I would go so far as to say that motherhood is the reason there is unequal treatment of the sexes across the world. Pregnancy, birth, and childrearing are the reason men all over the world are in charge. I'm sure it's been happening for thousands of years. Men are in charge because they can be. They aren't saddled with reproduction and childrearing. They set up the world to work for them. I'm reaching a point in my thinking where I feel a matriarchal society like elephants have is the only healthy way for females of a species to live.
My mom said the reason women struggle to rise in the world is because they have to keep track of the socks. My mom wasn't right about much (not here to dis motherhood but my mom is a pretty toxic person outside of any patriarchal/ sexist stuff... which she actively supports and tries to enforce on her daughters) but she was right here. Socks. Shoes. Backpacks. Homework. Jackets (my son once lost his entire winter coat... in January). And the spoons. And the cat food. And the permission slip. And the birthday party. And the dental appointment. And the glasses.The mountain of trivial details apparently only moms can handle are overwhelming.
I am childfree, and the amount of misogyny in childfree online spaces is staggering. Most of it comes from men, but a lot from other women. I find it very shocking especially when coming from women who claim to be feminists - isn't it obvious that when mothers lose, all women lose? Without solidarity with each other, what do we have?
I agree with you Charlotte. I am also childfree, but I am an intersectional feminist. I support all aspects of feminism that advance women’s rights and quality of life and motherhood is a HUGE one.
The only thing I might add is that a pregnant woman is more likely to be murdered. Also, women’s mortality rates in child birth, especially for black women, rival 3rd world countries.
This issue is near and dear to my heart. It is my main complaint about Ms magazine, all about women and never about mothers.
As a reproductive psychiatrist, I work with exclusively with women around issues including menstruation, pregnancy and menopause. My background includes surviving medical school and the Army (scholarship paid for med school) in the 80’s and 90’s and so the perspective I bring to my work is feminist, sharpened by my own experience navigating those male dominated worlds.
It astounds me that there is this divide among women, or child bearers and feminists. I have my own theories but I’m writing here to thank you Zawn for writing in such a compeling way about it. You have a wonderful way of getting right to the guts of the problem and it is refreshing.
I will again print this article and share it with my patients as I work to teach women to advocate for themselves and dare I say, become feminists?!
Love this! And just in time for Mother's Day too. The group of mums I mediate on FB is already saying how over Mother's Day they are, and it's still weeks away! It's just heartbreaking that a day meant to celebrate mothers has become just another task they're in charge of organizing, or if they somehow don't have to do any organizing and actually get a day "off" there's more work the next day because no one did any of her usual work while she was relaxing. Zawn, people have said that Mother's Day should only celebrate women who are "in the trenches of parenting" and I'm wondering what you think about that, since it really sounds to me like a reflection of the exact problem you're discussing here.
As someone who was formerly one of Those Young White Feminists, thank you. I am now 43, happily single, and will remain child-free til I die alone with my cats. And all of that is possible because of mothers.
My mom, who spent my entire childhood telling me that "men ain't shit" and "you need to have your OWN money/house/car/support network," while being subjected to all of the pitfalls of motherhood in a patriarchy in the 90s.
My friends who wanted to be mothers, for calling me on my "yeah whatever she chose that and nobody said it was sunshine and roses" bullshit by asking hard questions like "so you aren't going to support ME, personally?'
My friends who are moms, many of whom I never knew Before Motherhood. For showing me that I don't "hate kids" just because I don't want anyone to be produced by my body. For feeling like I was safe enough for Real Talk and not keeping me out of the gross body horror parts of their pregnancies, births, and child-raising. Because I had no idea how gory it really all is, even though I knew I didn't want it. Now I EXTRA don't want it, but I love all my lil honorary (and biological) niblings and have a life full of women with very different experiences than my own. And I have the absolute dead certainty that yes, they may have "chosen" motherhood and may even love it tremendously. But that doesn't mean their men aren't garbage as a class. And I'm not blaming them, because I have also experienced men at various ages and determined that there really are very few "good choices" out there. And for someone (most of humans) who experiences an intense biological imperative to have and raise children, that means they'll necessarily settle for what looks like the Least Bad Choice.
