Twenty-five years ago this month, a new website appeared. The dotcom boom was at its height, and the internet was hot and modern. This forum was less so. “From breast to bottle”, ran one, less than whizzy, early headline. “How did you manage it?” Another section tempted readers with advice on such thrills as “socket covers, sterilised lunch boxes and stairgates”. Racier questions were posted: “Sex after Kids”, asked one. “Can it be even better than before?” Albeit not answers: the general feeling of the website on the matter was: “No”.
Mumsnet might not have been thrilling. Its success, however, was remarkable. Today, it is the most popular parenting website in Britain and one with an outsize influence. It retains its oddness. Its very name sounds like an oxymoron—mothers feel domestic, not digital—and its character is little less contrary. Its focus is often on the trivial: users discuss weaning and baby bottom butter—but its reach is colossal. It has around 10m monthly users, and those users trust it. When Mumsnetters recommended Waitrose’s Baby Bottom Butter as a fine moisturiser (for mother’s cheeks, not baby’s) it promptly sold out.
It is serious enough to attract prime ministers to its webchats—David Cameron, Gordon Brown and Boris Johnson all went on—then asks them: “What biscuit do you like?” (oatcakes, chocolate, and chocolate digestive, respectively). It is rarely taken too seriously; there is an account on X (formerly Twitter) called “Mumsnet Madness”. But it is serious enough to have helped change British laws and attitudes on topics from miscarriage to choking to trans. It is certainly serious enough to be insulted. Its users have been called “Guardian-reading, laptop-wielding harpies”. And it began, as so much of mothering does, with vomit.
In 1999 Justine Roberts, its CEO, was on a flight with her tiny twins. She had recently left her job in the City and was interested in founding an internet startup, though wasn’t sure on what. That holiday was her “light-bulb moment”, chiefly because it was so dark. The twins vomited; the hotel disappointed; Ms Roberts berated herself—then founded a website to “capture the wisdom of people who’ve been there and done that”. Mumsnet had begun.
Evidently other mothers were in need of such a site. A new mother, almost overnight, finds herself bereft of her job, her colleagues, her social life, her sleep and even her name: in hospital people simply call her “Mum”. It is a sudden and startling stripping of self. “Each suburban wife”, as the feminist writer Betty Friedan put it, “struggled…alone.” Mothers were, at that time, alone not merely socially but intellectually: so little literature touched on motherhood. Why? asked the writer Anne Enright. “Can mothers not hold a pen?”
Then came Mumsnet. Mothers might still not have held pens, but if their baby was awake at 2am they could, and now did, type into a laptop. Posts started to proliferate; their tone somewhere between a parenting magazine (“How good is your double buggy?”) and a parish one (“Thanks to Gilly for her recipe for Cartwheel Sandwiches”), with a dash of bracing biology thrown in. “Where”, asked a plaintive later post, “has my perineum gone?”
Its character developed too. The proliferation of acronyms—“DH” (dear husband), “DD” (dear daughter); “MIL” (mother-in-law)—implied this was a cosy club. The tone of the posts suggested that it was quite a middle-class one. “Which chocolates”, asked one user, do “you view as typically middle class?” Many others merely lurk: Mumsnet offers unbeatable online eavesdropping. A post about a husband’s bedside beaker (for post-sex cleanup) is justly infamous. By 2019, 43.5m words were being posted a month. Mothers had a chat room of their own.
Most of those words are good-natured. Ms Roberts employs moderators but uses them sparingly: like a “pub landlord” they don’t eavesdrop on every conversation but “If someone gets nasty, we will chuck them out.” They rarely need to. Unlike other forms of social media, forums tend to be just that: sociable. When users congregate around a shared interest (babies, beakers) rather than for “self-promotion” it can, says Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist, foster a “more intelligent and civil environment”.
It is also partly because Mumsnet is so female: at least 95% of users are women. They want validation, not domination. Ms Roberts introduced the acronym “AIBU”—“Am I being unreasonable?” (and its corollary, “YANBU”—“You are not being…”) because “so many conversations were beginning with [that] phrase”.
AIBU on trans?
Mumsnetters have, however, been willing to be called unreasonable. In 2016 the trans lobby was in the ascendant. Slogans such as “trans women are women” were gaining ground; sites like Facebook and Twitter had suspended the accounts of some sceptics. Mumsnet did not suspend them, which caused it to lose advertising and attract insults. One article accused it of being “a toxic hotbed of transphobia”. Ms Roberts didn’t give in.
This was “hugely important”, says Hadley Freeman, a journalist. Some women used “the toxic hotbed” to organise “Man Friday” events at which they self-identified as men, wore fake beards and crashed male-only venues. Others used it to ask whether “AIBU to think” that the trans stuff was going “too far”. One reason they resisted, says Janice Turner, a Times journalist who covered it, is that so many were mums. And nothing “brings home the fact biological sex is real more than giving birth”.
The trans debate is now ebbing. Mumsnetters are back to posting about the issues that really matter. AIBU, asked a recent post, “to despise the word ‘comfy’?” Not much, then, has changed in the 25 years since Mumsnet began. And yet a lot has. YANBU if you think that Mumsnet made some of that change happen. ■
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