Meet Anna from Finland, Tsukasa from Japan, Sarah from the United States and Chelsea from Kenya: four real women navigating their first year of motherhood in different countries with different cultures, dealing with individual struggles as they confront one shared experience. In “Four Mothers: An Intimate Journey through the First Year of Parenthood in Four Countries,” international journalist Abigail Leonard explores how programs such as paid leave, universal daycare, reproductive health care and family tax incentives – or the lack thereof – affect the day-to-day lives of parents. Leonard presents a personal and empathetic portrait of early motherhood around the world. “Four Mothers” came out Tuesday, and Leonard speaks Monday at Harvard Book Store. We interviewed her Friday; her words have been edited for length and clarity.
How did this idea come about?
From my own experience. I moved to Tokyo for my husband’s job when I was six months pregnant with my first baby. In retrospect, it was sort of a bold decision to move when you’re having your first kid, but we did it. I gave birth to him there, and then we ended up having two more kids, so I was working out new motherhood in a context that was totally different from the one in which I had been raised. Parenthood and the approach to gender roles are pretty different there than in the U.S. There’s a lot of social support for parents there, but a huge bulk of the responsibility falls on the moms, which is challenging. I came back to the U.S. and encountered American parental culture, and it was interesting to see how the situation is the flip side of the Japanese problem. Women in the U.S. have a lot of professional opportunities but are also expected to be mothers without the kind of support that Japan provides, and it made me think about how culture and policy impact the daily lives of mothers. You can’t disentangle motherhood from politics, and I became interested in how this is done around the world. Are there any places that get it right? What can we learn from other places? What is the daily experience of motherhood like in different places around the world? I found four mothers who were willing to participate in four countries I was interested in, and it went from there.
How did you choose which countries to include, and how did you find these women?
I wanted to be geographically representative. I wanted someone from Asia, someone from Africa and someone from Europe, particularly someone from the Nordic countries, because they have done so much work around family policy, and I knew I would include the U.S. I chose Kenya because it’s growing, it’s dynamic, it’s really youthful and it has high birth rates compared to these other places, so I thought that was a really interesting place to look. In Kenya and in Japan, there are all these traditional systems that are now giving way to modern systems, which I thought would be interesting as well. For the women, I wanted to find first-time mothers, ideally, who were most representative of where the world’s population is, so I looked for people who were middle class and in urban settings. I also wanted to find women who were all giving birth in January 2022, which was a pretty specific requirement. I worked with local reporters in those countries to help me find the women, and they did a great job. I talked to a couple people in each category in some of the countries; I really wanted people who were going to be open about their experience and willing to commit to the project for a year, and these women were totally on board. It was a lot, and they did all end up sticking with it, which was great.
How often did you speak with them? What kinds of relationships did you form?
I did one really long interview with each every month, but I was in touch more than that and via text. I had the same reporters who helped me find them go to their homes and take videos and pictures and do interviews, so I had all that to use as well, and I visited them in person and got a lot more color actually being there with them. The reporter-subject relationship is funny in some ways, because we’re not friends, exactly, but we do have this pretty intense connection. I know so much about their lives and they’re sharing so much with me. I really enjoyed all of them. They’re each amazing women, and I loved talking to them. It’s a really lonely time for a lot of people, and so I think it was also probably satisfying for them to have someone who was checking on them and who was interested in the day-to-day experience. Early motherhood can be sort of grueling, and also narrow and insular, because you’re just inside with your baby. Someone asking you, “How is it? What are the challenges?” can be so nice. I hope they got something out of that as well. And I give them a lot of credit for being open and being truly bought in. I think they all understood what I was doing, which was trying to highlight this really important, intense experience that is often overlooked, and I think it was meaningful for them on some level.
What were the biggest differences and similarities you noticed between the womens’ experiences?
There was such a universality around birth and being a mom. I remember Chelsea from Kenya, who lives in Nairobi, and Sarah from the U.S., who lives in Salt Lake City, saying after giving birth, “I can’t believe I’m someone’s mom now,” and I thought it was so funny that they said the exact same thing verbatim. It summed up the feeling I think a lot of people have – like, whoa, I am a mother. It’s really earth-shattering. In terms of things that were different, a lot of them had to do with policy. The place they happened to be and the policies that existed to support them, or didn’t, made for a lot of big differences. Chelsea and Sarah had three months’ leave, but Chelsea’s was fully paid and Sarah’s, in America, was not. She was a teacher and she had to work overtime shifts to pay for the birth and the time off she was going to take, which caused a lot of stress. That was something the other women didn’t have to deal with. Going back after three months of leave, paid or not fully paid, was a hard transition for both women. They were doing sleep training, which was tough, and a big part of their lives became breast pumping and finding time to pump. Someone walked in on Chelsea while she was pumping in her office, and that was sort of traumatic, because she was half naked and some guy walked right in. Sarah had to share a nursing room with six other nursing moms who work at her school. The whole thing was hard. On the other hand, the Finnish woman, Anna, and the Japanese woman, Tsukasa, had much longer paid leave. They had more time with their babies to adjust to new motherhood and then come out of it and go back to work, so that was a more seamless process, and they also both had universal day care. They seemed so much calmer than the other mothers because their lives simply weren’t as stressful. For instance, those women never used breast pumps because they just didn’t have to – they were done nursing by the time they went back to work. You don’t think of breast pumps and the stress of that as being downstream from lack of paid leave, but the day-to-day hassles really do stem from policy.
The U.S. stands out for being the only country in the book – and one of only seven countries in the world, many of them small Pacific island nations – to not have paid family leave. Do you think there’s hope for developing U.S. pro-family policies?
These policies in other places were produced by female activism. In Kenya, for example, there was a lot of female activism and women in Parliament who pushed for it, and that was what got them paid leave. And for 100 years in the U.S., there’s been a push for public day care here. It existed during World War II, and then it was dismantled, which caused parents to protest in the streets. One of the reasons they couldn’t keep it open was because the federal government couldn’t decide whether or not to give into requests from Southern states that it be segregated. So racism basically damned day care at that point. Then people pushed for it again in the 1970s during the women’s movement, and Richard Nixon actually campaigned on it and it was going to happen – it was passed by both houses of Congress – but church groups got upset about women leaving home to work. There was all this dialogue about how public day care was going to attack youth, with many of the same right-wing talking points we hear today. Nixon ended up giving into the conservative right and vetoing it. So there has been action taken by people in this country who are interested in good family leave, and that’s important to center. As we move forward, it needs to be not only mothers pushing for it. We need fathers involved, people without kids, older people whether or not they’ve had kids, and it’s essential that this isn’t state-by-state, but that it’s something that everyone has access to. I am hopeful and I do believe it’s possible. Other countries have done it, and it’s totally feasible here, so I don’t want us to give up on the U.S. It’s just going to take some amount of work on the part of families who would benefit and their allies.
Abigail Leonard reads from “Four Mothers” at 7 p.m. Monday at Harvard Book Store, 1256 Massachusetts Ave., Harvard Square, Cambridge. Free.
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