White Women Wake Up
White Woman Wake Up is a podcast where two white women from different generations come together to have honest, multi-generational conversations about how we, as white women, can awaken our own cultural biases and challenge the status quo. Through authentic, vulnerable dialogue—free from shame—we aim to empower ourselves and our listeners to unlearn harmful conditioning, build greater empathy, and embrace new ways of being in the world. We hope to inspire transformative growth by fostering curiosity, learning from one another, and embracing the complexities of our shared and individual experiences.
White Women Wake Up
Mother's Day Was a Protest Before Hallmark Bought It (And Trad Wives Prove It)
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Karen brings the topic this week: Mother's Day. She shares the original Mother's Day Proclamation, written by Julia Ward Howe in 1870 as an anti-war appeal to mothers to refuse to send their sons to be killed, and walks through how Hallmark turned a political uprising into a sentimental holiday. From there the conversation moves into Barbara Welter's Cult of True Womanhood, the four Victorian virtues that defined white middle-class womanhood and excluded Black, immigrant, and poor women by design. Karen and Jonelle name the suffrage betrayal, the post-Civil-War flip into the 1950s housewife, and the trad wife movement, using Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm as a case study of how an heir to a billion-dollar fortune sells colonial nostalgia as authentic rural domesticity. Then Jonelle shares the matriarchal AI agent team she has been building in her consulting work, framing distributed web-based leadership as a Trojan horse for breaking down hierarchical systems. Karen lands the episode with six matriarchal values for leadership: decision-makers must bear the cost of their decisions, care work is a political category rather than a personal virtue, power is accountable to the people closest to the problem, conflict cannot be exported, the values matter more than the title, and real matriarchal leadership would cost white women the racial privilege they have traded for proximity to patriarchal power.
CALLS TO ACTION
- Read the full 1870 Julia Ward Howe Mother's Day Proclamation this week. It is in the public domain and a five-minute read. Then ask yourself what you would have to give up to take it seriously as a Mother's Day call to action this year.
- Pick one of Karen's six matriarchal values and try to apply it to a decision you are making at work or in your family this week. Notice where it bumps against the hierarchical patterns you have been taught are normal.
- Join us at the Banned Book Club, second Tuesday of every month at 5:15 PM Pacific on Zoom with Becky Hope leading. June's book is Mad Honey. Reading along is welcome but not required. Email hello@whitewomenwakeup.com to register.
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