Mommification refers to the erasure of women’s identities as they become mothers in a misogynistic culture.

Motherhood is often invisible as a marginalized identity in itself.

A key mechanism through which mommification occurs is via maternal guilt.

Mothers can overcome mommification by reclaiming their whole selves.

Ambivalence is a common feeling among women as they consider motherhood, because the role is fraught in an oppressive culture. Mothers lose recognition and status in many areas of identity – social, professional, and financial, to name a few. Based on my experience as a psychologist and mother, I have begun to take note of these issues. The term I use to refer to the erasing of women’s identities as they become mothers in a misogynistic culture is mommification.

Motherhood in itself is often invisible as a marginalized identity. Jolly (2017) argued that motherhood has been missing in contemporary portrayals of social oppression. She maintained that motherhood is a key component in women’s experience of social and economic injustice. For example, she demonstrated that gender alone is not the source of discrimination that contributes to the motherhood wage penalty, given that childless women tend to be offered higher salaries.

Other research on mothers in the working world supports this notion of mommification. New mothers can lose status in their careers once they have children and feel forced to exit high-performing jobs. When they leave the traditional workplace, they often do so because they felt pushed to pick between the conflicting demands of work and home (Kanji & Cahusac, 2015). Career departure causes mothers a high professional and financial cost. However, mothers make meaning of this experience by seeing it as a choice with positive outcomes, like rejecting male-dominated, workaholic jobs. Mothers can also experience a loss in the adoption of problematic ideologies like intensive mothering (Hays, 1996). Intensive mothering is a high-demand approach to parenting that includes constant monitoring and activity-scheduling of a child (Novoa et al., 2022). This stance deprioritizes the mothers’ needs and yields mixed outcomes, often worsening the mental health of the mother and child. Clearly, women can lose themselves in the perfectionist pressures of contemporary motherhood.

When it comes to the erasing of mothers' sexual identities, Friedman and colleagues (1996) affirmed that they lose visibility as sexual beings to their community and partners. This occurs because the categories of sexuality and motherhood tend to be positioned as incompatible. They found in their research that the more sexual a woman was perceived to be, the less likely she was seen as a good mother, especially among cisgender men.

One of my mentors, Ruthellen Josselson, identified motherhood as a process of navigating a “matrix” of these tensions — of loss versus expansion, desexualization versus sexualization, and life-destroying versus life-promoting qualities (Oberman & Josselson, 1996). Women’s identities may become fractured as they integrate a motherhood identity and the identities of their children into their own (Laney et al., 2015).

I believe that a key mechanism through which mommification occurs is via maternal guilt. While the confidence of new mothers grows over time, their self-trust is eroded by guilt as they constantly compare themselves to cultural ideals of motherhood (Miller, 2007). My former dissertation student, Melody Montano (2023), examined the intersectionality of maternal guilt for working Latina women. She provided the example of cultural norms of marianismo and familismo that contribute to the maternal guilt of working mothers. However, they overcome the guilt by cultivating closeness and proximity to their children and redefining cultural norms of motherhood.

Mommification represents a hidden vestige of traditional gender dynamics that is masking women’s diminished power, and labeling it as chosen. The experience of mommification involves the loss of visibility of one’s sexual, professional, and financial identities, among others. In turn, women face greater loss as mommification obstructs the deep fulfilment and joy that motherhood can bring. As women, we can be savvy cultural navigators and resist mommification by reclaiming all of who we are, insisting that we can be both good mothers and whole people.

Friedman, A., Weinberg, H. & Pines, A.M. (1998). Sexuality and motherhood: Mutually exclusive in perception of women. Sex Roles, 38, 781–800. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1018873114523

Hays, S. (1996). The cultural contradictions of motherhood. Yale University Press.

Jolly, N. (2017). Envisioning mothers: Visualizations and the invisibility of motherhood. SIAS Faculty Publications. 830. https://digitalcommons.tacoma.uw.edu/ias_pub/830

Kanji, S., & Cahusac, E. (2015). Who am I? Mothers’ shifting identities, loss and sensemaking after workplace exit. Human Relations, 68(9), 1415-1436.

Laney, E. K., Hall, M. E. L., Anderson, T. L., & Willingham, M. M. (2015). Becoming a mother: The influence of motherhood on women’s identity development. Identity, 15(2), 126–145. https://doi.org/10.1080/15283488.2015.1023440

Miller, T. (2007). ‘‘Is this what motherhood is all about?’’: Weaving experiences and discourse through transition to first-time motherhood. Gender and Society, 21, 337–358.

Montano, M., Mizock, L., Pulido, C., & Calzada, E. (2023). The maternal guilt of working Latina mothers: A qualitative study. Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences, 45(3), 149-171.

Oberman, Y., & Josselson, R. (1996). Matrix of tensions: A model of mothering. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 20, 341–359.

Novoa, C., Cova, F., Nazar, G., Oliva, K., & Vergara-Barra, P. (2025). Intensive parenting: The risks of overdemanding. Trends in Psychology, 33, 53–66. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43076-022-00229-9

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