"America's Mom"

Sen. Katie Britt’s post-SOTU speech offered American mothers a political vision of nativism and natalism, at the expense of their material needs and reproductive freedoms.

GOP talking points that circulated before Sen. Katie Britt’s State of the Union response likened her to “America’s mom.”

“She’s one of us,” the suggested Republican talking points read. “That’ll be families’ takeaway watching this.”

The preemptive praise turned out too optimistic. Britt’s delivery—a breathy-weird MomTok affectation, punctuated by abrupt turns into debate-club cadence—earned pans from her own party before she even finished speaking. But behind the dunk-worthy performance was an even more off-putting message. Britt’s speech contained two core arguments: a racist refrain about the supposed threat (often explicitly sexual) from immigrants, and an empty appeal for American mothers to join in the Republican movement. 

Broadcast from Britt’s unsettlingly empty greige kitchen, the speech offered American mothers a political vision of nativism and natalism, at the expense of their material needs and reproductive freedoms.

The Republican party needs support from mothers. It’s the electoral necessity behind well-networked groups like Moms for Liberty, which use school board politics to recruit mothers into right-wing activism. 

(“I have been trying for a dozen years to get 20- and 30-year-old females involved with the Republican Party, and it was a heavy lift to get that demographic,” disgraced Florida politician Christian Ziegler, husband of Moms for Liberty co-founder Bridget Ziegler, told the Washington Post in 2021. “But now Moms for Liberty has done it for me.”)

Britt’s speech leaned into that recruitment drive, from the direct address to moms (“I want to make a direct appeal to the parents out there and in particular to my fellow moms,” she said) to the choice to deliver that address from a kitchen.

“She was picked as a housewife, not just a senator,” fellow Alabama Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville told HuffPost. 

Britt is not a “housewife.” She is one of the most politically influential women in the nation. But the conservative project has little patience for women’s power, unless aggressively tempered by performances of passivity and domesticity. (Relatedly, I recommend this essay on Britt and the childlike “fundie baby” voice, which explains some of her interesting intonation.) That’s why her address showed her enclosed in her home, making frequent reference to “kitchen tables just like this one” (three times!) as the real seat of women’s political domain. 

Nor is Britt the only recent right-wing woman to take on the moniker of “America’s mom.” Sherronna Bishop, a former campaign manager for Rep. Lauren Boebert, uses the name for herself on social media and on podcasts, where she’s a leading voice promoting conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. Bishop, too, has influence; in an affidavit about an alleged scheme to leak voting machine data, Bishop is named as a participant, though she has not been charged with a crime. The decision to label influential Republican women as “America’s mom” is little accident. In political circles that champion male leadership, “mom” is an acceptable form of female authority, a “little ol’ me” protestation against one’s own power while (in Britt’s case) very literally acting as the face of the GOP.

That projection of a fragile and housebound femininity (and let’s be honest: specifically the white femininity that has made a signifier of Britt’s exact kind of kitchen cabinet) contrasted with Britt’s invocation of brutal rapes and murders by foreign men. Britt “as-a-mom”ed the murder of an adult woman by an undocumented immigrant, though women are far more likely to be murdered by romantic partners. Britt implied President Joe Biden bore responsibility for the case of a woman who’d been sex-trafficked as a child, though Britt neglected to mention that the trafficking victim had been exploited in Mexico during the George W. Bush administration. 

American women, their identities bound up in motherhood, face an urgent physical and sexual threat from immigration, Britt’s speech suggested. She called on women to join the GOP to push back on that supposed threat. And she offered her own, more optimistic dream of the future (“our best days are still ahead”) that begins “around kitchen tables just like this, with moms and dads just like you.”

That family-centric vision requires the reproductive labor of women. But while Britt hinted vaguely at the challenges facing American mothers, her critiques were divorced from the material underpinnings of those struggles. She mentioned “sky high childcare costs” but did not reference her own party’s disdain for (and in fact, active plans to further reduce) publicly funded childcare. She assured watchers that the GOP “strongly support[s] continued nationwide access to in-vitro fertilization,” without mentioning that the “fetal personhood” legislation popular within her party would not only prohibit IVF but abortion.

Her speech’s strands of anti-immigrant nativism and misogynist pro-natalism came together in a  bizarre reference to a mythic pioneering American past. 

“Never forget we are steeped in the blood of patriots who overthrew the most powerful empire in the world,” Britt said in the segment of her speech directed at mothers. “We walk in the footsteps of pioneers who tamed the wild.”

People—mothers, no less!—lived in those “wilds” before white settlers waged centuries of colonial campaigns to crush indigenous Americans, but Britt probably does not view Manifest Destiny as an “immigration” movement.

The reference to pioneering reminded me of writer Gaby Del Valle’s recent essay on tradwives and the “pioneer burlesque” aesthetic that supports racist panics about immigration and white birth rates.

“The prosperity that pioneers had been promised was racially exclusive by design,” Del Valle writes of the era that tradwife influencers seek to invoke through manicured TikToks featuring large families and golden fields of wheat.

“The Free Soil movement offered homesteads to white settlers and white settlers alone, at the expense of both indigenous and Black people. Even so, by 1890, birth rates among Americans of Anglo-Saxon and Nordic descent had declined so drastically, in part due to urbanization, that social scientists and politicians spent the next thirty years sounding the alarm about ‘race suicide’ and urging women of so-called old stock to have more children.”

It’s a thriving form of racism that sees birth as a part of a zero-sum scramble for territory. It tells white women that their path to prosperity lays not in elevation of rights and resources for all women, but in hardening borders, hiding in the home, and committing fully to the projects of domesticity and baby-making.  It promises white women security—not through solidarity with other women globally, but at the expense of other populations.

You’re not getting state-funded daycares, the argument goes, so you’d better get really good at being a homemaker. “Wife and mother,” after all, is Britt’s “job that matters most,” she told viewers.

And if, like women have inevitably done throughout history, you do achieve political influence, you’d better learn to express it in non-threatening terms. Maybe give a speech from your kitchen.

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One parting PSA: I’m on the road, so expect my next installation mid next week. Okay, I love you, bye!