To you. And others like you. And specifically my friend Catherine, who sat with me at brunches for like 4 years and forced me to take moms into account if I'm going to be a feminist.
I still scoff at things like "parental leave for Fathers," but that's because now I know. They're probably just gonna fart into the couch and make things HARDER for a woman who literally just tore her body in half and now has to physically heal while also supporting a tiny flesh barnacle that feeds on her body.
I have found that the behavior of men on parental leave makes me want to argue against it completely. I imagine a “decent” man would pick up the housework and hold the baby and let mom sleep, but almost all of the men sit on their ass, demand food, and use their actual parental vacation from work to further diminish women’s childcare and household work as “easy” because men never freaking do it.
100% true about men and paternity leave. My ex husband sat around for 6 weeks, playing video games, eating candy and yelling at me if I asked him to make dinner. He told me that he didn't take the paternity leave for me or the baby, he did it for "his mental health" because he wanted a break from his job. 9 months later we were divorced.
Don’t get me started on mothers of disabled children (I am and have two disabled kids). The disdain amongst mothers of typical children I have experienced when I have dared to bring my children out in public (to a park no less) is horrifying. Of course you can not sit on the sidelines and have a coffee watching your child play because you are too busy hovering near your child in case they get over excited and pull a child’s hair that gets in their space. This happened to us and the child cried and I hurried over to the mother on the sidelines and apologised profusely and explained the situation but she just looked at me with contempt. All the other mothers just stared at me, no one asked if we were ok, and I ended up bursting into tears in the middle of the playground underneath my sunglasses and left. It was a horrible experience and it makes you never want to take your child out again. Taking children out generally in public is riddled with judgement from others but it is a million times harder when you try to do the same with disabled children. You are already so isolated in the community and there are Mum groups but not so much for your particular child that has a profound intellectual disability and is non verbal. This is why when I am (very seldomly) invited to a typical child’s birthday party, I don’t go because I just have to follow my child around the entire time in a state of hyper vigilance. Motherhood is such a thankless and endless task, I’m so tired but I just love you Zawn, you just get right to the centre of the issue and discuss and explain it so precisely. Thank you for this.
I’m sorry you had that experience 😣 I’ve found other Mums can be the worst for judgement. Two of my older sisters have non-verbal autistic children, and I never used to understand why they stayed home so much. One especially, she has two and she just used to be so stressed all the time. Even at family events, her eldest was a runner and you’d have to watch her like a hawk. As I got older I remember feeling resentful and judgemental towards her, hearing other people discuss what she was doing “right” or “wrong”. I realised how toxic that thinking was, but I didn’t really get it until I became a Mother myself. Now my son is a toddler and has epic meltdowns, I can feel the judgemental stares and have had so much unsolicited “advice” on my parenting. He may well be neurodivergent, and I’ve never been closer to my sister as I am now. It’s sad and frustrating how we really are pitted against each other, and I feel ashamed at my prior ignorance.
As mom to disabled kids, yes. Also, I hope you do find friends who don’t do this. I’ve been lucky to have had success in all the effort I’ve made to make friends with mostly non-judgmental people. (I’ve ended a friendship or two over their judgment too).
I’ll likely always carry the scars of trying to grocery shop or play at parks with mine. The glares as my toddler screamed and cried while I carried him on my back and the baby on my front and tried to manage. The people who left the gate at the park open because THEIR children weren’t runners with no regard for their own lives. The people who can’t understand that some children need So. Much. More. And I am doing my best.
Thank you for this post. Back in the early 2000s, I taught a Psychology of Mothering course as a Special Topic in the psychology and women's studies departments. Students were desperate for it but I still had to fight to teach it again. When I left my university (due to discrimination due to my mothering status - long story but I almost sued), the nursing department took over the course but turned it into something more medical. At least they acknowledged the importance of motherhood since neither the psych nor the WS departments considered it worth keeping. If it tells you anything, the chair of the WS department kept her mothering status under wraps.
