From Alcott to Zott: How Women Are (Still!) Both Too Much and Not Enough for Commercial Fiction

Oct 18, 2025

 

 

 

This is the true story of two U.S. based book PR firms firing me for my women co-protagonists being too “complicated.” The very women characters in my novel now celebrated by Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, the Times Literary Supplement, LoveReading, GoodReads, and and librarians calling it “easily one of the top books I’ve ever read.” If you can relate as a scandalized “difficult” woman (or scandalized-adjacent), read on.

💃🏻 Women in commercial literature are often expected to be just the right amount of everything—strong, but not too pushy; flawed but not unlikable; complex, but still digestible for a broad audience.

You know: “quirky.” Mac n’ cheese (with maybe some kale tossed in) to sell just-so 80,000-word delicious and nutritious bricks.

This is not a news. History has long dictated which women are worth remembering, how their characters ought to be framed, and how their stories should be told. So when I uncovered my great-great-grandfather’s diary and letters—painstaking records of his business dealings, daily reflections, even weather reports—I was disappointed, though not terribly surprised, to find that his wife wasn’t even named.

She was a shadow. A footnote in his grand narrative.

The evaporation of women is not just a thing of the past—it insidiously persists in modern literature.

Interestingly, this erasure and scrutiny of female characters is not equal across genres. In literary fiction—where books are positioned for critical discourse rather than mass-market appeal—female protagonists are often afforded more space to be complex and contradictory, without the same immediate pressure to be widely “likable” or easily marketable. While even literary fiction has seen its share of resistance toward “difficult” women, the commercial stakes heighten the demand for palatability.

📚 Think of Tayari Jones’s An American Marriage, Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other, or Michael Cunningham’s The Hours. These books feature female protagonists who are angry, selfish, conflicted, or morally ambiguous—yet, their complexity was not an obstacle to publication. These were books meant to be assigned in classrooms, dissected in literary essays, and discussed in academia.

💰 But when it comes to commercial fiction—books that need to sell, to boost a publisher’s bottom line, to earn their place on prestige bestseller lists—the scrutiny shifts. Female protagonists are expected to be not just compelling but “rootable” in a way that reassures rather than challenges readers.

It’s not that thorny women don’t exist in commercial literature—of course they do. But a pattern emerges: when they do appear, their authors often face more push-back, their marketability is questioned, and their success requires greater advocacy than that of their literary fiction counterparts.

It happens when publishers, marketers, and influencers insist that female protagonists be smoothed out and streamlined into something “relatable.” It happens when ambitious, rule-breaking women are labeled as “difficult” or “unlikable”—a problem male characters rarely face.

It also happened to my novel. Now. In 2025.

When I submitted The Covert Buccaneer (a Booklife, Publishers Weekly Editor’s Pick and recommended by Kirkus alongside The Women)—a dual-timeline feminist historical saga—for early marketing discussions with two US-based marketing teams, I was met with demands for “adjustments.” Could I make my female protagonists more consistent? Could I simplify their motivations—especially around sexuality, relationships, and motherhood—so readers wouldn’t be confused, wouldn’t struggle to “relate” to them?

What they meant was:

✅ Make them digestible.
✅ Make them palatable.
✅ (Make their job easy for plug-and-play marketing).

I stood my ground. Not out of stubbornness. But because capitulating to such pleas is precisely how women’s stories have been routinely sidelined.

The Women Who Wouldn’t Stay Small

The women in The Covert Buccaneer refuse to shrink. Not out of hubris or fearlessness or (gasp!) self-confidence. But out of necessity.

📖 Theodora “Teddy” Ellis, my 19th-century heroine, is a cross-dressing polyamorous miner, suffragist, and San Francisco real estate developer who infiltrates male-dominated spaces in disguise, survives the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, and fights for women’s rights and healthcare for indigent communities alongside her Miwok BFF.

Had she lived today, she might have had a label for her identity. Instead, she simply lived it.

