They have been angry before. But now they are taking to the streets and speaking out in numbers not seen in decades: American mothers are on the march.

Take Jenny Kaleczyc, a Montana lawyer and mother of two. Last month she went to Helena, the state capital, to demand that state and local governments provide unpaid break time for mothers to pump breast milk — and somewhere other than a toilet cubicle to pump it in.

Erin Faunce-Stoltzfus set off with her two young sons on a two-hour car ride from her home in Pennsylvania to Washington one recent morning to join a rally demanding paid sick days for workers across the US. She wasn’t alone.

More than 17,000 women sent messages to their US senators supporting the legislation. The direct action has been ignited by MomsRising, a new internet-based group that is bringing fresh energy to long-fought battles over childcare, healthcare, sex discrimination and other issues.

“This is about feeling powerful and knowing that together we can make a difference,” says Joan Blades, a mother of two who co-founded the group last May. Blades helped to start MoveOn.org, the left-wing political group that used the internet to build a grass-roots movement and activate millions of voters, and she hopes to do the same for mothers, making it easier to sign petitions, send e-mails, organise demonstrations and learn about issues. “The telephone on steroids, I sometimes call it.”

MomsRising has quickly grown to more than 80,000 members and Blades thinks it could reach one million — or even more. Women are encouraged to host small house parties to watch The Motherhood Manifesto , a documentary film that sets out the challenges of modern American motherhood and ways to solve them. They are also invited to rallies, hearings, even “nurse-ins” hastily organised last November at airports after a woman was kicked off a flight for refusing to cover up sufficiently while breast-feeding.

“MomsRising really sparked me,” says Faunce-Stoltzfus, who was politically active as a student but less involved as she focused on work and then building a family. “It really got me going again.”

“What is astounding about MomsRising is how fast they’ve made a difference,” says Jodie Levin-Epstein at the Centre for Law and Social Policy in Washington. “It’s not just a list. It’s a list that takes action.”

“MomsRising is definitely getting noticed and listened to in the halls of Congress,” says Laura Capps, a leading aide to Senator Edward Kennedy, a chief proponent of the paid sick leave law.

Until now, most of the energy among activist women has been in the battle to protect abortion rights, which peaked in 1989 when hundreds of thousands marched on Washington. The new “mommy muscle” groups are building ties to research centres and policy wonks, as well as to established feminist groups. They are even calling for a ceasefire in the “mommy wars” — the tension, often hyped by the media, between working and stay-at-home mothers.

Part of the enthusiasm in the “mommy” movement comes from the prominent role that mothers are taking in US politics. Nancy Pelosi, who in January became the first female Speaker of the House, is a mother and grandmother (“Don’t make me use my ‘mother of five’ voice,” she jokes to unruly crowds). Hillary Clinton is trying to ditch her early reputation as a tough liberal feminist, highlighting a more gentle, motherly side.

There are other explanations. Good, affordable childcare and healthcare have long been worries for poor people. But with more families in which both parents work, and fewer employers covering family medical costs, anxiety has spread to large swaths of the middle class. And young mothers who thought that an earlier generation of feminists had sorted things out for them are discovering that the work-life balance remains difficult.

The new networks are also showing American women how far they lag behind the rest of the world. The US does not guarantee paid leave for mothers after childbirth, placing it among five of 173 countries studied in a report by McGill University. The others were Lesotho, Liberia, Papua New Guinea and Swaziland. Nor is the US among the 107 countries that protect a working woman’s right to breast-feed, or the 137 that mandate paid annual leave. A forthcoming study from two Cornell University sociology professors offers proof of a “motherhood penalty” when it comes to getting a job. They responded to real job ads with CVs and covering letters from a pair of fictitious, equally qualified applicants, who differed in one respect: one listed “parent-teacher association co-ordinator” among her activities, while the other was described as a fundraiser for a neighbourhood association. The results were stark: childless women received 2.1 times as many callbacks as equally qualified mothers. There is even a new push to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, the 1972 Act that fell three votes short of enactment and stalled in the 1980s.

“When people realise that this is not normal, that what we’ve assumed to be normal is in fact not, it makes it much easier to say, ‘Oh, OK’ and get involved,” says Blades.

Kaleczyc and a friend organised a cake sale at the state capitol, at which people were asked to pay for their biscuits and cakes on a scale that reflects the wage gap that women face: $1 for men, 73 cents for mothers, 60 cents for single mothers, 50 cents for Native American women.

They plan to use the $75 they raised to buy changing tables for women’s and men’s lavatories in the capitol building, or to cover the costs of a lunchtime screening of the film for state officials.

MomsRising hopes to make itself a force in the 2008 presidential election, pushing candidates to talk about how they would tackle the issues. The group is also fighting battles across the states, bringing its national strength to women such as Kiki Peppard, who has waged a ten-year battle in Pennsylvania to make it illegal to ask women if they have children and if they are married when they apply for jobs.

With all that, Blades recognises that there is one more thing she must do, and soon: start a dads’ group. Already, 5 per cent of MomsRising members are men. “But we need to make a place where men feel comfortable too,” she says. “These are family issues.”

Women fighting for women

–– Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel formed the Women’s Party in 1917. After the campaign for women’s suffrage (in 1918 women over 30 got the vote), they fought for women’s employment rights, equal marriage and divorce laws, and maternity benefits.
–– Margaret Sanger was an American birth-control activist. She opened the first birth-control clinic in the US in 1916. It was raided and she spent 30 days in prison. Sanger died in 1966, a few months before birth control was legalised for married couples.
–– Cherie Blair is a working mum and in her capacity as an employment lawyer she has called for changes in the law to improve the “intolerable burden” on women in the workplace. She has stressed that employers will have to find ways of implementing family-friendly practices.

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