‘Impossible to be a mom’: new film shines light on how America fails its mothers

Documentary No Country for Mothers details how US moms lack support, paid leave and childcare help – and hopes to inspire push for action

When Reshma Saujani set out to make a documentary, she was clear from the outset: it would not be released on streaming platforms, or at film festivals.

Instead, No Country for Mothers – a new movie about how moms across the US are being failed – is being screened by hundreds of the subject themselves, nationwide, in person.

Brittney Walker is hosting a screening at a community poolhouse in Arizona. Joanna Carolina Berry rented out a theater in Georgia. Stephanie Valdez booked a library room in Nevada.

Saujani, the film’s executive producer, and the founder of advocacy organizations Moms First and Girls Who Code, said moms will often watch or read something at 10pm, after work and chores and parenting, by themselves, then get “pissed off in isolation”. But not this movie.

She wanted people to watch together, and get inspired to take action.

“We’ve been intentionally divided and distracted through culture wars, and mostly I think a lot by politicians, and now I would say influencers and tech companies,” Saujani told the Guardian at a screening in Minneapolis in June. “And so I think that the only way to beat back the culture wars is to get moms to come together.”

The documentary – focused on how mothers so not have adequate support, leave or childcare – calls for a unified push for paid leave and childcare funding. It walks through decades of failures to enact policies for families, featuring women across the political spectrum.

Hillary Clinton notes in the film how Congress passed a childcare bill in the 1970s, only for then president Richard Nixon to veto it.

The priority is childcare and paid leave, according to Saujani. Much of the country is increasingly acknowledging childcare as an economic issue, and some states have stepped up to create paid programs, she said. Still, Trump recently said it was “not possible” to address funding at the federal level, and cut off access to payments to blue states over fraud concerns.

“We can’t take care of daycare,” he said in April. “We’re a big country. We have 50 states. We have all these other people. We’re fighting wars. We can’t take care of daycare. You [have] got to let a state take care of daycare, and they should pay for it, too.”

In another scene, Saujani herself asks Trump about childcare funding , an answer he bungled. “They had no fucking clue how to answer that question,” she says.

Introducing the film in Minneapolis, Saujani told a crowd of dozens of mostly women that America makes it “impossible to be a mom” by pitting women against each other – working moms versus stay-at-home moms, trad wives versus girl-boss feminists. The goal is to keep moms distracted with culture wars, rather than united over policies they agree on, like paid leave or universal childcare, Saujani suggested.

But the movie has a record-breaking number of producers listed in its credits – the thousands of moms who shared their stories or hosted screenings.

“They know that the moment that we choose our power over their blame, it’s over for them,” Saujani said. “This film is gasoline, and we are the match. So, let’s burn it down and build back America to what should have always been: a country for mothers.”

‘Let’s burn it down’

The film features a Turning Point USA summit for women, focus groups of moms weighing what would help them most, and interviews with mothers at their homes about how they struggle to keep up. Saujani said she has intentionally shown up in places where she – and her allies on the left – may not agree politically. The “easy thing”, she said, would have been to go to Turning Point and think: “Look at these crazy people.”

It’s hard for her, as a daughter of refugees, to talk to people who she knows do not support her father’s right to live in the country. But in order to win on these issues, she needs to, she said.

“I want to be in a room full of people who subscribe to Evie magazine,” said Saujani, referring to the rightwing women’s magazine. “I want them to watch this. I want to hear what they have to say.”

Alice Mann, a Democratic member of the Minnesota state senate who authored the state’s new paid leave law, said in a panel after the Minneapolis screening that the US is in a period of backlash to women’s advancement, pointing to the overturning of Roe v Wade .

The amount of work to pass the paid leave law in Minnesota was “absolutely astounding”, she said, adding that not all Democrats were on board and no Republicans voted for it. One male senator told her he did not like the paid leave policy, she said, because he believed women in their child-bearing years should be at home taking care of kids, not working.

“I’m hopeful that the backlash and the erosion of our rights is going to come to a point where it’s going to light that fire that we need to then turn around and get to that turning point,” said Mann.

‘Nobody told me’

For mothers hosting screenings around the country, the film presents an opportunity to discuss issues that can sometimes be taboo or seen as individual problems rather than societal gaps.

At a playground with a friend when her first child was a baby, Saujani was struggling with breastfeeding as she returned to work. She felt like the burden of parenthood fell more squarely on her than her husband despite marrying “probably the most feminist man you could marry”.

When she told her friend that she felt like she “lost all respect and all value the minute I popped out a baby”, Saujani said they replied: “Me too.”

“I was like, ‘Why didn’t anyone tell us?’ I feel like nobody told me,” she said.

Meanwhile, Brittney Walker, a mother of six who grew up Mormon, said she has seen her views on motherhood change as she left the church. But throughout motherhood, she’s experienced the push and pull of working versus taking care of her kids. She’s hosting a screening in Phoenix. The group she invited is politically mixed: former Republicans who left the church, conservative family members, people whose politics she doesn’t know.

“It’s hard to imagine anything being unifying right now, but I’m hopeful,” Walker said. “If there’s any hope, any chance of people starting to have conversations and see things eye to eye in any way, and have less division, this is a potential way.”

Joanna Carolina Berry, a mom in Atlanta, said she was told at a previous employer that she’d never be able to do her job pregnant or once the baby came, a traumatizing entry into motherhood that left her feeling betrayed. At the time, she didn’t talk about it publicly out of fear. When she hosted a screening at a theater, where the audience discussed the movie for two hours afterward.

“It really does take a village, and they keep telling us about the village, but they won’t give us the address,” she said. “And so my goal and my mission is to create the village that they’ve been talking about.”

People can speak about paid leave and childcare across the political divide, Berry believes, because the system isn’t working for anyone. “At the end of the day, babies aren’t born Republican or Democrat,” she said.

Stephanie Valdez, a news creator who runs a podcast for girls’ empowerment, rented out out a a library room in Las Vegas.

“I understand that this is a very complicated issue,” she said. “But also I’m getting really tired of hearing and seeing people say, ‘Oh, it’s too complicated to support our families, it’s too complicated to support parents, to support children,” when we’re supporting a lot of other things and fast-tracking them super quick.

“How come families who are paying taxes, who are raising the future – how come we’re not part of the conversation?”