Feminism has long had a motherhood problem but it has gotten at least a little bit better. The National Organization for Women used to never make mention of mothers on their website. Now they do. There used to be very few books on mothering. Now there are many. There's even a news outlet (the 19th) that often does reporting on mothering issues. The Association for Women in Psychology now has a Mothering Caucus. But we still have a very long way to go.
Thank you for this. I have experienced this division not only between childless women and mothers but with moms of a few children versus moms of many. I have seven children, and that is wrong. Nearly everyone I encounter says so, though not always in those words. They say 7 kids is so much work that I can't possibly give them all the love and attention they need. But also having so many kids (and thereby doing the work for so many kids) is "selfish." That one hurts so much, because I don't feel especially selfish. I feel like I'm pouring myself out constantly to make up for the "deficit" my "poor" children have to endure by having so many siblings. You are right that the underlying issue is that motherhood is always wrong. It's sad and discouraging.
I had to learn this lesson myself, and I’m glad to see you articulate it here. I’m childfree and thought of myself as personally victimized by motherhood discourse when I was younger. What I learned is the misogyny we all face is about motherhood, whether we’re moms or not. I face a misogyny that sees me as worthless because I’m *not* a mother, and it took me too long to realize that’s the same misogyny that treats mothers as nothing *but* mothers; it’s all about ignoring a woman’s personhood and seeing her as nothing but a babymaking machine for men.
I’m so sad for the years I spent angry at mothers, thinking all the things you mention here. I could have learned a lot from witnessing friends’ paths into motherhood, and I could have lent a progressive voice to their (our) fight much earlier.
Oh, they will figure it out in a decade or so. When they are also fucked over by the system after they climbed to whatever unsteady precipice they thought they landed on, and then find out, as I did, that it's a man's world--they will realize. I was a young feminist once, I've never STOPPED being a feminist, but I laughed at SNL mom jokes and joined in the men teasing the mothers--and guess what? My feminism has only GROWN in relativity to realizing that the so-called feminist men I was around would STAB ME in the back in heartbeat--and so now, I'm an uber-feminist. And I'm a mom. Feminists who do not energize around and INCLUDING mothers are stupid, a joke. They will learn their lesson the hard way.
Imagine if a guy was pitching “Masculinity and Fatherhood” - I’m sure they wouldn’t have told him the audience was too narrow like they did for “feminism and motherhood.” After all, everyone has a father, or knows a father, right?
Also it’s sad that men can put on their LinkedIn “Father. Husband. Entrepreneur. Coach…” etc and still get seen as both competent AND relationally aware/kind, whereas a woman who puts “Mother. Wife. Scientist…” etc in her LinkedIn will be seen as incompetent and not worth listening to, since being a mother/wife apparently cancels out everything that follows.
My tagline is Wife, mother, teacher, author of sexy romance novels. I got a job. :) teaching college. We should all just throw it in people's faces. Yes, I'm a mom and a professor. And?
Whew Zawn this is a fabulous article! You were very adept at outlining the framework of diseased elements swirling around feminism and explaining how this affects the overall health and effectiveness of feminism today. I am so relieved to finally find someone who understands the issues us mothers face and the larger societal impacts it causes!! Thank you so much for your work it is invaluable!
So true!
I would go so far as to say that motherhood is the reason there is unequal treatment of the sexes across the world. Pregnancy, birth, and childrearing are the reason men all over the world are in charge. I'm sure it's been happening for thousands of years. Men are in charge because they can be. They aren't saddled with reproduction and childrearing. They set up the world to work for them. I'm reaching a point in my thinking where I feel a matriarchal society like elephants have is the only healthy way for females of a species to live.
My mom said the reason women struggle to rise in the world is because they have to keep track of the socks. My mom wasn't right about much (not here to dis motherhood but my mom is a pretty toxic person outside of any patriarchal/ sexist stuff... which she actively supports and tries to enforce on her daughters) but she was right here. Socks. Shoes. Backpacks. Homework. Jackets (my son once lost his entire winter coat... in January). And the spoons. And the cat food. And the permission slip. And the birthday party. And the dental appointment. And the glasses.The mountain of trivial details apparently only moms can handle are overwhelming.
