Fight Like a Mother

How a Grassroots Movement Took on the Gun Lobby and Why Women Will Change the World

Shannon Watts

• Publisher: HarperOne
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780062892638
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Advocacy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Shannon Watts was a stay-at-home mom folding laundry when news of the tragic shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary flashed across the television screen. In one moment, she went from outraged to engaged and decided to do something about it. What started as a simple Facebook group to connect with other frustrated parents grew into Moms Demand Action, a national movement with millions of supporters and a powerful grassroots network of local chapters in all 50 states. Shannon has been called "the NRA's worst nightmare"—and her army of moms have bravely gone up against the gun lobby, showing up in their signature red shirts, blocking the hallways of congress with their strollers, electing gun sense candidates and running for office themselves, proving that if the 80 million moms in this country come together, they can put an end to gun violence.

Fight Like a Mother is the incredible account how one mother's cry for change became the driving force behind gun safety progress. Along with stories of perseverance, courage, and compassion, Wattsshines a light on the unique power of women—starting with what they have, leading with their maternal strengths, and doubling down instead of backing down. While not everyone can be on the front lines lobbying congress, every mom is already a multi-tasking organizer, and Shannon explains how to go from amateur activist to having a real impact in your community and beyond. Fight Like a Mother will inspire everyone—mothers and fathers, students and teachers, lawmakers, and anyone motivated to enact change—to get to work transforming hearts and minds, and passing laws that save lives.

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Use MOMentum

During the first few days after Sandy Hook, everyone was waiting for the NRA to issue a statement. Yet NRA leaders stayed strangely silent. I, along with so many of the other women I was now connected to as my Facebook page grew by hundreds of people a day, took the organization’s delay as a sign that it “got it”—that this shooting had gone too far and it would finally realize it was time to make it harder for dangerous people to gain access to guns. It seems so naive, even laughable, that we thought this—especially knowing what I know now about how there appears to be no bottom to the NRA leaders’ deranged commitment to removing all legal restrictions to gun ownership. But that’s why, when the NRA announced a press conference for December 21, 2012—a full week after the massacre—I couldn’t help but feel hopeful and even a little excited to go to the broadcast studio in downtown Indianapolis to provide an on-camera reaction to its statement on MSNBC.

As I sat off camera, listening to NRA executive vice president and CEO Wayne LaPierre speak through my earpiece, I was incredulous. First, he blamed music videos, movies, video games, and the media for school shootings. Next, he called for creating a national database of the mentally ill. Then he uttered the infamous line, “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” And he ended by proposing a nationwide effort to put armed officers in every school and said the NRA would provide the training, free, as a gift to the country.

By the time he was done talking, I had gone from shocked to pissed. Which is why, when a reporter from USA Today got ahold of me on my phone minutes later, I desperately wanted to say something that was going to get heard; something that reflected how, as a mother, I was offended and in full-on mama bear mode; something that essentially said, How dare you? And so I told the reporter, “[The NRA is] about to see a tsunami of eighty-four million angry moms coming out at them. Angry moms like they have never seen before.”

Those words came out of me in a moment of maternal fire, and ever since, they’ve served as a beacon for Moms Demand Action. Granted, my Facebook page was less than a week old, but I knew that American moms would not let this stand. That outrage has been instrumental in helping us grow quickly and stay strong.

Society frowns on angry women—we’re often described as being shrill or unhinged; we’re called harpies, bitches, and worse when we let our fury show. But those big emotions that offend so many are key ingredients for transformation. As a mom, there is likely always some kind of injustice in the world making you feel rage or anguish or both. Whatever emotion is pulling at your heartstrings, go with it. Those intense feelings aren’t meant to torture you, or to make you feel disempowered, but exactly the opposite. Any heartache you may be feeling about where the world is headed means one thing: it’s time to go from outraged to engaged.

All you have to do is decide to heed the call—you don’t need training, prior experience, or even a lot of time. So many of the active volunteers of Moms Demand Action, myself included, are accidental activists—we were never particularly politically active, and we certainly never imagined we’d become leaders in the gun safety movement. In fact, very few of us would have said we had the extra bandwidth to become activists. But we all felt called to action by a moment that made us realize we could no longer stand on the sidelines.

The volunteers who’ve joined Moms Demand Action have each had their own moment that spurred them into action: whether it was hearing about yet another mass shooting, or losing a friend or family member to gun violence, or sending their kids to school and finding out that lockdown drills have become a routine part of an American education. Most mothers cannot fathom that their kids—even preschoolers and kindergartners—will regularly spend part of their school day rehearsing for the possibility that someone with a gun will come into their school and murder as many people as possible.

You may not see yourself as an agent of change. (Yet.) After all, you’re probably plenty busy taking care of your kids and making a living. You might think you don’t have the time, energy, or guts to be an activist. Well, I have two words for you (and I say them with love): Stop that! You have so much potential to effect change—more than you know.