📖 Ellie Benvenuto, my modern heroine, is a single mother, a climate migrant attorney threatened with job insecurity, and a special needs parent. Her life is a tightrope. She also exhausted, unsure, and at times resentful of the impossible demands placed on her. She is strong, yes—but not in the effortless, inspiring 5-second-reel TikTok way that publishing and marketing teams often prefer female protagonists to behave.

Both women are deeply moral, compelling, and likable—but not in a way that is simple. They’re actually easy to cheer for, yet at times make the reader feel frustrated by them. They are contradictory, ambitious, uncertain, and grappling with being their full selves—and that is what makes them worth reading. They are real because they are based on real women and real lived experiences.

The Cost of Making Women’s Stories “Easy”

The pressure to make women’s narratives “easier” permeates the publishing ecosystem.

✔ Agents want manuscripts that are easy to sell to big 5 publishers.
✔ Publishers want to market to broad audiences.
✔ Publicists want to pitch stories in a 12-second, digestible Book-Tok using an existing click-bait formula for scalability (low effort: high yield).
✔ Influencers want characters they can champion without much internal conflict to appease the algorithm gods.

But when we sand down a character’s rough edges, smooth out their contradictions and rewrite their struggles into something less faceted, what we’re really doing is shrinking them to something for history to contain. And that’s exactly how women’s histories have been lost in the first place—erased not by omission, but by dilution. When we make women easier to consume, we make them easier to forget.

Publishing’s Pattern of Rejecting “Difficult” Women

Take a look at what publishing has long deemed “too much” for mainstream audiences:
🚺 Women who defy traditional relationships.
🚺 Women with certain sexual proclivities and choices will be judged as “not feminist”
🚺 Women who struggle with motherhood (and dare to admit it).
🚺 Women who exercise power in the outside world, yet remain riddled with internal self-doubt.

This isn’t just my experience. Legacy publishing has a long history of skepticism toward complex, unapologetic female characters.

📚 Consider Gone With the Wind (1936) by Margaret Mitchell—Now considered a classic, Scarlett O’Hara was deeply controversial in her time. Unlike the traditional, self-sacrificing heroines of historical fiction, Scarlett was calculating, materialistic, and willing to manipulate to get what she wanted—whether that meant marrying for financial security, running a business in a man’s world, or refusing to be tamed by love.

📚 The Joy Luck Club (1989) by Amy Tan was a commercial success, but early criticism—especially from within the Asian-American literary community—argued that it played into stereotypes about Chinese mothers and daughters. It also fueled debates about who gets to tell Asian-American stories and what mainstream publishing deems “marketable.”

📚 More recently, Lessons in Chemistry (2022) by Bonnie Garmus was initially met with skepticism. Protagonist Elizabeth Zott is brilliant, blunt, and unwilling to conform. Publishers weren’t sure how to categorize a novel that was both feminist and deeply emotional, both sharp-witted and melancholic. Yet, it was precisely for her contradictions readers adored her.

📚 The backlash isn’t limited to historical fiction. Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You sparked heated debate because protagonist, Alice Kelleher, actively resists the “likable” heroine trope. Alice is depressive, detached, and at times outright difficult. She’s uninterested in performing for readers’ approval. But that resistance to easy packaging is what makes her so compelling.

And If You’re A Feminist Protagonist, You’d Better Be All-In

📚 Even when we have a clearly feminist protagonist in commercial literature, she must be unwavering across contexts. Take Jo March from Little Women. She was widely embraced as a feminist literary icon. But the moment she made a personal choice that didn’t align with feminist expectations (marrying Bhaer), outrage ensued. Louisa May Alcott admitted she had to write that ending because a single, independent woman was unthinkable in commercial fiction at the time.

📚 More recently, in Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games, Katniss is a perfect case study in commercial fiction’s packaging of feminist heroines: strong, fiercely independent, and a survivor. But she’s also emotionally repressed and largely removed from personal desire. She resists romance, rarely expresses vulnerability, and is defined almost entirely by her fight against the Capitol. Backlash ensued when she showed hesitation, fear, or internal conflict—especially regarding Peeta and Gale. Many critics and fans demanded she be a consistent feminist warrior: uncompromising, mission-driven, morally certain. The expectation was clear—if she faltered, wanted protection, admitted to exhaustion, her feminist credibility would be suspect.

