Praise

Revolutionary Mothering is a powerful collection of stories that affirm mothering as the bridge to radical futures.

– Journal of the Motherhood Initiative

All of these narratives reveal the revolutionary message of social change, alongside the everyday and visceral realities of mothering, showing how it is time we recognize the powerful political potential within these everyday acts of caregiving and love.

– Canadian Woman Studies/les cahiers de la femme

Revolutionary Mothering has many must-read essays.

– Herizons Magazine

Revolutionary Mothering is a love offering from diverse women of color around the globe—queer, immigrant, activist, feminist, poets, workers. An urgent call for radical, transgressive, political, defiant mothering, co-editors Alexis Pauline Gumbs, China Martens, and Mai’a Williams provide an antidote to obligatory, compulsory motherhood which is pioneering and liberating.

– Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Anna Julia Cooper Professor of Women’s Studies at Spelman College

Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines is the revolutionary Black and Brown, queer and trans, disabled, non and many partnered parenting manual manifesto we have been waiting for. I am so grateful to see this book in the world, collecting pieces of work I have soaked up eagerly when I read them online, in zines, as handouts in workshops and in now out of print magazines. “Love is lifeforce” is a line June Jordan said, presented in an essay of hers published here for the first time. That phrase has been on my lips since I read it. This book is revolutionary, marginalized, resisting mama/parenting love lifeforce magic.

– Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, author of Dirty River, Love Cake, and Consensual Genocide

This collection is a treat for anyone that sees class and that needs to learn more about the experiences of women of color (and who doesn’t?!). There is no dogma here, just fresh ideas and women of color taking on capitalism, anti-racist, anti-sexist theory-building that is rooted in the most primal of human connections, the making of two people from the body of one: mothering.

– Barbara Jensen, author of Reading Classes: On Culture and Classism in America

This is the book for readers who know mothering is not just about a baby and a mother or parents in an isolated suburban nursery, but that mothering happens in a context of generations, a context of racial history, and in a spiritual context; that it takes place from the shore line to the front line, in times of scarcity and abundance; that it is queer and love-filled. Here, revolution, love, and mothering are an inseparable unity.

– Faith Holseart, coeditor of Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts of Women in SNCC

Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines is juicy, gutsy, vulnerable, and very brave. These women insist on having their children in a society that does not welcome them, in a world that is rapidly falling apart. Their dream for their children, based on their love of them, encompasses the sorrow and the joy that mothers everywhere, whether human, animal, or plant, feel at this time. A radical vision, many radical visions of how to mother in a time of resistance and of pain.

– Alice Walker, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and activist

For women of color, mothering—the art of mothering—has been framed by the most virulent systems, historically: enslavement, colonialism, capitalism, imperialism. We have had few opportunities to define mothering not only as an aspect of individual lives and choices, but as the processes of love and as a way of structuring community. Revolutionary Mothering arrives as a needed balm.

– Alexis De Veaux, author of Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde

There are some books that are considered to be necessary and needed because they speak to the issues that guide our heart and situate our world. Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines is one of those books. Although it is primarily written for mothers of all ages, the issues that are raised—about family, love, struggle, sacrifice, and acceptance—are universal as they speak to the revolutionary that exists within all of us. It is the book that you will turn to again and again, the one that will become a lifestyle handbook in your home, and the one that you will recommend as a lifeline when folks feel that they have nothing left to give either to themselves or to others. It is the book that mothers have been waiting for.

– Karsonya Wise Whitehead, phD, author Notes from a Colored Girl: The Civil War Pocket Diaries of Emilie Frances Davis and Letters to My Black Sons: Raising Boys in a Post-Racial America

there is an artform in the nurturing of life. when we think of the word “revolutionary”, what often comes to mind is a warrior with a roar of “NO” on their lips, moving against the forces of oppression. and there is this other force, the soil for the seed, the water for the green and fragile form, the wisdom to listen, the question that climbs under the cover where you cower away from the psychological and socioeconomic monsters, the shoulder with a collarbone cup for teas. the soft voice whispering, and believing, that who you are is marvelous and miraculous and irreplaceable. this collection offers us voices from those living into and redefining the act of mothering—in your hands is gift after gift of lessons learned on an intergenerational front line. listen to those who hold hands with the future—herein lies everything.

– Adrienne Maree Brown, co-editor of Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories From Social Justice Movements

Through Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, China Martens, and Mai’a Williams have acted as parteras communitarias, midwifes of words and experiences. This collection reflects, documents, and carries on an ancient and living legacy of practicing and defining motherhood beyond the constraints of the biological. As someone who has been living and writing about mami’hood, the intersection of race, class, gender, sexuality and activism through the lens of mothering, this book reads and feels like a shared collective deep breath, a shared chant/cancion of affirmation, reclamation, and transformation.

– Maegan “la Mamita Mala” Ortiz, NYRican mami media maker

Since I am a “non bio/mothering” female, who finds the idea of something growing in, then popping out of my body repugnant, nauseating, and depressing to even contemplate, it comes as a great and refreshing surprise that I honestly enjoyed this intense, vibrantly inspiring collection about ‘radical mothering’. Not just enjoyed but learned and totally admired the range of eclectic essays and approaches, as well as the brave, wonderful, trailblazing writers. Recommended for any passionately thinking person who cares about the quality of life in the near or distant future. For people who want to make a major, serious difference; for revolutionaries on a most profound and basic level.

– Doris Davenport, poet/writer/educator and one of the original contributors to This Bridge Called My Back