I’m not the only one who thinks so. I had the great pleasure and honor of interviewing Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi for this book, and here’s what she had to say to me about the power of moms: “Being a mom, what are you? You’re a diplomat, focused on interpersonal relationships. You’re a chef. You’re a chauffeur. You’re a problem solver. You’re a nurse. You’re a health-care provider. You do so much, and that’s just with the children, not to mention the other aspects of family. And moms bringing those collective skills to an issue make us unstoppable. Never bet against moms—we are organized, mobilized, and determined to advocate for our children’s safety.”

The power of mothers to effect change is not a new phenomenon: women have been the secret sauce in the progress we’ve made on many social issues throughout history. Just look at Prohibition. In the 1800s, chronic drinking in the United States had contributed to many social problems, including the abuse of women and children. Eventually, women began to organize, which gave rise to the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. Because sobriety was considered a Christian value, women—then the religious standard-bearers of American families—were allowed to be on the front lines of the war to eradicate alcohol. Women never looked back and continued fighting political battles in America to end child labor, expand voting rights and civil rights, stop drunk driving—all the way up to exposing the water crisis in Flint, Michigan. It’s almost always women who are leading the charge for social change, and gun violence prevention is no different.

What Is MOMentum?

We use the term MOMentum a lot in our planning meetings and everyday conversations with each other, because it reminds us that Moms Demand Action is an organization of moms and helps us remember to be loud and proud about that fact. Because the truth is, no matter what race or socioeconomic class we are, we women—especially those of us who are middle-aged (like I am) or older—are not paid much attention in this country, despite the fact that we do so much of the heavy lifting. Seeking to build MOMentum is about giving ourselves the chance to lead and bring about change on the issues that matter to us. It’s about always remembering that although we are moms, we are also activists—and those two roles are not conflicting. Rather, they each strengthen the other.

You don’t need to chain yourself to a fence outside the White House or be handcuffed by security guards to be an effective activist. These days, you don’t even need to leave your house. Many of our volunteers have only a few minutes here or there in a typical week to devote to the cause. Still, it matters when they wear their Moms Demand Action T-shirts while running errands, or send emails during lunch breaks, or fire off a tweet before bed. From the very beginning, we’ve advocated something we call naptivism—a term inspired by a volunteer who made a video while her child was taking a nap to show how to call your member of Congress and then posted it to social media. Some activism is always better than none. Every action, no matter how small, is like drips on a rock—over time, they can carve a canyon through even the thickest, most immovable layer of rock.

Why Moms Make the Best Activists on Earth

Everyone can get engaged in the world. Even moms. Especially moms.

You may not realize just how powerful we moms are. After all, it’s an undeniable—and shameful—fact that women hold very few formal positions of power in the United States. At the start of the 2019 legislative session—when we hit our highest numbers ever—we still made up only 28.5 percent of state legislatures¹ and 23.4 percent of Congress.² In the business world, women make up only 1 percent of Fortune 1000 CEOs.

Yet there are other, more empowering numbers that are too often overlooked. Namely, that women comprise the majority of the voting population. On top of that, we make 80 percent of the spending decisions for our families. Politicians and companies care very much about what we have to say. And when we band together, we absolutely have enough influence as a voting bloc and an economic force to create change.

Another thing that stands in the way of seeing just how strong we are is the stereotype that moms are frazzled and need several glasses of wine just to recuperate from all that cleaning, errand running, homework wrangling, and schedule managing. The NRA has latched on to this perception and often tries to insult Moms Demand Action members by saying that we like to drink boxed wine in our driveways—a stereotype that began when NRA spokesperson Dana Loesch said that I seemed like a “lonely woman who sits in her driveway drinking boxed wine” in a video she made in 2014.³ Don’t get me wrong—some of us might enjoy a sauvignon blanc from time to time, but this does not define us. (And I’m pretty sure many NRA members are boozing in their backyards.) The fact is, we have to own our mom status and not let it be seen as a weakness. If we don’t claim our motherhood as a tool, it will be used against us as a weapon.

Trust me, I get that it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the craziness of raising a family and probably also earning a living—after all, I’ve got five kids and have worked a variety of jobs while raising them. But let’s reframe our ability to manage all the things we do as the perfect qualifications for moving mountains.

Moms are formidable. Don’t believe me? Think of all the things you’ve done since the moment you became a mom: giving birth, for one (no matter how that baby came out, how much more powerful can you get than creating a new life?); foregoing sleep; catching every virus your kid brought home from daycare or playgroup; advocating for your kids at school, at the pediatrician’s office, or maybe even within your own family; developing the ability to manage multiple people’s seemingly incompatible schedules and needs; continually growing your capacity to love other human beings beyond what you ever thought possible; honing your patience; and building physical, mental, and emotional resilience.

