Individualized Solidarities: Privatizing Happiness Together

This chapter elaborates the modes of gender solidarity that animate mothering through precarity by exploring two mothering communities: Mothers of Preschoolers, a grassroots international Christian network devoted to mentoring mothers, and Momastery, an online mothering community that coheres around the microcelebrity of blogger Glennon Doyle Melton. Specifically, this chapter argues that these mothering communities offer women individualized solidarities, where the aim of collectivity is to privatize happiness, that is, to stabilize and valorize individual nuclear families. Mothers feel and act in solidarity with each other, providing significant forms of material and affective support in hopes of keeping one another attached to nuclear family life despite its mounting impossibilities. Mothers help each other to embrace precarity and work to privatize happiness together.