This is just another expression of the same discomfort—publishing’s wariness of ‘difficult’ women. When did we decide that “feminism” in fiction means a woman who never stumbles, never submits, never changes her mind—is unflappably consistent and stalwart? Is that really “relatable”? Or is it just manageable—binary for social media scrollers, not readers?

One American PR team questioned my character Ellie in the bedroom. “I couldn’t help but feel disappointed in her,” my contact wrote. “She’s doing all these things in the world, and it seems incongruous for her to just surrender [in the bedroom]. This potentially reads as non-feminist and perpetrating stereotypes of women as sexually submissive.”

❎ “Just surrender.”

❎ “Non-feminist.”

❎ “Incongruous”

My response:

Ellie hasn’t come into her power yet. It would be incongruous for the reader to see her dominate the bedroom. I’m crafting duality with this scene—not congruity. We can be staunch feminists who, behind closed doors, have facets that need to be held by a lover who will safe-keep both them and us. I’m not perpetuating stereotypes, I’m telling women that getting what you want and need sexually—without apologizing—is plenty feminist.

They fired me anyway. So I turned to the UK—where they didn’t blink. They lunged.

Book marketing scions continue to underestimate readers, assuming that audiences want streamlined women—that characters must be either aspirational or cautionary tales. But the success of Mitchell, Tan, Garmus, Rooney, Alcott, Collins, ME, and countless others proves that readers crave complexity.

Why is that? Perhaps it helps them understand themselves.

As it turns out, “complicated” women are relatable.

So what gets American marketers’ panties in such a twist that they still treat female complexity as a marketing liability rather than an asset?

Why Women Deserve To Be “Too Much”

🏆 Because we’ve earned it.
🏆 Because real women do not fit easy, pre-packaged narratives.
🏆 Because making a character relatable shouldn’t come at the cost of making her real.

The (historically real) women of The Covert Buccaneer don’t conform to expectations. Nor are they necessarily confident about bucking them. Their lives aren’t easy to summarize. They make choices that defy social norms. They love, they fail, they push forward. They exist in full contradiction—just like the real women history has too often cast aside.

Teddy, living in the late 19th century, knows that women like her are denied space in the written record. A woman who wears men’s clothing and stakes mining claims is already an anomaly. A woman who enters partnerships on her own terms, crosses cultural boundaries, and refuses to shrink herself into the mold of marriage and domesticity is nearly unthinkable.

💃🏻 Yet, these women existed. They aren’t figments of romanticized revisionist history, but real, flesh-and-blood figures who made impossible choices every day. Women who lived openly as men to access freedom; who cross-dressed and smoked cigars to keep company in male spaces; who stood on the front lines of labor movements, suffrage campaigns, and legal battles—but were later omitted from the mainstream narrative because their stories were too inconvenient, too difficult to categorize, too hard to sell.

Ellie, a modern woman, faces a different kind of erasure. She’s “doing it all”—at great personal cost. She is a devoted special needs mother, but that doesn’t erase her frustration or exhaustion. She’s an advocate for the marginalized, but that doesn’t shield her from self-doubt—especially when confronting past transgressions committed against her. She is deeply moral, but questions if she’s making the right choices. She resists the confines of traditional marriage—which she views as “a product leveraging guerrilla tactic marketing from a very young age. A product of security and legitimacy, a trap for women, and a way for men to look good to other men”—even as she grapples with the unexpected pull of new love.

In short, she is messy, conflicted, and wholly real.

If history has taught us anything, it’s that humanity—especially when it comes to women—is never as binary or breezy as social media buzzwords urging us to “speak our truth” and “conquer our fears” would have us believe. Nor should it be. Look, we’re all adults here. Can we quit pretending that we aren’t both altruistic and selfish; fighters and lovers; virtuous and janky; inclusive and biased?

I wonder: How many exquisitely written, fully realized women’s narratives we’re missing because marketers deem them too challenging for their molds? How many manuscripts sit on hard drives, unread—because they defy ready packaging?

