How Katherine Goldstein is Using Movement Journalism to Create Change for Mothers
In season four, episode four of The Double Shift, the podcast’s founder, Katherine Goldstein, and cohost, Angela Garbes, bantered about the glimmer of hope they were feeling. It was April, Americans were getting vaccinated, and the country had begun to open up.
Goldstein: “I don’t want to jinx anything, but it feels like we’re coming out of some very, very dark times.”
Garbes: “Yeah, this strange feeling of hope that I have, that I actually am able to trust a little bit. But I also think part of the transition right now is also coming to terms with what’s happened to us in the past year. Just because we get to go on vacation or hug our parents and grandparents doesn’t mean by any means that we’re healed from the personal and collective trauma of the pandemic.”
Goldstein: “I think we just have to be honest that it’s not going to be a snap of the fingers to recover from what we’ve gone through this year. How do we even start to get our heads around it? The emotional toll, the grief.”
That episode, as The Double Shift tagline promises, featured a woman who is “challenging the status quo of motherhood”: Andrea Landry, an Indigenous teacher, activist, and mother of a 4-year-old daughter. In a conversation that traversed through topics like grief, motherhood, and how to heal from the pandemic, Landry presented an idea that literally stopped me in my tracks as I listened during a long run: Rather than trying to change entrenched systems, we should support the fledgling things outside the mainstream that we want to see grow.
“For me, it’s not about putting energy into colonial systems to change and dismantle them,” Landry said on the show. “It’s about putting energy and investing time into Indigenous systems and revitalizing them.”
As someone who has spent a lot of time thinking about how to fix broken systems, I told Goldstein when we spoke in August, Landry’s idea stuck with me because it felt so new.
Presenting new ideas around motherhood and questioning the ingrained systems that hold mothers back is exactly what Goldstein is aiming to do with The Double Shift, which she launched in January 2019, a year before a pandemic that would eventually push tens of millions of women out of the global workforce. “I think one of the most important things that our show is doing is allowing people to see that those deeply personal problems are systemic,” she said.
The Double Shift is showing alternative pathways for motherhood that open the possibility for more support, equality, and agency than moms have in mainstream American culture.
When Goldstein started The Double Shift, this was a radical idea. The reigning myth perpetuated by most media targeting moms is that we’re responsible for our problems and we should fix them. “We have so many social messages that tell us that these are personal problems and if we try a little harder, get up a little earlier, use this lunch-packing strategy, it’s going to work out,” she said.
Goldstein said there’s a lot to unpack with the status quo. “It's so ingrained that we take this as just inherently as things are,” she said. By offering narratives that run counter to the status quo—stories about moms working in a Nevada brothel, or about a transgender dad raising his kids in a cohousing community—she is showing alternative pathways for motherhood that open the possibility for more support, equality, and agency than moms have in mainstream American culture.
Just as the mothers she features in her show are challenging the status quo of motherhood, Goldstein is challenging the status quo of media by practicing “movement journalism.” “It’s the idea of journalism that comes organically through communities and empowers communities rather than coming from an outsider, top-down perspective,” she said.
Traditionally, journalists are taught to be objective, to refrain from sharing an opinion so they can present the most detached version of the facts. “That really privileges the status quo because it positions men and white people as the default perspective and then anyone else as having an opinion or bias,” Goldstein said.
“[Movement journalism] embraces life experience for creating justice. It embraces identity rather than saying that identity is somehow antithetical to journalism.”
Put another way, the status quo in journalism erases the lived experience of any journalist who is not white and male. “The idea of community-centered journalism and journalism coming from communities and being connected to communities has been adopted by a lot of people who feel outside of mainstream journalism institutions, including journalists of color and queer journalists,” Goldstein said.
She felt movement journalism would provide a unique lens from which to cover motherhood because it would gather and activate people toward solutions that are already working for their community. “This sort of journalism embraces life experience for creating justice,” she said. “It embraces identity rather than saying that identity is somehow antithetical to journalism.”
Goldstein came to the idea for launching The Double Shift after her own experience as a new mom with a high-powered media job revealed how difficult it can be for mothers in the workforce. When her oldest son, Asher, was born in 2015, he had serious health problems and needed to be hospitalized twice while Goldstein was on maternity leave. “He’s fine now, but it was a traumatic experience,” Goldstein recalled.
Six months after Asher was born, Goldstein lost her job, which she said felt unfair. It also shattered her sense of identity. “I very much felt like a failure,” she said. “I felt like my career might be over.”
Goldstein’s entrée into motherhood was challenging and in some ways emotionally devastating. But it also reoriented her life and work. In 2017, she spent a year as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard reporting on women and work. During that time, she wrote several pieces about the issues women face in journalism, from sexual harassment to poor workplace policies for parents to lack of support for breast-feeding mothers.
One of the women she interviewed for the breast-feeding piece, Emily Ramshaw, who at the time was editor-in-chief of the Texas Tribune, described the great lengths she took to nurse her baby daughter, who wouldn’t take a bottle. “As the editor, I had an office with a locking door and the resources and flexibility to have a nanny bring the baby to me,” Ramshaw told Goldstein. “It is not lost on me how few women in the workplace—and particularly the newsroom—have that luxury.” In January 2020, just a few years after that interview, Ramshaw and Amanda Zamora started The 19th*, a new publication with a mission to report on politics and policy through the lens of gender, race, and sexual orientation. As a newsroom, The 19th* is known for its family-friendly policies, including generous paid family and caregiver leave, flexible hours, and remote work options.
