody has to engage, almost everybody has to be working in the workforce today. and it's really impossible to do this. and the other side is you were saying earlier. we know so much about early childhood development, brain development, the idea that we want to be a great nation and we want to have a great workforce and a well-educated workforce that we would take away that opportunity from young kids to get the brain development, also for many kids, they need to be there to eat. they eat breakfast, they eat lunch, it's an important part of their nutrition as well. it's ludicrous to think we can cut that and have a real future for our country. >> it's politically viable enough that they're trying to do it. my question is, why is that the case, right? is there a backlash in maine for this kind of a cut or do people see it as not affecting them? is it a convenient scapegoat to say yeah, those are exactly the

kind of programs we should be cutting right now. >> well it's interesting. right now i'm hopeful there will be a backlash, that head start is a program that should not be cut. in the next couple of weeks, the maine state legislature, controlled by republicans, will be making that decision. i'm hopeful they won't, but the fear is that they will make that decision. a couple of years ago when i was in the legislature, the then senate president libby mitchell to make state funding to go to public school breakfast programs. she got an unbelievable backlash that we should be having to pay for breakfast for kids. this was from the public, so i mean i don't know. i would hope that the public wouldn't be outranled. i would hope that the public would realize taking care of kids between 0-5 is one of the most responsibilities our nation and families should have. honestly after seeing the breakfast backlash, some people's priorities are

obviously very difficult. >> congresswoman chellie pingreee and her daughter, har na pingree, thank you so much. the author of "bringing up baby" coming up. ♪ you make me happy when skies are gray ♪ [ female announcer ] you know exactly what it takes to make them feel better. ♪ you make me happy [ female announcer ] that's why you choose children's tylenol. the same brand your mom trusted for you when you were young. ♪ how much i love you [ humming ] [ female announcer ] children's tylenol, the #1 brand of pain and fever relief recommended by pediatricians and used by moms decade after decade. [ humming ]

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with me this morning, i have playright eve einsler, creator of "the vagina monologues" jamilla bay, creator of she the people. later we'll be joined by pamela druckerman, author of the bestseller, "bringing up baby" in 2010, 60% 6 women with children under the age of 1 and

71% of mothers with children under the age of 18 were were in the labor force. women still spend considerably more time caring for children than their partners do. there are only so many hours in a week and work and motherhood each make their claims on them. when did our expectations become unreasonable. a buzzy cover story in "time" magazine this week crystallizes the question. a cover which features a mom breastfeeding her 3-year-old son asks, are you mom enough. and a controversial book by a french author called "the conflict" how motherhood undermines the status of women. her book has stoked fierce debate over whether our cultural expectations of motherhood conflict with the social and political gains won by second wave feminism. this is a central question right now. socially. i should note this conversation

tends to happen in a social cohort that is very upper middle class, very privileged and highly educated. a lot of these trade-off discussions and the culture of incredibly intense time-committed mothering and the sort of professionalization of mothering in a weird way. as an activity that you bring the totality of your capacity as intellectual into. that is a conversation that's happening in a specific cohort. i don't want to overgeneralize this. because i think the conversations can get blinkered. that said, it's a real issue. it strikes me as one of the points of contention about where feminism right now and where women's equality is right now. >> a lot of times you'll hear people say you can't criticize the culture of extreme attachment parenting because women are choosing it. to a certain extent, that's true. i wouldn't criticize somebody

for breastfeeding for three and a half or whatever, although i might criticize them for doing it on the cover of "time" magazine. to me there's a difference between saying this is okay and saying this is the expectation. women aren't choosing this in a vacuum, right? there's a whole kind of social context, not an uncommon thing. where a movement that starts out as a movement for integration, in a way you could say the same thing in the civil rights movement. basically asking for kind of equality comes up against obstacles and after kind of banging its head into a brick wall, instead settles for a strategy, a validation of separatism. and you've got a generation of women who came up against the limits of integration, when you've come up against the glass ceiling at a certain point you start thinking, i can choose to stay home. i can choose to do something, value this other sphere where there aren't going to be the