I am childfree, and the amount of misogyny in childfree online spaces is staggering. Most of it comes from men, but a lot from other women. I find it very shocking especially when coming from women who claim to be feminists - isn't it obvious that when mothers lose, all women lose? Without solidarity with each other, what do we have?
I agree with you Charlotte. I am also childfree, but I am an intersectional feminist. I support all aspects of feminism that advance women’s rights and quality of life and motherhood is a HUGE one.
{{{{{{{standing ovation}}}}}}}}}}
Thank you for this. Seriously.
The only thing I might add is that a pregnant woman is more likely to be murdered. Also, women’s mortality rates in child birth, especially for black women, rival 3rd world countries.
Yes. Thank you.
This issue is near and dear to my heart. It is my main complaint about Ms magazine, all about women and never about mothers.
As a reproductive psychiatrist, I work with exclusively with women around issues including menstruation, pregnancy and menopause. My background includes surviving medical school and the Army (scholarship paid for med school) in the 80’s and 90’s and so the perspective I bring to my work is feminist, sharpened by my own experience navigating those male dominated worlds.
It astounds me that there is this divide among women, or child bearers and feminists. I have my own theories but I’m writing here to thank you Zawn for writing in such a compeling way about it. You have a wonderful way of getting right to the guts of the problem and it is refreshing.
I will again print this article and share it with my patients as I work to teach women to advocate for themselves and dare I say, become feminists?!
I’m standing punching in the air shouting yeeessss! This is a brilliant piece, thank you!!
Love this! And just in time for Mother's Day too. The group of mums I mediate on FB is already saying how over Mother's Day they are, and it's still weeks away! It's just heartbreaking that a day meant to celebrate mothers has become just another task they're in charge of organizing, or if they somehow don't have to do any organizing and actually get a day "off" there's more work the next day because no one did any of her usual work while she was relaxing. Zawn, people have said that Mother's Day should only celebrate women who are "in the trenches of parenting" and I'm wondering what you think about that, since it really sounds to me like a reflection of the exact problem you're discussing here.
As someone who was formerly one of Those Young White Feminists, thank you. I am now 43, happily single, and will remain child-free til I die alone with my cats. And all of that is possible because of mothers.
My mom, who spent my entire childhood telling me that "men ain't shit" and "you need to have your OWN money/house/car/support network," while being subjected to all of the pitfalls of motherhood in a patriarchy in the 90s.
My friends who wanted to be mothers, for calling me on my "yeah whatever she chose that and nobody said it was sunshine and roses" bullshit by asking hard questions like "so you aren't going to support ME, personally?'
My friends who are moms, many of whom I never knew Before Motherhood. For showing me that I don't "hate kids" just because I don't want anyone to be produced by my body. For feeling like I was safe enough for Real Talk and not keeping me out of the gross body horror parts of their pregnancies, births, and child-raising. Because I had no idea how gory it really all is, even though I knew I didn't want it. Now I EXTRA don't want it, but I love all my lil honorary (and biological) niblings and have a life full of women with very different experiences than my own. And I have the absolute dead certainty that yes, they may have "chosen" motherhood and may even love it tremendously. But that doesn't mean their men aren't garbage as a class. And I'm not blaming them, because I have also experienced men at various ages and determined that there really are very few "good choices" out there. And for someone (most of humans) who experiences an intense biological imperative to have and raise children, that means they'll necessarily settle for what looks like the Least Bad Choice.
To you. And others like you. And specifically my friend Catherine, who sat with me at brunches for like 4 years and forced me to take moms into account if I'm going to be a feminist.
I still scoff at things like "parental leave for Fathers," but that's because now I know. They're probably just gonna fart into the couch and make things HARDER for a woman who literally just tore her body in half and now has to physically heal while also supporting a tiny flesh barnacle that feeds on her body.
I have found that the behavior of men on parental leave makes me want to argue against it completely. I imagine a “decent” man would pick up the housework and hold the baby and let mom sleep, but almost all of the men sit on their ass, demand food, and use their actual parental vacation from work to further diminish women’s childcare and household work as “easy” because men never freaking do it.