I do not write to comfort. That’s what a personal journal is for. Or, as for my character Teddy in The Covert Buccaneer—scribbling from the ashes of the Chicago Fire, to the plains and mining towns on the frontier, to the ruthless Klondike, to the splendid atrium of San Francisco’s Palace Hotel—a diary.

🔥 I write to provoke thought.
🔥 To ignite discussion.
🔥 To illuminate untold stories—past and present.

If it raises a few hackles? I must be doing something right. 

The Beats Broke the Rules. They Also Broke the Women

Sep 27, 2025

Recently I visited the Beat Museum in my San Francisco North Beach neighborhood. It’s just a few blocks from my home. The Beat Generation has long been held up as the patron saints of rebellion — the men who tore through mid-century America with notebooks, Benzedrine, and a conviction that freedom was a moral imperative. Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Cassady—the names glow like neon in our cultural imagination.

But here’s the truth that rarely makes the syllabus (and not exactly spotlighted at the Beat Museum, where said figures are mythologized on walls and in glass cases):

Their liberation was often built on the backs of the women in their orbit.

The more I research generational narratives (for fiction and nonfiction alike), the more I see a persistent pattern: women not merely overlooked, but structurally erased and harmed. The Beats didn’t invent the pattern — but they perfected it into an aesthetic.

And since myths don’t dismantle themselves, here’s some straight talk from one of their own (SF North Beach writer, that is).

📣 The women were fuel, not equals.

The movement adored “muses,” “mad girls,” and “free spirits.” And as soon as the curiosity of the main stage figures was satisfied, the women inhabiting those tropes were discarded as holding no further merit. What the movement did not adore was women artists with agency.

Jack Kerouac’s wife, Joan Haverty, wrote brilliantly. Diane di Prima was a literary titan. Hettie Jones shaped an entire literary scene. How many people could name them before reading this?*

Exactly.

Their work existed. Their talent was undeniable. The men simply didn’t want them sharing the stage.

📣 They preached freedom while practicing misogyny.

“Free love” was a marquee concept for the Beats — but it tilted heavily in one direction. The public rhetoric: break the norms; reject conformity; seek truth.

The private reality for women: infidelity, control, emotional exploitation, abandonment, and the expectation they carry the domestic and emotional load while the men wandered and wrote.

Liberation wasn’t evenly distributed.

📣 Male freedom was subsidized by female labor.

The mythic Beat life — spontaneous road trips at 2 a.m., cross-country epiphanies, unbridled creativity — required something to make it all possible: Someone else holding the fort.

While the men chased vision, women:

• paid rent

• raised children

• managed addiction fallout

• maintained households

• endured emotional turbulence

• picked up the pieces

The men got icon status. The women got exhaustion and overdue utility bills.

📣 Trauma wasn’t theoretical — it was physical.

The most harrowing example: William S. Burroughs killed his wife, Joan Vollmer, during a drunken “William Tell” stunt. Beat legend. A woman dead. And in many tellings, her name is barely whispered.

Violence wasn’t rare in that circle — it was normalized, excused, folded into the mythology of tortured genius.

📣 The road was never equally safe.

The call to “go”—to hitchhike, roam, reinvent—was exhilarating if you were:

• male

• young

• white

• unencumbered

• and protected by society’s scaffolding

Women traveled a different road: exposure, vulnerability, risk, and far less societal forgiveness for the exact same behaviors.

A Beat man who drifted was “free.” A Beat woman who drifted was “troubled.”

📣 The daughters paid for the mythology too.

The negation didn’t stop with the wives.

Jan Kerouac is Exhibit A. Her father, the mythic Jack Kerouac, denied patrimony of his daughter, Jan, until forced by a court.

Jan was brilliant, wounded, truth-telling — and perpetually overshadowed by a father who romanticized departure at the expense of everything that required staying.

Her work is extraordinary; her recognition, fractional.

💡Why does this matter now?

Because how we recount artistic history shapes who feels entitled to inhabit the future.

