The Rights of Mothers

Rebecca Mead on Ali Wong’s latest Neflix special:

Perhaps the most radical thing about “Hard Knock Wife” is that nowhere in her routine does Wong mention the obvious fact that, once again, she is pregnant. One way of interpreting her silence is as a bold gesture of liberation—the freedom not to mention her condition, as if it necessarily modified her words. But another way to look at the omission would be that Wong ignores her pregnancy and its implications because, in so many ways, the structure of our society, in its scandalous lack of support for new mothers, persists in doing exactly the same.

Read her comment on The New Yorker.