same obstacles. you're going into the sphere with the professional orientation. motherhood becomes professionalized. >> or you have a lot of women who are educated and who have the means to stay home. and give all of their time and attention to their child and make their own little super baby who will get into the right schools, who will get into the right educational pathway. so that child will become a captain of industry while mozart being played. >> elizabeth calls it the child as king culture when she's criticizing. my question is, do you want that child? is that child that you're making them learn mandarin when you're two and you're monitoring every second of their free time to make sure they only have wooden toys and organic food. do you want that child? is he going to be so unbearable. >> aside from the question of

whether you're actual creating the child that you think you're creating -- >> you can't, right. >> there's a whole literature about why is there kind of a generation of narcissists. my mom was a college math teacher and so she retired. she talked about how you know, in recent years, right before she retired, she started getting phone calls from her student's parents, about their performance on tests, something that never happened in her entire career. there's a way in which you're not raising a generation of superchildren, you're raising a generation of children who can't take care of themselves. >> there's a part of the so-called attachment parenting that speaks to the issue of autonomy and doing what's best for the child and also against the violence that has happened in child rearing. one of the reasons i think a lot of people got involved in so-called attachment parenting. >> i call yourself that? >> i loosely do. >> you're not posing me on the

cover of "time" magazine. >> i'm my kid's mom. we figure out what is best for our parents, we do what is nurturing to the child. i also realize that mommy is not going to be there all the time. imt not going to hover and argue, why didn't my kid get picked for the sun in the play, he should not have been the wind. i'm not going to have those arguments, one of the things mentioned during the breaks is we need to nurture our children. we need to be gentle with them. we don't need to bring this rugged individual yulism to well, you know, cry it out, baby, you got, mommy's got partying to do or mommy's got work to do. you know, i'm not going to let you cry it out. that's part of why some parents are drawn to, i will give my child what he needs so that when he is able to be an autonomous human being, he makes good choices.

>> there are social consequences to that. >> this is important grounding em care, we don't have data for this, the most recent data we have is from 2005. nearly doubled from 1975 to 2003. time spent on child care has nearly doubled from 1975 to 2003. >> one thing when i was reading about the attachment mothering idea. many people who get into it are people who haven't been attached. who didn't have parents who nurtured them. who didn't have parents who loved them. >> or felt sufficiently loved. >> there's something to be said about rewriting the story and for living differently than you were loved and i think that's very profound. and there's something about going, i'm going to have a baby. there's this idea of women are just, i was thinking this

morning about how amazing women are. >> you were thinking that? a breaking news kyron? >> we do is so intensely and we do it with dedication. of course women are going to do child parenting amazingly and devote themselves to it. part of it is we have so much ambition that doesn't get focused. do you know what i mean? >> and if we are told that we have to be good mothers and be at home, we're going to do did 100%, part of it is to say we can do a little bit over here and do a little bit over there, so there's balance. if we're being relegated, if we're being told we're not a good mother and we're being judged, of course we're going to do that. >> can we talk about judgment and competition? those are the key underlying facts. >> it's just what's strange is how oppressive these cultures

can be toward other people and create expectations where you have to breastfeed or do certain things, even the "time" magazine cover, "are you mom enough"omen catty to other women, frankly, i don't think men carry how long you breastfeed. >> we're creating, this mother culture where you're judging other mothers and saying you're not doing it right, i'm doing it right. is she doing it right. i hear it all the time. she has weekend baby sitting. all of these strange judgments, who cares what goes on. >> who sets that up? who sets that up? when you come up with an idea like mommy wars, like who creates that term? right? i mean i, mommy war, first of all, we're not at war, we're not killing each other, war is where you shoot each other and you die, right. so this construct that gets set up. it's kind of elevated the cat fight. that somebody has an idea of like you're either a working mom

or a stay-at-home mom. >> i want to suggest those men you imagine setting up that cat fight wouldn't be able to set up the cat fight if the women weren't willing to fight each other. >> but isn't it the -- >> the energy of judgment -- >> if you turn motherhood into the main arena that peek are seeking status in. we're kind of status-seeking animals. and obviously it's going to be intensely competitive if that's where you're getting your identity from. >> we're particularly status-y animals in current culture. i want to get to the idea of raising a future captains of industry. i want to talk about after this. students and teachers get better results in ap courses. together, they raised ap test scores 138%. just imagine our potential... ...if the other states joined them. let's raise our scores. let's invest in our teachers and inspire our students.

