At age 69, my Sino-Anglo-Burmese mother has lived in four different countries on three continents. When she recounts being pregnant, birthing, and then raising my sister and I in a pre-Internet era, nostalgia takes center stage. She insists we were near perfect babies who slept 7 a.m. to 7 p.m—often under tables at restaurants—and that our two entries into the world were drug-free vaginal births with supportive hospital staff that didn’t pressure her to deliver any other way. Besides nearly biting my father’s hand off when he suggested playing nature sounds during her active labor, my mom paints the image of her pregnancy, childbirth, and early motherhood with uncharacteristically rosy strokes.

Her recent mothering advice to me—”You should read less, and trust yourself more”—may stem from her lack of access to Asian American writers like Angela Garbes, who writes in Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change that distrusting our own power “keeps us uncertain, small, and afraid.” In the early 1980s when my mom gave birth to me, the idea of encountering even one motherhood book written by someone who shared any cultural commonality with her was about as unthinkable as the daunting task of parenting a third-culture kid herself.

At age 37, my unexpected twin pregnancy and subsequent birthing experience in Mexico was nothing like the emulous motherhood journey my mom described. I could only manage to eat watermelon, chicken and rice, and sometimes plain toast during my first trimester, finding all other flavors completely revolting.

In my second trimester, I finally got my copy of Angela Garbes’ Like a Mother: A Feminist Journey Through the Science and Culture of Pregnancy. And with it, my appetite for the spicy, flavorful foods I used to love also returned. I found myself insatiable again, most of all for motherhood books by non-white authors. But, where were they? Where were we, the global majority, in the canon of motherhood literature?

In 2020, The New York Times posed the question that had been consuming me, too: Just How White Is the Book Industry? At that time, the Black Lives Matter movement seemed to be diversifying publishing, but the NYT authors wanted to know specifically how many current authors were actually people of color. Unfortunately, that data wasn’t available anywhere they looked. It turns out that 95 percent of the 7,000-plus books for which they identified the author’s race were written by white authors. And while the writers claimed that “author diversity has increased in recent years”, they also confirmed the obvious: “white writers still dominate.”

“We know so little because our knowledge has been taken from us for generations,” Angela María Spring told me. The 41-year-old Caribbean Latinx writer, bookseller, and mother found the same brown needle in the (very white) haystack that I did:

“Like a Mother shines a light on how to reclaim that knowledge for all. It was the only pregnancy book I found while pregnant that I was remotely interested in reading because Angela Garbes answered all the questions I actually had.”

Despite my best efforts to find other voices like Garbes’, my exhaustive search for listicles and “best of” motherhood reading lists left me drowning in a sea of exclusively white voices whose experiences were completely unrelatable. When I reached out to other WGM (women of the global majority, a.k.a. Black, Indigenous and people of color) moms to help guide me, they were apologetic for not knowing about any resources by our own people, either.

Indira Martell cited “too many conflicting opinions and not enough time to figure out who and what is credible” as her reason for intentionally avoiding books on motherhood and related topics altogether. The 44 year-old Ghanaian and American mother didn’t read “any of those books at all, regardless of who wrote it and who it was written for.” She turned to the Mayo Clinic website to find recommendations and manage expectations. The midwives at her midwifery clinic, her OB-GYN, her doula, and her trusted family were her greatest counselors, she said.

In reality, the search for motherhood books by non-white authors doesn’t just come up empty for me or for the many WGM I interviewed. There’s a noticeable void in pregnancy and motherhood books, but not for lack of interest. In simple terms, WGM and BIPOC voices have been systematically excluded from the discourse of motherhood. In The Ethos of Black Motherhood in America: Only White Women Get Pregnant, Dr. Kimberly C. Harper speaks from personal experience as a Black mother, arguing Black women have been intentionally shut out not only from pregnancy publications, but also from maternal medical literature, media, and scholarship.

“All of the books I read about pregnancy, motherhood, etc. were by white women,” admitted Melissa Lim Patterson, a 35-year-old Chinese-Cambodian-Vietnamese American mother of two. “As I think about raising my girls as women of color, I wish there were more out there, though there is a growing number of children’s books featuring people of color,” she shared with me.

Fortunately, it seems the exclusion of WGM and BIPOC birthers is coming to an end. Or, at least the rhetoric is (if begrudgingly) making room for us. In The Guardian, Huma Qureshi argued that motherhood is naturally inclusive and therefore worthy of more WGM-centric motherhood literature because “even if we’ve not all given birth we have all been born.” That motherhood books aren’t just for WGM, but rather for everyone, is increasingly becoming more accepted. As the revered feminist author bell hooks wrote, “there is a great need for women and men to organize around the issue of child care to ensure that all children will be raised in the best possible social frameworks; to ensure that women will not be the sole, or primary, child rearers.”

