Crucially, motherhood can itself be a vehicle of social change, as well as a sphere of individual transformation. Mothers are overlooked in history but, as the writer Anna Malaika Tubbs shows in her book Three Mothers, about the mothers of James Baldwin, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, mothers are the first teachers, the first leaders, the first caretakers. As the writer Angela Garbes argues in her book Essential Labor, motherhood can be a kind of creative rebellion. There is power in parenting that teaches children to challenge the harms of the status quo.