Goldstein’s fellowship allowed her to do the kind of deep, unhurried work that’s a luxury in a field known for leaving people (not just mothers) feeling overworked, underpaid, and burned out. “That really gave me the time and space, one, to process some of my own really difficult experiences with motherhood and work, but also to do this really deep dive into mothers in journalism,” she said.
The Nieman Fellowship planted the seeds for The Double Shift, which has become essential listening for anyone who wants to understand the varied experiences of American mothers, especially during the pandemic.
When the pandemic hit, The Double Shift had just finished its second season, and the nature of the storytelling shifted from more traditional reporting to intimate and frank conversations. These began with a series of informal audio diaries between Goldstein and the show’s senior producer, Rachel McCarthy, as they navigated the early days of the pandemic. Then in season three, Garbes joined Goldstein as cohost, and they interspersed lively conversations with authors like Dani McClain and Mia Birdsong with honest, revealing shows about their own life experience. In a series on mental health, both Goldstein and Garbes disclosed that they, like many moms, had started to take antidepressants during the pandemic. In one episode, the pair sweetly interviewed each other’s mothers. In another, Goldstein and Garbes kicked down the wall between editorial and business, sharing details about the financial challenges of running an independent podcast and inviting listeners to problem-solve with them.
By season four, Goldstein had made a subtle change to The Double Shift tagline. When she started the podcast in 2019, she announced that the show was about “a new generation of working mothers.” She no longer uses the moniker “working mothers.” She explained why in an essay co-authored with Jo Piazza. “Mothering, like all parenting, is work,” the pair wrote. “If anyone was unaware of this fact before the pandemic, 18 months of watching moms nearly drown under the weight of the effort has driven the point home.” By ditching the term “working mother,” Goldstein is challenging the status quo assumption that paid employment is the only kind of valuable work. Mother is a verb. Kids need it. Our economy depends on it. And yet, somehow, society still fails to value it, even when mothers stepped in to take on the lion’s share of caregiving, homeschooling, and household responsibilities during the pandemic.
These issues are heavy, but Goldstein sounds optimistic on The Double Shift, frequently letting out a delighted chuckle midsentence. (During the “Our Moms” episode, Goldstein’s mom, Kay, said Goldstein’s laugh is her favorite part about the show: “It’s like she’s really enjoying what she’s talking about or hearing or doing.”)
But when I spoke with Goldstein in August and asked her the question I ask everyone at the start of an interview—What are you most excited about in your work or life right now?—she told me I was catching her at an uncharacteristically pessimistic moment. Goldstein, who had twins early in the pandemic and had hired an au pair to provide extra support for her three kids, had just resolved a childcare crisis. Now she was feeling on edge about the potential for another crisis. “What will happen to schools this fall?” she wondered, foretelling what has happened, with skyrocketing covid cases among children, school districts that are failing to require that staff get vaccinated, and parents that refuse to mask their kids.
““I’m worried about the generational loss of knowledge and advancement for women and mothers.” ”
Goldstein knows that things have never been great for mothers, and they are particularly bad now, but what usually keeps her spirits up is the possibility of generational change. “Crisis is the time for great social change and possibility, so I feel like it’s very hard to see the forest for the trees in different moments in the pandemic, and I’m right there with everyone in the trees: knowing things might not get better in the next few months, but things might get better for long-term change,” she said.
Then she added: “But right now: I’m not feeling extremely peppy about what’s going on.”
So I asked her the opposite of the question I usually lead with: What concerns you most right now?
“I’m most worried about momentum being lost,” she said, reflecting on how much she has struggled in her own life and work as a mother during the pandemic, and what she is seeing happen to caregivers around her. “I’m worried about the generational loss of knowledge and advancement for women and mothers.”
After the pandemic pushed the first wave of women out of the workforce—865,000 women dropped out of the U.S. labor force in September 2020, four times the number of men—Goldstein figured something would change. Policymakers would wake up to the plight of moms. But nothing happened. Now Goldstein worries that another wave of mothers will be forced out of paid work and won’t be able to get back in.
“That worries me in terms of who’s going to be running the world,” she said. “If you look at the micro examples, it’s like this person who could have been on track to run for office is now working part time because it’s too much, or this person who had really innovative ideas, instead of taking a six-month maternity leave is going to take a three-year maternity leave.”
Goldstein’s comment got me thinking of the guests she’s had on The Double Shift and the ideas they are sending into the world. And it got me thinking about her listeners, who are catching those ideas and spinning something new, creating ripples of positive change. These are the women she’s talking about. The women who are sending up solutions like wishes for a better future. I understand Goldstein’s despair. These are the women I want leading us, too.
But then I remembered the words of Andrea Landry that made me stop mid-run to think about the things I want to see grow. These ideas may be fledgling, but we have the power to expand them.
“The fact that you’re still thinking about something that Andrea Landry said in a podcast six months ago is a seed of something, giving you a new way of thinking about things,” Goldstein said. “And what I hope the show can do is help us think about a better future.”
Since March, the federal government has been gripped in protracted negotiations over a social spending package that could help moms through programs like paid family leave, universal pre-K, and free community college. But the social spending piece that could help moms the most—including the continuation of monthly payments to families with children, which is slated to end in December—is the primary sticking point.
Goldstein is not hopeful about government solutions. “I don’t necessarily feel like the cavalry of top-down solutions are coming for moms,” she said. “Here we are in August 2021, and nobody’s fucking coming to save us.”
But maybe, if we heed the ideas on The Double Shift, we can save each other.
The Double Shift is changing the conversation about motherhood and the value of care in America. Join me as a Double Shift member to hear important conversations that challenge the status quo of motherhood.