So, it is with great joy that I offer up this hard-won motherhood reading list. These 30 titles are written by WGM and center Black and brown motherhood. Whether you’re pregnant, thinking of conceiving, or don’t aspire to have children but do care about reproductive justice, we are all integral to the act of mothering. Having simply been born is reason enough to consider reading these books by WGM focused on holistic well-being with Black and brown motherhood at the forefront. Together, they form an essential roadmap for childbirth and mothering for everyone.

30 Essential Motherhood Books by Women of the Global Majority

Before You Get Pregnant (or Don’t)

From the humorous and unapologetically raunchy Dear Girls to the newly released trauma memoir This Boy We Made, these books dance along the spectrum of mothering while non-white, sometimes even clumsily. Indeed, navigating a world not adequately built for us as WGM or our Black and brown babies can often leave us feeling like we have two left feet. But mothering is a communal act of love that takes shape across genders, age, belief systems, cultures, and often without compensation. If we can agree that motherhood should indeed be a form of collective effort, as defined by Garbes in Essential Labor, we’ll begin to view care work as invaluable to, intertwined with, and yes, essential, for building a healthier society.

When You’re Expecting

My own birth plan was based on the guiding sample in Nurture, so believe me when I say if you only buy one book while you’re pregnant, make it this one! With its accessible language, doula-informed content, and easy-to-use checklists and critical questions answered, there’s no doubt any new mother in your life will be beyond thankful to own a copy. That being said, any existing parent in your life will also tell you that once your little one arrives, you’ll never read again. In reality, only Olympian multitaskers will read much (if at all) in the early days of postpartum. So, while you’re still expecting, consider stocking your shelves with relatable content by WGM who have unique and powerful stories to tell, and have produced groundbreaking research on reproductive rights we should all be concerned about sharing.

The First 40 Days (Postpartum)

The Chinese-American founder motherhood-focused food and lifestyle company MotherBees, Heng Ou, retrieves the ancient wisdom of “confinement care” in The First Forty Days, emphasizing the often ignored critical months and weeks following the delivery of a child. Packed with recipes rooted in Ayurvedic, Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), and other global culinary traditions, The First Forty Days is a guidebook to brush up on while you’re pregnant, and cling to when you’re in the haze of early motherhood. It’s also a way to open conversations with loved ones about how to best support new parents, especially mothers, and to help nourish them during their most vulnerable, exhausted days.

Also included here are books for multiracial families, old-school lessons from Black mamas, and invaluable instructions for how to parent using an anti-racist lens. Each brings clarity to the unique tasks for which WGM are authorities before they are mothers. Mira Jacob’s Good Talk is “by turns hilarious and heart-rending,” writes Celeste Ng. These postpartum reads are appropriate for not only new parents, but also for those who have been seeking them all along. The WGM writers brave enough to share their families’ stories give us a mirror to our own.

More Online Resources

Hungry for more non-white writers on motherhood and related topics? Check out Jamilah Lemieux’s Care + Feeding column, the Mater Mea blog for Black mothers, and these essay series focused on WGM: Propublica, The Rumpus, and Black Motherhood via the Washington Post.

Key Takeaways

→ Author diversity has been steadily increasing in recent years, but white writers still dominate the book industry, making it an added challenge to find books about pregnancy, motherhood, postpartum, and children’s literature that features multicultural characters and families. With that said, we—women of the global majority—need these books to see our stories represented.

→ In the racial mix of the world, only 16 percent of the global population is white. By 2060, it is predicted that only 10 percent of the world will be white (Source: Rutland Herald). That’s why we prefer the terms “people of the global majority” and “women of the global majority” to outdated language like “minorities” and “people of color”. It’s also why we think it’s urgent to share resources like this reading roundup, where diverse voices are uplifted and brought to the fore.

→ The maternal mortality rate for non-Hispanic Black women is still nearly three times the rate for non-Hispanic White mothers, according to the CDC. With this in mind, it remains essential to not only include Black women’s voices in the motherhood literature canon, but to celebrate their unique perspectives, which help to provide reliable information to expecting mothers and support Black women in their postpartum journeys, which are unique for every individual.

→ If you enjoyed this list, please share it with mothers, mothers-to-be, and anyone in your life who has been born! After countless hours of research, we haven’t found another list like it yet. As bell hooks advised, “there is a great need for women and men to organize around the issue of child care to ensure that all children will be raised in the best possible social frameworks; to ensure that women will not be the sole, or primary, child rearers.”

→ Please follow us @urbanwellnessmag and subscribe to our newsletters to receive honest recommendations from the women of the global majority who make up our editorial team about sustainable products, health-conscious recipes, great reads, and of-the-moment things to learn, listen to, and watch—all with your holistic well-being in mind.

In Search of Motherhood Books by Non-White Authors – The Top 30 Titles by Women of The Global Majority