How Mompreneurs Can Change the World

The Wild Word magazine
6 min readApr 2, 2019

By Jami Ingledue — BEHIND DOMESTIC LINES

So we moms have another new catchy word to define us, this time in the realm of business — ”Mompreneur.” The best of everything! Motherhood AND a small business. Loving caregiver AND hardworking innovator!

But entrepreneurship, like business in general, is still a man’s world.

In fact, the combination of “mom” and “entrepreneur” is especially tricky, because we are combining two paradigms that demand a near-complete sacrifice of our own needs: capitalism and motherhood. Capitalism tells us that our only value is what we produce. Motherhood traditionally tells us to sacrifice ourselves completely for others.

This can be a dangerous combination.

The nature of capitalism is that it puts profit over people, and therefore families. And it treats workers like commodities, rather than human beings (with families). The patriarchal structure was set up so that the woman would stay at home and support the family — doing loads of unpaid labor — so that the man could go out to earn money. Both are labor. Only one is paid.

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