And maybe this is why I write the stories I do — because the women I write aren’t inventions. They’re spotlights and composites of real women history treated as scenery while the “main characters” took their bows. What I’ve learned writing The Covert Buccaneer— a novel rooted in lost women’s histories — is that erasure isn’t accidental. It is structural, habitual, inherited. Women like the heroines of The Covert Buccaneer (Teddy, Helki, and even Ellie) carry the burden of stories the world was not ready to honor.

When we perpetuate incomplete narratives, we reinforce the same asymmetries that held the door open for some and handily closed it on others. The Beats did it in the 1950s. The Transcendentalists did it in the 1850s (tell me: were you ever assigned even a single essay by Margaret Fuller in high school? I didn’t think so). The Victorian miners in my novel did it in the 1880s. The workplace still does it now (with some progress since the 1880s, admittedly). But progress is anything but linear …

Look at what’s unfolding right now around the release of the Epstein files: a modern tableau of powerful men behaving with the same entitlement, impunity, and predation the Beats romanticized. Women—girls, really—have spent decades fighting to be believed, fighting for their accounts to be treated as evidence rather than inconvenience. The legal system bent itself into origami to protect the reputations of men rather than the safety or dignity of victims. It is the same architecture of erasure, just with more viral headlines.

Different eras, same playbook.

Which is precisely why reclaiming these narratives isn’t nostalgia; it’s repair. The Beats certainly weren’t the first to sideline and harm women. They were just very, very good at making it look romantic.

And when we reclaim the full story — women included — something powerful happens:

🦄 The myth cracks, and the truth finally gets oxygen.

This isn’t about canceling the Beats. It’s about completing the record.

Because women weren’t supporting characters in the Beat movement. They were the scaffolding, the intellect, the stabilizers, the emotional laborers, the lost geniuses —and in many cases, the true artists whose careers were extinguished before they could burn.

History doesn’t need another shrine to tortured male genius; it needs light on the women who made the genius possible. The women of the Beat movement were not background figures — they were the uncredited infrastructure.

But we don’t restore history by tearing down its icons; we restore it by illuminating the shadows they cast. The women of the Beat movement — the writers, the caretakers, the visionaries, the ones who stayed when the men drifted — are not footnotes.

They are the missing chapters. And the future gets brighter every time we write them back in.

*(Beat women named = illustrative, not exhaustive)

Mirror Mirror: How Social Media Feeds the Ego but Starves the Soul (and Your 401k Account)

Jun 3, 2025

After 20 years on LinkedIn, I have over 35,000 followers (as of this writing) on the platform. When I made a splashy, high-performing announcement that I’d started an Instagram account (@santaluciasf – at the persistent nudging of the PR team for my major novel releasing October 2025), only about 40 people followed me over. Forty. Out of 35,000+. That statistic—deceptively small, but profoundly telling—encapsulates the mirage we’re chasing in the social media desert: the illusion of popularity and mattering.

 

Now, I’ll say this about Insta: it’s a FUN playground. But …

You can spend hours crafting dazzling, meaningful content vibes (all time during which you’re not, say, reading a book or hiking a trail with your dog, mind you):

🎞️ Reels that sizzle with on-trend music, passion, and movement.

📚 Stories threaded with authenticity and all the feels.

📋 Posts that tap into the very pulse of cultural and personal resonance.

And still—crickets 🦗

No matter how polished your output, the system is rigged—like vanity sizing in the fashion industry: flattering on the surface to encourage that ApplePay tap, but without changing the underlying muffin-top reality. Visibility has become transactional. Unless you pay to play—boosting posts or running bots behind the curtain—your reach is throttled by a merciless algorithm designed to feed desperation, dopamine, and the lottery ticket mindset.

🎰 Look, I’m hardly the first to notice that social media has long ceased being a tool for connection. It’s a casino slot machine. And the house always wins.

Even when you do fork over “protection” funds from your own till, you’re paying for the privilege of being trickedinto thinking you’re popular, important, sought-after, loved … adored. That you matter to those followers—that you’re even on their mind.

