Alumni Spotlight: Minna Dubin – Goddard Alumni Association

Minna Dubin (she/her) is a writer, mother, and educator who currently resides in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her essay “The Rage Mothers Don’t Talk About,” which, fittingly opens with a quote from Anne Lammott, examines the full range of emotions motherhood can bring about and was published in The New York Times. Her work has also appeared in Salon, Parents, Romper, The Forward, Hobart, MUTHA Magazine, and elsewhere. Minna has become a leading feminist voice on the topic of “mom rage,” appearing on MSNBC, Good Morning America, The Tamron Hall Show, NBC10 Boston, NPR, and her work was made fun of on Real Time with Bill Maher.

Minna graduated from the Transformative Language Arts program at Goddard. In her time there, she searched for an alternate term for “identity politics” that might allow the idea to escape its complicated history. She landed on the term “power identities” which has since been independently used by Ibram X. Kendi, and is about the identities that we are either given, born into, or take on that give or take away power.

Minna’s writing has often tackled hard subjects that people aren’t supposed to talk about, from sex, race, and interracial relationships. Now, as a leading feminist voice on mother rage, Minna writes about mothers and what society expects of them, from career shifts to emotional calm and reserve, and how these expectations can breed a crisis of loneliness and yes, rage, in mothers.

Her forthcoming book, MOM RAGE: The Everyday Crisis of Modern Motherhood will be published in September by Seal Press and is available for preorder now anywhere books are sold.

About the book: Mom Rage is Dubin’s groundbreaking work of reportage about an unspoken crisis of anger sweeping the country—and the world. She finds that while a specific instance of rage might be triggered by something as simple as a child who won’t tie her shoes, the roots of the anger go far deeper, from the unequal burden of childcare shouldered by moms to the flattening of women’s identities once they have kids. Drawing on insights from moms across the spectrum of race, sexual orientation, and class, she offers practical tools to help readers disarm their rage in the moment, while never losing sight of the broader social change we need to stop raging for good.

Pre-order from Minna’s local bookstores:

Also available wherever books are sold: