Out of all the marketing moves for Meghan Markle to regain agency over her public image, her most recent Instagram feature may be her most strategic yet; soft power framed through the lens of motherhood.

Meghan Markle has just released a series of intimate Instagram posts to celebrate her daughter, Lillibet’s, fourth birthday on Instagram. One shows an intimate candid moment between mother and daughter. Another is a lighthearted video of Meghan dancing  in the maternity ward with Harry to help induce labour. 

Yet already, news outlets have already found their angle, one that has been driven into the ground since her relationship with Prince Harry started. GB news wasted no time in accusing Meghan of hypocrisy; How, they asked, could a woman in an ongoing legal battle over privacy simultaneously share such intimate glimpses of her family life? Why, if she’s so desperate to stay out of the spotlight, is she sharing videos of twerking in the labour ward?

But this critique flattens the nuance of her actions. What if these images were actually a smart calculated form of soft power, grounded in her identity as a mother?

Meghan Markle has had a tenuous relationship with the UK press . She has been racialized, demonised and policed by the UK tabloids. The infamous article, “(Almost) straight outta Compton” is still circulating on the Daily Mail despite such blatant racist connotations. The campaign to dethrone her was so aggressive that it actually worked and the pair stepped back from their royal positions, exiling to California.

Since then, the couple have taken a hands-on approach to rewrite their public narrative, brand deal by brand deal. There was Spare, Harry’s memoir; an infamous interview with Oprah that garnered a whopping 17 million viewers; the Archetypes podcast; their non profit organisation Archewell; producing credits on Live to Lead and Heart of Invictus; a Netflix documentary With Love, Meghan; and most recently, Meghans upcoming lifestyle brand, As Ever (previously American Riviera Orchard), the list goes on.

While some projects have been more successful than others, Meghan’s most recent and intimate photos of her and Lilibet lean into the most widely recognisable cultural archetype of softness and sacrifice: the mother. 

Rather than motherhood simply being the concept of a woman having children, it is a social intervention in the media ecosystem. This figure is idealised in the media as a digestible form of femininity. Meghan’s recent posts taps into this ideal; they recast her not as a disruptive outsider or an ungrateful royal, but as a grounded, joyful mother. It’s a role that makes her more relatable, more human and more palatable to a public conditioned to accept women through traditional tropes of femininity.  By allowing Lilibet to be seen, Meghan invites the public into a carefully chosen frame. These images don’t undermine her call for privacy, instead, she’s choosing what intimacy sells and what repositions her in a media economy where she was once violently misrepresented.

As Natalia Krzyżanowska (2020) outlines in her analysis of media discourse around motherhood, contemporary representations of mothers are deeply entangled with consumerist values. Media narratives encourage a model of the ideal “good mother” who performs emotional authenticity and caregiving in highly visual and consumable ways. Motherhood becomes a cultural product that is carefully staged, shared, and absorbed into broader economies of attention and admiration.

Meghan’s curated a soft-focus birthday moment on Instagram is part of this economy. It’s a strategic display of maternal credibility that functions as both emotional outreach and brand recalibration. As Krzyżanowska notes, these visual performances reinforce specific ideas of femininity, care, and social belonging, all of which Meghan has been historically denied by the British media. 

Even her pregnancy dancing video, labelled as embarrassing and inappropriate by some, has its place in this strategy deployment. In sharing it, she offers a glimpse into her unpolished moments that humanise her when the media have not given her the same grace.

This leans into a broader trope that Meghan is idealising with. Her Instagram shows glimpses into her life as a homemaker, picking her own fruits and vegetables, food layouts, walks outside with her family. She reframes the narrative from celebrity and ex-royal to wife and mother, leaving behind extravagance in place of curated authenticity.

By reclaiming the maternal lens, Meghan shows herself under terms she controls, in a manner that makes her both recognisable and emotionally resonant. Meghan’s feature of motherhood could be her strongest brand decision yet.