You don’t. And you’re not. They’re focused on themselves and the time they’re also spending creating ‘content’ they hope will magically get the right person’s attention. Many may be following you because they view you as their revenue stream or want to tailgate your energy or accomplishments to boost their visibility. Sorry to break it to you, Petunia, but people generally act out of self-interest–even if their DMs couch their motives in sneaky, reciprocally-rewarding looking words like “collaborating.”

What’s also happening? The lining of an algorithmic mastermind (some might say mob boss)’s already endlessly deep mid-wash, straight-leg, no-fuss dad jeans pockets that say (if jeans could talk), “I disrupted fashion by opting out.” Every tap to boost a Reel is a fresh kill tossed into Zuckerberg’s eagle’s nest. And what’s the payout? A dripline of illusion straight to your ego’s vein—fast, addictive, and depressingly effective:

👍 The faint glow of a few more likes.

🤖 A trickle of new followers (who may not even be human).

✏️ Maybe an empty comment or two (“Spot on!” “Great post!” “This is fire!” — anyone?).

We’re told that visibility = value. That engagement = impact.

But often—just like with actual bestselling books (think: Lessons in Chemistry or a Reese’s Book Club pick)—what it really signals is a big budget (and/or a well-timed influencer anointing). See above: “slot machine,” Vegas edition. Popularity can be bought, and influence, it turns out, is often a rented suit.

And here’s the kicker: even when you comment on the posts of influencers with huge followings, they’re likely not the ones reading it. Think they’ll notice you? Think again, Princess Buttercup. They’ve outsourced their community engagement to social media managers who charge thousands per month to maintain the performance of authenticity. Hell, even people who market themselves as public figures or influencers (but really aren’t) deploy this strategy.

People. You. Personally. Know. And have spent time with.

Your thoughtful reply? It’s algorithmic fodder, not a genuine connection or strategic mechanism to get noticed. Also, notice whether they reciprocate by following, reacting, or commenting on your stuff (even if they do, it’s not them in many instances. It’s a stunt double from their MarCom team, not a decision-maker).

🧐 So I ask myself: why feed this machine? Why participate at all?

Because, well, it’s kinda fascinating! I admit it. And as a Gen X’er who’s becoming less relevant by the minute, I try to lurk at the margins of awareness about how the world works. Also, there’s still a sliver of strategic value—when deployed with care. A post can help you reach a niche audience in a new market. It might put your work in front of a gatekeeper, a podcast host, or an editor who wouldn’t have seen it otherwise. In rare cases, it can spark a cascade of organic momentum. But these are extreme exceptions—like how a 19-year old justifies their withdrawal from college to their parents by pointing to Zuckerberg himself. Or an indie author who says, “Well, look what happened with The Martian.”

The real work—the work that matters—isn’t happening in the comments. It’s in the craft:

📖 The exquisitely (and organically—ahem) written book that took years to chisel and polish, and drove you to the precipice of bona fide madness.

🚀 The launch–mine will be at the Palace Hotel in SF this fall. 🎉

📣 The voice you refine when no one’s watching or “reacting.”

True visibility isn’t in the boost. That’s an evanescent hologram which dissolves like the Wicked Witch made of brown sugar–especially if some celebrity sneezed around the same time you spent money that could have gone into your 401k account to boost a post (and buy Zuckerberg a week of Starbucks cold brews).

It starts with substance.

📈 So no, I won’t confuse algorithmic reach with artistic or intellectual worth. Nor is it my business plan. I won’t pretend that social media engagement is anything more than an insidious and finely tuned illusion. And I certainly won’t measure my significance by the number of hearts on a screen.

🌈 I think I’ll let others chase the metrics. I hope they find the pot of gold at the end of that chimera so they can, at the very least, break even. Maybe even boost that retirement account, after all.

I’ll be here, building gravity. And over there on the IG carousel too—@santaluciasf—having fun, however modest my following may be. I don’t pay anyone to pretend to be me, and I do all my own posts using just the native app and a free account. Think of it as my Zuckerberg version of the grey tee and Birkenstocks 👕

Why? Because my self-determination is bigger than Zuckerberg’s B-nut.

And because gravity? It pulls more than smoke, mirrors, and a man behind a silicon curtain. And it always will.