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this is the hippest mom pick for the music today. pam la druckerman has a passing sentence in "bringing up baby" that relates to something you talked about raising a future captain of industry. i want to throw in my take, that i do think part of this bizarre competitiveness is the sense that there's a scarcity towards which we are training our children. and the scarcity is good jobs and success. >> that's correct. >> there's going to be a small group of life lottery winners or you know, captains of industry, the people with the good jobs, up at the top in this very intense pyramid that we've constructed. the subtext for a lot of this, the baby einstein, getting mandarin at two years old, the competition to get in the best day care is the fear that you're going to make some choice as a

parent, a mother particularly at age 18 months, three years, that's going to divert them from a path of obtaining the scarce resource. >> it will be all your fault, mom, you did it. you ruined my life. >> i feel that maybe i'm wrong, a society that was more equal, in which there was more expectations of middle class stability, that would be less the case. i really do. i think you would feel this less frenetic competitive -- >> except read "the lonely crowd." 1950s -- >> high water mark. >> affluent society. he's kind of writing about the same thing. in his talk about in all of his theories, he's writing about the same pressure, the same outside pressure, the international pressure and the same fear and anxiety some malaise that will befall clirld. i don't know if it's just our

culture. it's intense for economic reasons. there's the case that that there's the idea of your children going to fail. you can't protect them. >> i don't think there's anne an exodus of women from the workforce, he was writing during the time of a feminist backlash, well were told to go home to find their identity as professional mothers, to take their skills they applied to careers, to now baking bread. at the same time women were attacked by christopher lash and who was it who wrote the book about momism? you know, there was the kind these simultaneous pressures, on the one hand, make your child your career and you're ruining

them with their intense hovering attachment. >> it's sort of a different stage, it wasn't like there with women in the workforce treated in the same way. >> there were tons of women in the workforce during world war ii. >> it was sort of different than our current feminist values for obvious reasons. i don't think he was attacking women in that book, he's writing about the family and the fears. >> you seem to think, michelle, to put this in the most provocative terms. up with chris hayes "time" magazine cover that there's a fundamental reactionary substrate, to the project specifically? >> there's a place in which the radical left and the radical right meet. it's important to remember dr. sears comes from a very conservative catholic background. i think he becomes an evangelical, converts back to

catholicism. the la leche league, the la leche league, which we think of a crunchy, hippie earth mom movement. began as a right wing catholic women's organization. >> i did not know that. >> similarly natural childbirth, when we watch "mad men" and we see betty draper getting put under. twilight sleep was a feminist progressive reform against women who thought women had to suffer through childbirth. it's a reaction that started out as feminist reforms now are being, there's been a convergence. you say the -- >> it's a convergence towards essentialism. >> as the two conceptual underpinnings. >> we saw this in peer groups

about expectations of a natural childbirth. >> can choices that are individuals should make are sets of expectations that come about beginning with that, go to breastfeeding. >> i think what michelle is saying is so important the reason that these ideas have so much power in kind of a progressive world, in sushen circles and progressive circles, these really old-fashioned traditional archaic ideas have so much power is precisely they are both of those things, they are liberal and natural and left wing and green. and they also appeal to some fundamental, frightening primal conservative ideal we have about what a parent is, what a mother is, what families are. it's the convergence of the two that make it very hard to escape for almost everybody. >> there's guilt, underlying

guilt in women all the time. that you're not being natural, you're not being devoted enough, you're not mom enough. i often wonder, we get so locked into these polarized places, you know, stay at home mom, working mom, as opposed to having real discourse with each other where we can talk about the feelings that exist, there's no real space to have that. >> jamjamilla, you wrote a interesting piece about social expectations and breastfeeding after this in here, great food s a great presentation. so at&t showed corporate caterers how to better collaborate by using a mobile solution, in a whole new way. using real-time photo sharing abilities, they can create and maintain high standards, from kitchen to table. this technology allows us to collaborate with our drivers to make a better experience for our customers. [ male announcer ] it's a network of possibilities -- helping you do what you do... even better. ♪

