Hip Mama

Hip Mama: The Parenting Zine is a quarterly magazine dealing with the practice and principles of motherhood from an alternative, “hip” perspective. Originally founded by Ariel Gore in Oakland, California, in 1993, the magazine has relocated to Portland, Oregon, with Kerlin Richter taking over as editor and publisher. The magazine has been credited with spearheading the maternal feminism movement or contemporary motherhood movement, in which motherhood and feminism are a natural pairing rather than positioned opposites.

Gore, a California-born author and journalist with a graduate degree from the University of California at Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism, continues to contribute material to the magazine. Her oldest child, daughter Maia Swift, was born in 1990 and as a teenager received a co-writing credit with Gore for Hip Mama's Guide to Raising a Teenager. Other books with the Hip Mama brand include the Hip Mama Survival Guide: Advice From the Trenches and The Essential Hip Mama: Writing From the Cutting Edge of Parenting, an anthology of material from the magazine. Gore contributes the first page of each issue, “Yo Mama's Daybook,” a brief daily diary with notes such as, “Deli guy warns me not to give boy kids soy because of the estrogen; say, “It's O.K., we want him to be gay.” As with many magazines of its type, Hip Mama's content is reader contributed, in addition to the features provided by the editors. Originally slanted toward urban and single mothers, it now identifies itself as “a reader-written zine for progressive families,” in indicia beneath humorous, dictionary-style definitions of hip and mama.

Issues have broad themes, such as community, the future, or voice; within those themes, material explores a wide range of territory. The “future” issue, for instance, opens with a question from Richter's editorial: “How do we balance our relative confidence that the world as we know it's totally [expletive], with the pure optimism necessary to take care of children?” Other features in the issue cover topics such as young-adult science fiction writer Madeline L'Engle, a reader's worries that her fears of dystopia had turned her son into “the curator of my narcissistic self-absorption,” multiracial families, and the multiplicity of parents in the lives of children of the postmodern age, among other areas.