The School for Good Mothers is Jessamine Chan’s debut novel and was just released this year. The timing of this novel is impeccable with anti-abortion rhetoric in the US really ramping up, the recent passing of restrictive abortion laws in the US (with more to come), and the US Supreme Court poised to overturn Roe v. Wade. The School for Good Mothers examines the lack of women’s rights, how the State controls women and how the concept of “motherhood” is weaponized against women. It examines how society judges mothers, especially mothers who are poor and who are not white. It is an incredibly imaginative novel, but it is bogged down by a disappointing protagonist and a depressing ending.

Frida Liu is a thirty-nine-year-old Chinese American woman with an eighteen-month-old daughter. Her husband left her just after she gave birth for a much younger, white woman. Frida is depressed and exhausted. She has a job that she does not like, she wants her husband back, she is suffering from insomnia, and her daughter, Harriet, is sick and constantly fussing. Frida leaves Harriet home alone napping with the intention of just popping into work to grab a file she needs. Instead, she is gone for over two hours, the neighbours call the police, and her daughter is taken away.

Frida’s lapse in parental judgement occurs at a time when the various levels of government in the US are cracking down on parental abuse and neglect, the idea being that children will not grow up to be bad people if they have good parents. Frida loses custody of Harriet; she is allowed supervised visits that are scheduled at the social worker’s whims. The State installs surveillance cameras in her home so that her behaviour can be observed, and she must attend counselling. It seems like Frida is on track to never get custody of Harriet again when she is offered the opportunity to attend a new State-funded school for bad mothers where they are taught to be “good” mothers. Frida must give up a year of her life to attend this school, and pass each course taught there, if she ever wants to see Harriet again.

I am not going to go into detail of how the school functions and how the women that attend the school are taught to be “good” mothers, as I think readers should discover this for themselves. What I will tell you, though, is that the school teaches the white American ideal of motherhood, you know, the 1950s doting mother and housewife whose life revolves around her husband and children and who has no desires of her own. Almost every single person involved in taking Harriet away from Frida and running the school for mothers is white, and most of the “bad” mothers that attend the school are Black or Latina. There are a few white mothers (it seems the white mothers must do really terrible things to get sent there) and Frida is the only Asian.

There is also a school for bad fathers. The mothers discuss what the school for fathers must be like: it must be nicer, the fathers are probably treated better, and there are probably fewer bad fathers. The reader eventually finds out that all of this is correct. The school for mothers is more about controlling women rather than keeping children safe from bad parents. The mothers are practically browbeaten into believing that they are all narcissists and that they are bad mothers because they “desired”, but the school for fathers is a more affirmative environment, the same way that fathers are praised in North American society when they do the same thing that mothers are expected to do all day, every day, without complaint.

Frida is a character that I think a lot of women would be able to relate to: depressed and stressed; trying to manage too many things and failing; feeling unloved and unappreciated. Frida does a terrible thing, leaving her eighteen-month-old child at home alone, but the punishment certainly does not fit the crime. (On the other hand, no one questions her ex-husband’s girlfriend’s parenting skills when she is an antivaxxer and puts Harriet on diets that are inappropriate for a child.) She clearly loves Harriet. My problem with Frida, though, is that she does not seem to hold herself accountable for her actions. There were extenuating circumstances that led her to temporarily abandon her child for a couple of hours, but she keeps referring to it as her “bad day” and barely acknowledges how irresponsible and horrible it was that she left her baby home alone. When Frida is at the school, she at first rails against the injustice of it (which I do not blame her for at all), then she starts to take the school seriously when she realizes that it is the only way she will get her daughter back, but then she allows herself to get distracted by one of the men at the school for fathers. This, and what she really did when she left Harriet alone, makes me think that maybe Frida is not really that committed to being a mother since she does not balance her own wants with her own child’s needs. Still, I do not think that Frida deserves the judgement handed down on her when she finishes the school. And I am curious to know what people with children think of her actions at the very end of the novel; I feel very conflicted about it myself.

The School for Good Mothers shines a bright light on how toxic the North American ideals of parenthood are. It is not just on women to raise children; men play their role in conceiving children, so they should also play a role in raising them. Let us take a second to reflect on abortion laws and how they are actually about controlling women’s bodies; if abortion laws were really about protecting unborn children, then the men who get women pregnant would be targeted with laws that demand they provide for the women they impregnate and the children they helped procreate. There would also be better support systems in place for unwed mothers and mothers living in poverty (who are disproportionately women of colour) so they can take better care of themselves and their children.