The UES Mommas started as the success story of a kind, Don’t Mess with the Zohan-style community Facebook group of middle-class upper East Side mothers. Early on a Friday morning, its parent company Meta inexplicably pulled the plug on it. Originally formed back in 2011 to allow fellow moms to spread parenting tips, the collaborative group took off like wildfire, exploding in numbers and claiming more than 40,000 members. Its history has been plagued by exclusionary practices and small‐bore controversies that too frequently distracted from its true mission.
The creation of UES Mommas was based on community, positive energy and connection. Moms traded tips on pediatricians and set up the mommy-and-me music classes. As time passed, the Working Group turned into a battlefield for dissident views. The stringent membership requirements often drew scrutiny and criticism. Tiffany Ma, who joined the group as a moderator in 2020, put into place strict measures that potential members had to meet. Her requests for sonograms and birth certificates served to further stoke contentious battlegrounds of privacy and inclusion across the group.
On Wednesday morning, UES Mommas re-emerged onto the online landscape after going dark for six days. Their return came after The Post began asking Meta why it abruptly closed the page. This surprise hiatus has brought renewed scrutiny to the group’s highly controversial practices and their effects on the surrounding community.
Unfortunately, through the years, UES Mommas, has found itself in deep contentious waters. In 2017, two tea party mothers enlisted legal help after being labeled racists and bullies by other chapter members. Geraldine’s and Martha’s arguments were focused on the idea of white privilege and condescending responses to the Black Lives Matter protests. Such controversies represented the group’s ongoing fight with issues of diversity and inclusion.
Besides these troubling allegations, UES Mommas has experienced a tumultuous leadership saga from the start. In 2020, author Jane L. Rosen found herself on the chopping block, so to speak. Her new novel, Eliza Starts a Rumor, which again focused on a group like this, caused some upset among the moderators. Yet this incident showed just how closely intertwined the group’s identity is with its leadership and structure of decision-making.
Kate Donnelly, who joined UES Mommas in 2012, reflected on her experience as largely positive, stating that the group had been an invaluable resource for parenting advice. She admitted she recognized the escalating rifts among the community’s residents. In 2020, things came to a head and the divisions became clear. Members were vociferous in their demand for more diverse moderators, eventually forcing the group to bring on a Black mom to the admin team. This request was met with fierce push back from the then-moderator, Lindsey Plotnick Berger. Importantly, she underscored her dedication to steering the coalition in the direction that its current member constituents want.
“I have no intention of adding admins right now. I have worked my ass off to attempt to lead this group in a way that accounts for what its members want.” – Lindsey Plotnick Berger
The group’s anti-LGBT exclusionary practices have been condemned from all sides. Martin, a former member, articulated this sentiment well: “Despite its protests to the contrary and its insistence that its mission was to ‘support mothers,’ its very essence was about keeping ‘certain people’ and ‘certain ideas’ out.” He further noted that “eventually their exclusionary ‘mean girl’ essence became the group’s identity.”
Although many expressed outrage at Ma’s micromanagement, there seemed to be a fervent group intent on justifying Ma’s behavior. An unnamed member stated, “There is a lot of false information about Tiffany out there. I have met her. She is not a bad person.” Another remarked on the stringent entry requirements: “Her asks [to] join were a bit much, but she never did illegal things.”
The tumult within UES Mommas reached a peak when former members received cease-and-desist letters from criminal defense lawyer Yifat Schnur, labeling their conduct as “libelous, tortious, wrongful and illegal.” This dramatic legal strategy became just the latest twist in the saga that has followed the organization.
UES Mommas is intensely figuring out what it wants to be, as it deals with fights over ideology and member bigotry. Or will it return to its original purpose of building that positive, connecting environment that mothers need? The recent shutdown has only put fuel on the fire that is the movement to reform, diversify, and make the organization more inclusive.
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