About Me: I am S. Lucia Kanter St. Amour, a joyful, sassy, organic cross-genre writer, attorney, law professor, and VP Emerita of UN Women San Francisco. I’m the author of five books, with my latest dual timeline women’s historical fiction novel, The Covert Buccaneer, releasing Fall 2025.

Bursting the Mimosa Bubble

May 9, 2025

One Mothers’ Day, my sons made me a messy fruit salad. Strawberries, bananas, blueberries—even a sprig of mint. They served it with burnt toast, silly grins, sticky fingers, and the kind of pride that made me tear up. It was sweet. It was perfect.

And it had little to do with what I actually needed.

 

Mothers’ Day is sold to us as a celebration—but we still have to work. It’s not actually a day off. After the fruit salad came the dishes. The laundry. The meltdown over a missing shoe. The screen-time negotiation. The looming bills. The splinter that required tweezers and tweaked patience. The code called “summer break” to crack. The groceries.

I didn’t need brunch. I needed backup.

Like so many mothers, I wasn’t just raising children—I was holding up the scaffolding of our family. Quietly. Invisibly. While caregiving for a special needs child. While holding down a so-called real job. While quietly crying in the shower. While trying not to collapse under the weight of it all.

In this country, while mothers are vaulted on social media, we’re penalized in reality. We’re romanticized in cards, but rarely supported in policy. We’re handed mimosas when what we need is paid leave. Affordable childcare. Job protection. For our labor—the emotional, physical, invisible, economy-driving kind—to be compensated and counted.

We need a system that doesn’t punish us for reproducing. Or con us with talk of $5,000 “baby bonuses,” as if a signing bonus could offset the physical and financial cost of raising a child. (In 2020, that figure was $286,000 per child from birth to age 17, per the HBS Caregiver Economy Report.) And it certainly doesn’t cover the opportunity cost of stepping off a career path because you had no choice.

Our organizations and economy can’t afford to keep losing women. The math is brutal:

🧮 70% of U.S. mothers are in the workforce.

🧮 They contribute, on average, 40% of household income. In the poorest families, that jumps to 86%.

🧮 And still, women pay a 4% wage penalty per child.

🧮 Men? They get a 6% raise—for the same baby.

🧮 This gap widens with each child and is never recovered.

🧮 Meanwhile, U.S. companies lose $35 billion annually by failing to support caregivers (82% of whom are women).

Mothers are drivers of the economy. There’s serious bank in taking mothers seriously.

But we don’t.

We tell mothers to lean in, but don’t meet them with a net. We urge them to break glass ceilings—then leave them barefoot in the shards.

And historically? We’ve treated caregiving as a private burden, not a shared responsibility. Even during COVID lockdowns—when both parents were home—“[t]here was a lot more domestic labor to do. More dishes piled up, with more needy children underfoot. But even when men worked from home, women still handled more of the work. Eight in 10 mothers said they managed remote schooling (fathers overestimated their contribution).”—The New York Times, March 11, 2025.

🍓 Oh—but wait. Those strawberries are dipped in chocolate?

Still.

Imagine a society that stops performing appreciation and starts practicing it—in budgets, in policy, in daily life:

💸 that pays her what she’s worth.

📈 that protects her job and promotion pathways.

🏛 that passes laws that support her—not trap her.

🧮 that counts her labor as labor—and chips in.

We trail every. other. industrialized. nation. when it comes to how we treat mothers. If we’re going to stage this annual Prosecco-fueled theater, let’s at least drop the curtain and speak the truth:

Brunch has class. But equity cuts glass. Still, we must move beyond ideology to materiality if we want to stem the hemorrhaging of protections for women and mothers. (For more on that, read my article “Indispensable.”)

And if you know a single mother? Don’t just thank her. Back her. Believe her. Elevate her. Every flipping day.

Honoring mothers is more than fizzy. It’s fierce.

S. Lucia Kanter St. Amour is a joyful organic cross-genre writer, attorney, law professor, and VP Emerita of UN Women San Francisco. She is the author of five books, with her latest women’s historical fiction novel, The Covert Buccaneer, releasing Fall 2025.