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every communications ncer ] provider is differentlutions. but centurylink is committed to being a different kind of communications company. ♪ we link people and fortune 500 companies nationwide and around the world. and we will continue to free you to do more and focus on what matters. ♪ ♪ jamilla, you wrote a really good piece about the ways that social expectations are formed. in terms of mothering and breastfeeding, and formula particularly among peers who are african-american. i want you to just --

>> i went to a protest and wound up reporting from the protest, bare-breasted with my own nursling. a woman had been thrown out of a art museum for nursing in a corner. so washington, d.c. moms converged on the smithsonian museum and i looked around and i interviewed a lot of the african-american mothers who showed up during the three hours i was there. and the stories were the same. black women who have traditionally provided domestic work, child-rearing of other children, wet-nursing of other children, there was a time after the so-called civil rights movement -- i say "so-called" a lot. in which it was decided that formula is just as good. you need not relegate yourself to that position. our mothers did that, our grandmoms did that, we don't need to do that any more.

>> liberatory. >> and economic and scientific advancement. however, as we look at health outcomes and asthma, you know, obesity, what-not and we understand that breastfeeding can have a protective effect against that. fully, the numbers have changed, the most recent say that 61% of african-american children once they hit like six months, are no longer breastfeeding at all. black women do not breastfeed, they don't initiate at rates of any other ethnic group. don't continue at rates of any other group and a lot of that is cultural, a lot of women will tell you, these are for my husband. a lot of women tell you, i don't do that, what if the baby gets hungry in public. it's just, it's really a cultural thing that says, you don't have to do it.

it's nasty, it's probably going to be painful and it's not that good for your kids. and these things are just -- >> i want to make the point that this is not in other, there are other countries in which that is the dominant paradigm. in fact that's the elite high-status paradigm. in france, for instance. in the u.s. we have a system now where there's high correlation along racial lines and income. here's a stat. that higher income women are more likely to breastfeed. this gets at some of what these cultural expectations are at the top and the dividing line, the deep class differences in what motherhood looks like. >> some of the stuff is a luxury. it's kind of a luxury to breathfeed your baby after six months. >> how much of this has to do with accommodations that are made for people at work. >> i couldn't see the bottom line. i wonder if that's initiation rates or at what point the kids

are breastfeeding. a lot of women, we're up in the 60, high 60% of all women, african-americans included, who will initiate breastfeeding in the hospital. but a lot of women will go home with the free formula sample. if they don't have a supportive person in the home -- >> that's the other thing. >> who says, no, honey, i'm up with you, we're going to do this. >> it's super-hard. this is such a silly dumb, naive thing to say, but i will say it, anyway. you think oh, breastfeeding, that's the natural way, but we've been doing it for 100,000 years, but it's hard and stressful. >> we don't see it. we don't see it. i, i happen to have a family where babies got nursed. it was just what i saw very young. and ingrained in me. most of my own peers never saw their own mother put a baby to the breast. when you don't see it, it's not normalized and it's sexualized. >> i want to bring in a

journalist who has done a lot of great work. pamela druckerman, author of the bestselling br"bringing up bebe" it's about american parenting and the social expectations of what american mothering look like as it is about the french alternative. >> yeah, i mean the french way is in many ways interesting because it's exactly a counterpoint to the american model. you know, they're even statistics that show french mothers, you mentioned that american mothers are spending more time with their kids, it's doubled. over that time, the amount that we enjoy parenting has gone down. the same statistics show that french mothers like being parents more than american mothers do. it's partly because there isn't this expectation that we're going to monitor, that they're going to monitor their kids so intensely that they have to cheer their kids on to each next

stage of development. they don't breastfeed in france. the lowerest rate of breastfeeding in the western world. the highest birth rate. the much better health outcomes, no mommy wars and more pragmatic. the government supports moms in a way that american moms are not supported. >> how much of what we have in the u.s. at this moment is a product of a certain set of cultural expectations and how much of it is the policy framework? you talk bur child in the creche in france which is the universal day care pre-k. >> which i was terrified of. i was terrified of the french public day care. i'm sending my kid to the post office. it's wonderful, all the middle class moms are competing to get a spot. it's the preferred type of child care and of course it makes everything much easier. it makes it easier to go back to

