Article: "Being a good mom can get you fired"

Given today’s occasion, I thought it would only be appropriate to discuss an article that deals with the same reason today is a holiday in the first place: our mothers. Ellen Bravo of CNN, who is also the executive director of the Family Values @ Work Consortium, argues that there needs to be assistive policy changes for pregnant women and those on leave within the workplace. Her nonpartisan, nonprofit network of 21 state and local coalitions aims to do just that by striving for benefits such as paid sick days and family leave insurance. In this specific article, Bravo uses exemplification paired with anecdotes and emotional diction to demonstrate how hard it is to be a good mom that works, as well as how badly work policies need to be changed.

Bravo begins the article with a generalization about mothers stating that they are typically “warm, loving, patient, generous, protecting, [and] wise,”(Bravo) therefore, why would anyone want to fire them? Here Bravo uses emotional diction to quickly and effectively create the image of what she wants her audience to imagine as a “good mom”. She then continues to give an example about when a good mom, Rhiannon Broschard of Chicago, was fired because she had to stay home in order to care for her special-needs child. Bravo continues to give another example in Brenda of Milwaukee who was fired after giving birth. These examples and anecdotes both appeal to pathos by making her audience feeling sympathetic for the mothers’ situations. The actual examples also strengthen her argument by making it more concrete and displays that this problem is legitimate.

Overall, I found the article to be effective, although there was one area in which Bravo could have improved. While she did offer real examples, they were both simply of someone being fired. If she had chosen a real example that displayed the implications of having been fired (i.e. having to selling a house, going bankrupt, etc) then her argument would have been stronger. Other than that, a solid article.