'I Wrote It To Make Women Angry': What One Author Wants You To Know About Momfluencers, Casey Anthony, & More 'Bad Mothers'

“I would be shocked if I met a mother who had not felt judged as a bad mother at one point or another,” says EJ Dickson.

When she talks to SheKnows, the culture writer is celebrating the release of her first book, One Bad Mother: In Praise of Psycho Housewives, Stage Parents, Momfluencers, and Other Women We Love. The title is a play on the phrase “one bad motherf—er,” but Dickson says the book is for all women, whether or not they are parents.

“The experience of being judged according to restrictive cultural standards that are ultimately complete bulls— and invented to keep us in line, quiet and distracted… [is] basically universal to the experience of being a woman,” she says. “I don’t think this is a book about being a mother, I think this is a book about being a woman and I wrote it to make women angry.”

And make women angry it will. In One Bad Mother, Dickson charts the trope of the bad mother throughout pop culture, from the MILF (the chapter about which is excerpted in The Cut, where Dickson has worked as a culture writer since 2024) to the momfluencer, a relatively new phenomenon that has wasted no time in incensing our ideals of what a good mother is.

“The fact that these women are monetizing maternal labor—and getting extremely well compensated for it—and are making it look appealing, that’s exposing the whole thing as a sham,” Dickson says. “There are other reasons: they promote unrealistic and unattainable ideals of motherhood. [But] it’s exposing the fact that we’re all expected to do this for free, with a smile on our face and not complain about it. That’s the reason why I think we hate momfluencers—they expose the scam of motherhood.”

Melded with the copious examples of bad moms in pop culture are the bad moms in real life. Dickson includes examples such as the welfare queen of 1980s Reagan’s America and the spectacle of paternity test reveals on daytime talk shows, most of which were designed to shame and uphold stereotypes of families of color, particularly Black families. She quotes from the legal scholar Dorothy Robert’s 2022 book, Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—And How Abolition Can Build a Safer World, that “the quintessential bad mother in the United States is a Black mother,” however it’s the misdeeds of bad white moms, like the idealized 1950s version of which appears on the cover of One Bad Mother, that I think we’re most intrigued by as a society.

Take Casey Anthony, the Florida mom who was found not guilty of the murder of her daughter, Caylee Anthony, in July 2011 (she was found guilty of providing false information to law enforcement and was released later that month with time served).

“I really did not want to write about Casey Anthony,” writes Dickson in the chapter entitled “Casey Anthony Is In the Book or, True Crime, Motherhood and the Horror We Can’t Name” in which Dickson grapples with our obsession with true crime and, in our rush to identify with the victims of said cases, how those involving maternal filicide force us to, however uncomfortably, see ourselves in the perpetrator. 

Dickson herself is turned off by true crime, even more so when she had children of her own. “I know there are a lot of mothers who, for whatever reason, become more invested in true crime after they have kids. That’s the opposite of my experience,” she says. She was perturbed by the amount of people who, when she told them she was writing a book about bad mothers, asked if she was going to write about Anthony.

“As a writer, if there’s a topic that makes you uncomfortable or repels you in some way, that should be an invitation to grapple with it,” she says. “The chapter isn’t really about Casey Anthony so much as it is a chapter about why people are interested in stories about mothers who harm their children. That’s a huge percentage of the true crime podcast audience, so I was really interested in how so many women could have the total opposite reaction as me. So that’s what that was probing into: is it because it’s instructive to us in some way, or is it because we identify with these women in some way and we don’t want to confront that, so that was really interesting for me to explore.”

Filicide is vanishingly rare, and when it does happen, it’s usually the result of untreated postpartum depression or, more often, family annihilators by the father. However, Dickson came across a study in the Indian Journal of Psychiatry that posited that the United States has the highest rate of filicide in the developed world. “There is something specific about the state of parenthood in the United States that makes parents more likely to kill their children,” Dickson writes in One Bad Mother. This study was from 2016. With the state of parenthood, including access to childcare, restrictions around reproductive rights and family separations by ICE, growing even more difficult in the decade since, one wouldn’t be surprised if that rate has increased, though there is not yet any available data to support that theory.

“That was just my inference as someone who thinks about these things,” Dickson says. “The lack of infrastructural support for mothers is a driving force behind a lot of the questions that I ask in the book.”

It’s enough to make mothers—bad or otherwise—mad as hell.

Scarlett Harris is a culture critic and author of ‘A Diva Was a Female Version of a Wrestler: An Abbreviated Herstory of World Wrestling Entertainment.’ Read her previously published work on her website and through her Substack, The Scarlett Woman. Follow her on Bluesky at @scarletteharris.bsky.social.