work if you know thundershower child is well taken care of. whereas in america there's a lot of anxiety about day care for good reason, there are different standards in different states so it helps that there are all of these institutions supporting moms in france. there's a different relationship with guilt. you all were talking about guilt. and i feel like when i go back home, i feel like my american friends and me, too, i do this, too, naturally. kind of embrace guilt. we feel that you know, we're so conflicted about working, versus not spending enough time with our kids, we feel if we feel guilty about all this, it's okay to take time for ourselves. it's okay to go out to dinner with our husbands whereas french moms, they understand that there's the temptation to feel guilty. but they say guilt is dangerous, it's a trap. i don't want to go there. it will roun my good time. >> one fundamental difference, american parents are very outcome-focused. we'll do whatever it takes now. no matter how much it destroys

our weekend, to make sure that our kids are well-positioned in 20 years. the french of course want their kids to be successful. they think about what is, what is my weekend going to be like. what are these 20 years going to be like for me? they're looking for some kind of balance. >> more on balance after this. [ female announcer ] when skin meets goddess... romance happens. confidence happens. ♪ when skin meets goddess, anything can happen. introducing venus & olay, a match made in skin heaven. olay moisture bars release skin conditioners to help lock in moisture and boost your shave. while five blades get venus close. revealing smooth. renewing beauty. and goddess skin begins. only from venus & olay.

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great businesses deserve the most rewards! awesome!!! [ male announcer ] the spark business card from capital one. choose unlimited rewards with 2% cash back or double miles on every purchase, every day! what's in your wallet? we're talking about the cultural expectations in different cultures. there was something you wanted to say about how we define motherhood and specifically. >> as a step mother, and a person who chose not to have biological children. i think sometimes we have a very narrow definition of mothering. you know, i think there's so many nontraditional less restrictive ideas of mothering. i want to say something for adopting children. having adopted my son and actually adopted a few girls over the course of my travels in

the world. that there's a lot of people in the world who need nurturing and support. sometimes we all get hooked on the thing that is ours. this is my baby, this is my -- as opposed to this kind of larger community idea. there's a lot of children that are actually ours. >> i feel like our idea of family and love is so narrow. so unimaginative. what you're talking about is love can come to a child from a lot of different places, maybe hillary clinton "it takes a village" did it in a cliche way. the point remains is family and love is not necessarily blood, it's just not about blood, it's about something else. >> pamly, when you talk about being worried about sending your child to the public day care. that's a very common instinct. it points to our expectations of the quality of care that a child will get in the private setting as opposed to a public one. are there different expectations

in france? i imagine there are, because of the fact it is interwoven into family life that there are these public amenities? >> i think there's a lot more trust of day care. i asked people in day care what's your parenting philosophy. they thought it was a crazy question. everyone agrees on the basics in france, there aren't these different warring philosophies where you worry if you leave your child with someone they're going to feed them different vegetables than you believe in when i got pregnant, i feel i had to study to read all the books and decide which to follow. in france people read a couple of books, but you go with what else does. that's the benefit of being in france, it calms the whole conversation down. you don't have to worry that you picked the wrong philosophy. there's confidence in these institutions in part because they're extremely well-regulated. they're quite similar to the network of day care centers that the u.s. military runs. those are almost identical to

the way the french day care system is run. >> you said before and you say in the book, you talk about middle-class moms. vying for these slots. this conversation that happens in the u.s., mommy war stuff tends to be very specific in its class orientation, there are millions of moms that are not in a position to be reading 50 different books on mothering if they have a job that pays $10 an hour and have two kids and don't have day care. is there more continuity in a society in which there's public provisions,or do the public provisions end up being utilized by people with capital and resources and status? >> it's true. you can kinded of lobby to get a spot in the public day care. but they reserve spots for people of different income levels. so it's not that only the privileged get their kids into the public sector programs. to the contrary, there's much more of a safety net.