And those qualifications are just the beginning of what makes you, as a mom, such a force.

A mother’s love is fierce. It’s in our nature to protect our children, and that instinct is so strong that we would put ourselves in front of a speeding train to save a child. We are true warriors when it comes to our kids. And you don’t even have to try to summon this courage; it’s all instinct. Agatha Christie wrote, “A mother’s love for her child is like nothing else in the world. It knows no law, no pity. It dares all things and crushes down remorselessly all that stands in its path.” The next time you’re doubting your ability to disrupt the status quo, remember that—especially the “crushing down remorselessly” part.

For mothers, the thought of losing a child is unbearable. And while suffering such a loss is terrible to contemplate, it’s also liberating. It empowers you to protect your kids as if you have nothing to lose. Because if you lost your kids, you would feel as though you’d lost everything.

Of course, moms are also forces of love—the ones who kiss the boo-boos, dry the tears, and teach the emotional lessons. That makes us moms an important voice of morality and compassion—not just in our own families, but in society at large. It also makes us the perfect counterbalance to the posturing and intimidation of the NRA leadership and their lobbyists. After all, our current gun laws are a textbook representation of masculinity gone haywire, and for too long, men have dominated the discussion about guns. Moms are the yin to toxic masculinity’s yang.

And it’s not just your kids that your heart guides you to protect. As Hillary Clinton said, there’s no such thing as other people’s children. Becoming a mother makes you realize that you’re a caretaker not just for your own kids, but for everyone else’s too. You understand that it’s part of your role to make the world a better place for everyone; it’s a moral obligation that you feel not so much as a duty but as a simple fact of life.

I’ve seen this natural tendency to support others every day, when our volunteers come together to support those whose loved ones have been taken by gun violence. In 2018 in Austin, Texas, one of our moms, Diana Earl, was facing the emotional gauntlet of attending the trial of the man who had shot and killed her only child, Dedrick. The defense attorneys were trying to paint her son as a thug who had brought his own death upon himself. Members of her Moms Demand Action chapter, many of whom had never met her, organized themselves so that at least a half-dozen of them were at the trial every day, so that she would know that someone was always with her and visibly supporting her in the courtroom.

We’ve supported each other through illness. Another Texas mom, Catherine Nance, joined Moms Demand Action during the campaign to fight a bill that would allow guns on college campuses in that state. She was an adjunct professor and mom to three little kids and came to every hearing despite having some health issues that she thought were related to her last C-section. When she was diagnosed with stage-four colon cancer, our volunteers cooked her family food, sat with her during her hospital visits, and ripped out soggy drywall in her home after Hurricane Harvey. Catherine remained devoted to the cause to the end, even going out wearing a wig to canvass for a Moms Demand Action volunteer who was running for local office. These women who never knew each other before became as close as family.

After the 2016 mass shooting at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, protestors showed up at an Orlando vigil to harass attendees, including one of our volunteers, Wayne McNeil, a gun violence survivor and member of the LGBTQ community. Moms Demand Action volunteers simply walked over to where all the haters were gathered and hid them from vigil attendees with a huge Disarm Hate sign. Wayne later said, “That we could support each other in a moment of unspeakable grief speaks volumes to what Moms Demand Action really stands for in America. People finding the strength to lift each other up with love in the midst of so much violence and hate is what makes us special. It is what we do every day.”

This drive to protect other people—even complete strangers—is what makes moms relentless. My husband told me after I started Moms Demand Action that even if he found out he had a terminal illness, he wouldn’t spend as much time trying to cure it as I was spending trying to eradicate gun violence. When women are passionate about an issue, they do not take “no” for an answer. That passion is our power; we care so much that we become unstoppable.

So it’s not that we can be effective activists despite being mothers; we wield power and have access to unfathomable strength because we are mothers. It’s time for us to wear our motherhood with pride, and beyond that, to use it to our advantage.

Don’t Hide the Fact That You’re a Mom: Own It. Use It.

When I first started working in corporate America more than twenty-five years ago, motherhood still had a big stigma attached to it. In 1999, when I was the first pregnant vice president at the PR firm FleishmanHillard in Kansas City, I got pushback just for wearing maternity clothes. One day I was in an elevator with another woman (a woman!) who ran the office. I was wearing a suit with a swing-style blouse underneath my jacket, because I couldn’t button a normal shirt over my belly. She gave me the side-eye and said, “That’s an interesting top you’re wearing.” Pregnancy was seen as an affliction rather than as a part of life. And motherhood was something I tried to hide as much as possible, saying I was sick instead of admitting that I needed to stay home with a sick kid, and never, ever allowing any telltale kid noises to be heard in the background of conference calls I did from home.

It wasn’t until I started Moms Demand Action that I fully understood just how much political clout and power motherhood gives us. Clearly, with a name like Moms Demand Action, we fly the mom flag proudly, but that’s not the only way we put the ...