"Mommy bloggers" or not, we owe a debt to "Dooce"

I've continued to think about the late, great Heather Armstrong, aka "Dooce," as the tributes pour in. (Adding to the sadness is she died just before Mother's Day.)  So many wonderful pieces of writing, and I linked to a few of them in my previous post that mentioned her death.  

This morning, I read another, particularly good one from Jessica Grose at the New York Times that I wanted to unpack here a little more:  "Dooce and Other 'Mommy Blogs' Deserve Credit for Shaping the Internet."  It's from her subscriber-only newsletter, but I've gift-linked it for your reading pleasure, because I think it's worth a read in full. 

Grose writes about the changing online world, with giants from the past 20 years such as BuzzNews, Vice and Gawker either gone or in danger of disappearing.  Then she adds (and I apologize for the slightly wonky formatting, not sure how to correct that...?): 

But I think there’s an expanse of popular media from the past two decades that risks being left out when we recount this period in online history: The publications called “mommy blogs,” an often dismissive term that many of their writers hated but used as shorthand anyway.

With the sad passing of Heather Armstrong, who started the website Dooce, was often affectionately called “Dooce” and was known for her radical candor about motherhood and mental health, it’s a moment to remember just how revolutionary this kind of confessional felt when it was new, and how influential it has been. It’s also a moment to remember that Armstrong and her peers, including Glennon Doyle of Momastery, Joanna Goddard of Cup of Jo and Ree Drummond of The Pioneer Woman, have left a lasting imprint on our culture and run successful businesses, some of which have outlasted upstarts run by men.

Assessing Armstrong’s legacy for The Times on Thursday, Lisa Belkin, who profiled her for The Times in 2011, explains that Dooce was part of “a brief but golden age of women making themselves heard on the internet, proving what is now assumed but was then brand-new: that a woman writing about her life from her kitchen could make her life into a living.”

 

She goes on to say:  

I also hope that Armstrong and her contemporaries aren’t left out of the story of how online media, as we know it, was built. And that we finally stop thinking about women chronicling domestic life as less than — if I had to do a shot every time someone told me that motherhood was a “niche” subject, I’d stay tipsy. So I want to be sure that these women are given the same swashbuckling credentials as Nick Denton of Gawker and Jonah Peretti of BuzzFeed.  

Ummm... if motherhood is a "niche" subject, try writing about involuntary childlessness...!  (Sorry, I digress, but I couldn't resist that aside.) But I wholeheartedly approve of her conclusion:     

...Let’s acknowledge that, and stop thinking of women writing from the heart as something that’s silly and small. It’s tremendous, and it has changed so many lives.

Lyz Lenz, in her Washington Post tribute (you can find a gift link in my previous post), said of Armstrong,  "She showed a generation of women who would become mothers that the stuff of our lives was valuable and important, that our voices and stories mattered."  And: "If she’d been a man, she’d be a humorist and memoirist. But she was a woman, so she was a mommy blogger." (Touche!)  

Well, I'm a woman, but I am not a mother (of a living child, anyway -- although somehow I did wind up on a list of Parenting magazine's "Must-Read Moms 2010" (!!) -- alongside Dooce, no less!! and other notable bloggers of the time) -- and yet, I recognize the debt that I and other women bloggers, regardless of subject matter, owe to Heather Armstrong.  

Would there have been "mommy blogs" without Dooce? Would someone else have ultimately been dubbed "Queen of the Mommy Bloggers"?  Maybe, but maybe not. And without "mommy blogs" like "Dooce," I wonder, would childless women like me have felt the need to respond by writing about their/our much-different experiences in the same, highly personal way?  

Regardless of whether you're a mother -- if you're a woman and you're "writing from the heart," about deeply personal things in a raw and honest way (or have done so during the past 20 years), you can trace at least part of your lineage back to Heather Armstrong and Dooce.  So I think all of us, moms and not, owe her our heartfelt thanks and appreciation.