there's free, there are free clinics, which i've used often, that you can bring your kids to from age zero to six. you don't have to pay for childbirth, you can stay in the hospital for six days, which a lot of people do. there are certainly important class differences. but in france, in other places, in terms of child care choices people make, there are, you go on the internet and the city of paris has a list of subsidized child care options that are really appealing. anyone can access them. you have to have a computer. but you can go to an office in the neighborhood, too. >> this is michelle goldberg, i'm curious about how these policies were enacted in the first place. how much of it was out of a commitment to either kind of feminism or social justice or social security. how much of it is because france has a history of real concern about demographic decline and

there's literature about the relationship between day care and public service for mothers and the amount of children that they're well to have? >> i think france definitely had a pro natalist policy to convince women to having more kids. and it worked because france has the highest birth rate in western europe. they got this policy to work, unlike other countries like japan, where nobody listened. because they had the institutions to support women. and it's not just the institutions. it's a fact that once you have a kid, there's not the social pressure to breastfeed for a long period. in certain sectors to have nondisposable diapers and make your own baby food. all of that is considered, as elizabeth points out, burdensome for women and epidurals are extremely common. there's almost no debate in france about whether or not you're going to have an epidural when you give birth. you just do. and all of these things, whether

you like them or not, they kind of take some of the pressure off and make it easier to have a brood of kids. but i think there are long historical reasons why france has public day care. it started after the war. but we have some of the same history that america has, in america we've always had you know, it's not just attachment parenting that's made us doubt whether our kids are going to be damaged because we're away from them. it's been years we've had ambivalence whetherabout whether we should have public day care. it was considered too communistic and communalist. this is something we've been grappling with for many years. now we have all of these women in the workforce. we have pressure to work, but no good options for child care for the first five years. >> i want to talk about transforming the mommy wars to the day care wars and the daddy wars, right after this.

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than it was in the 1960s when i was growing up. when you used to be able to have mom and home and dad at work. now mom and dad both have to work, whether they want to or not and they usually have to have two jobs. weed into good child cares in society. to start a child care center not off where people live, but where they work. and that is something which we helped create. a company called bright horizons. >> mitt romney, 1994 talking about a big private equity success which was helping early funding for bright horizons, a popular and successful day care business. part of the reason i think that the conversation, there's a bunch of reasons conversation about conflict and motherhood gets overly limited. one of the reasons it gets very narrowly class focused. the other thing is there's two elements that don't get talked about when you talk about the competition for time. is one our one is day care and the other are fathers when they are in the picture. i thought this was interesting.

this is the number of hours fathers spend doing house work. and what you see is basically there's some significant gains between 1965 and 1985 and it flat lines. part of the reason that the tradeoffs have to happen is because fathers have not really stepped up in the same way. they are spending more time with their kids. panel la, i wonder if you can give us a comparative perspective on the role of fathers in all this in france. >> french fathers, you'll be even happy to know do less child care and less keening up around the house. >> but interestingly french mothers in my perspective, my view are less upset about this than american women are. i find that american women are, when you get us together in a group, after the first couple of drinks we're going to be complaining about our husbands for sure. what they don't do, there's a lot of pent-up rage oftentimes,

in france i don't find that. i think for better or worse, there isn't this dream of 50/50 equality in france. french mothers think, french women think their husbands are kind of adorably incompetent in a lot of realms, they don't think they'll be able to make doctor's appointments and buy dish towels and everyone is fine with that. there's not this battle of sexes and animosity. it makes things work better dprks not as fair. >> i think agreeing with you, there's something kind of humiliating about bringing this level of the conversation down to the mundane discourse, who is cleaning up the lego. on a fundamental level, what would simone debeuvior think about this. this has to be more important things. the amount of energy spent on this one question seems a little

overblown to me. >> as a woman i don't argue much about those because i've cultivated the adorable incompetence. the fact is that until kind of although yes, it's demeaning i would shoot myself in the head before i had a choor wheel. but at the same time the fact that we have these kind of persistent inequalities is never, ever going to change. and the way in which these kind of choices become inevitable in which it's just easier for one person to stay home. since they're home it's easier for them to do the housework. you don't have women in politics, unless you kind of address these very common things, you're not going to make the big changes. >> i want to thank pamela druckerman for being with us on this mother's day. >> what we should know for the news week ahead coming up. sure .

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week coming up. a viewer thinks you need to know the cost of raising a child to age 17 spiked 25% in the last ten years, adjusted for inflation. chief drivers of those costs, groceries and medical care, usually doesn't include the cost of college, which as we discussed on the program is rising at rates far above inflation. you should know if our society cared about moms, kids and family as much as it says it does, it would give mothers and children what they need to flourish, including medical care and daycare. while pregnant women are protected from unemployment discrimination, they aren't required to make workplace accommodations for pregnant women, sometimes necessary for a pregnant woman to stay at her job. two representatives, mather animal own ee introduce legislation tuesday, pregnant worker fairness act to rectify this. if celebrating mother's day, you should know the save the

children report, the u.s. has the least favorable environment for breastfeeding. save the children calculated a score for 36 industrialized countries, based on maternity leave laws, rights to nursing breaks at work and policy features, norway came in first, the u.s. came in last. the affordable care act requires workplaces with more than 50 workers to create rooms where women can pump or breastfeed. and there's a whole lot more needs to be done. you should know before mother's day was an occasion for cards and flowers and brunch, not that anything is wrong with brunch, it was founded as a radical call for peace. in 1870, a feminist abolitionist inaugurate rated the first mother's day with the following proclamation. arise then women of this day. arise all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be that of water or tears. say firmly we will not have great questions cited by irrelevant agencies. our husbands shall not come

reaching from carnage for car he ises and applause. our sons shall not be taken to unlearn all we taught them of charity, mercy, patience. we women of one country will be too tender of those of another to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs. from the bosom of the devastated earth, a voice goes up with our own. it stays disarm. the sword of murder is not justice. as men have often forsaken the plow and andville, let women that have left all for an earnest day of counsel. let them meet to commemorate the dead, solemnly take council as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, each bearing after his time the sacred impress. what my guests want us to know.

eve ensler, what should people know. >> i love that proclamation. i honor mothers, i honor being mothered and the way they continue to mother without recognition and value, and i hope that's transformed. in honor of julia ward howe, we are doing an event in 2013 called one billion rising, inviting one billion women on the planet raped or beaten in their lifetime, a u.n. statistic, walk out of jobs, schools, houses with the women that love them and dance. come to v day.org. get your posse. for women, get 15 women and come dance. >> michelle goldberg. >> i did a story about melinda gates who is putting the force of her charity behind family

plannings. one of her numbers is that 100,000 women die after pregnancies they did not want. and so you should know this week the house voted to drastically cut aid for family planning, $100 million -- >> what should folks know. >> for the first time in history, nato is meeting in the u.s. and not in washington, d.c. they'll be in chicago. there will be a lot of talk of peace, particularly looking at afghanistan. >> what should folks know? >> i want to recommend a book, are you my mother. it is a bill yant memoir about fiercely judging your mother, understanding your mother, and also respecting what she gave you. allison beck dell.

thank you all, and thank you for joining us. we will be back next weekend, saturday and sunday at 8:00 eastern time. it will include ezra klein. get more info on tomorrow's show on facebook and sign up for my web chat at noon eastern wednesday. go to twilight of the elites on facebook for appearances, discussing my book. coming up next, melissa harris-perry. >> i can't hear that question about are you my mother without thinking you're not my mother, you're a scary snort! this mother's day we look at president obama's momma and mitt romney's mom and what they can tell us about their governing. also, a look at the sad and growing crisis of moms in prison and broken families they leave behind and what happens to the children of moms in prison. and we're going to continue to

talk same sex marriage because mitt romney, even though he said he didn't want to talk about t he talked about it. >> that's up next. see you next week on up. [ male announcer ] the inspiring story of how a shipping giant can befriend a forest may seem like the stuff of fairy tales. but if you take away the faces on the trees... take away the pixie dust. take away the singing animals, and the storybook narrator... [ man ] you're left with more electric trucks. more recycled shipping materials... and a growing number of lower emissions planes... which still makes for a pretty enchanted tale. ♪ la la la [ man ] whoops, forgot one... [ male announcer ] sustainable solutions. fedex. solutions that matter. [ dog ] [ male announcer ] we found it together.upbeat ] on a walk, walk, walk. love to walk. yeah, we found that wonderful thing. and you smiled. and threw it. and i decided i would never, ever leave it anywhere.

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