100% true about men and paternity leave. My ex husband sat around for 6 weeks, playing video games, eating candy and yelling at me if I asked him to make dinner. He told me that he didn't take the paternity leave for me or the baby, he did it for "his mental health" because he wanted a break from his job. 9 months later we were divorced.
Don’t get me started on mothers of disabled children (I am and have two disabled kids). The disdain amongst mothers of typical children I have experienced when I have dared to bring my children out in public (to a park no less) is horrifying. Of course you can not sit on the sidelines and have a coffee watching your child play because you are too busy hovering near your child in case they get over excited and pull a child’s hair that gets in their space. This happened to us and the child cried and I hurried over to the mother on the sidelines and apologised profusely and explained the situation but she just looked at me with contempt. All the other mothers just stared at me, no one asked if we were ok, and I ended up bursting into tears in the middle of the playground underneath my sunglasses and left. It was a horrible experience and it makes you never want to take your child out again. Taking children out generally in public is riddled with judgement from others but it is a million times harder when you try to do the same with disabled children. You are already so isolated in the community and there are Mum groups but not so much for your particular child that has a profound intellectual disability and is non verbal. This is why when I am (very seldomly) invited to a typical child’s birthday party, I don’t go because I just have to follow my child around the entire time in a state of hyper vigilance. Motherhood is such a thankless and endless task, I’m so tired but I just love you Zawn, you just get right to the centre of the issue and discuss and explain it so precisely. Thank you for this.
I’m sorry you had that experience 😣 I’ve found other Mums can be the worst for judgement. Two of my older sisters have non-verbal autistic children, and I never used to understand why they stayed home so much. One especially, she has two and she just used to be so stressed all the time. Even at family events, her eldest was a runner and you’d have to watch her like a hawk. As I got older I remember feeling resentful and judgemental towards her, hearing other people discuss what she was doing “right” or “wrong”. I realised how toxic that thinking was, but I didn’t really get it until I became a Mother myself. Now my son is a toddler and has epic meltdowns, I can feel the judgemental stares and have had so much unsolicited “advice” on my parenting. He may well be neurodivergent, and I’ve never been closer to my sister as I am now. It’s sad and frustrating how we really are pitted against each other, and I feel ashamed at my prior ignorance.
As mom to disabled kids, yes. Also, I hope you do find friends who don’t do this. I’ve been lucky to have had success in all the effort I’ve made to make friends with mostly non-judgmental people. (I’ve ended a friendship or two over their judgment too).
I’ll likely always carry the scars of trying to grocery shop or play at parks with mine. The glares as my toddler screamed and cried while I carried him on my back and the baby on my front and tried to manage. The people who left the gate at the park open because THEIR children weren’t runners with no regard for their own lives. The people who can’t understand that some children need So. Much. More. And I am doing my best.
And so are you. I see you.
Thank you for this post. Back in the early 2000s, I taught a Psychology of Mothering course as a Special Topic in the psychology and women's studies departments. Students were desperate for it but I still had to fight to teach it again. When I left my university (due to discrimination due to my mothering status - long story but I almost sued), the nursing department took over the course but turned it into something more medical. At least they acknowledged the importance of motherhood since neither the psych nor the WS departments considered it worth keeping. If it tells you anything, the chair of the WS department kept her mothering status under wraps.
Feminism has long had a motherhood problem but it has gotten at least a little bit better. The National Organization for Women used to never make mention of mothers on their website. Now they do. There used to be very few books on mothering. Now there are many. There's even a news outlet (the 19th) that often does reporting on mothering issues. The Association for Women in Psychology now has a Mothering Caucus. But we still have a very long way to go.
Thank you for this. I have experienced this division not only between childless women and mothers but with moms of a few children versus moms of many. I have seven children, and that is wrong. Nearly everyone I encounter says so, though not always in those words. They say 7 kids is so much work that I can't possibly give them all the love and attention they need. But also having so many kids (and thereby doing the work for so many kids) is "selfish." That one hurts so much, because I don't feel especially selfish. I feel like I'm pouring myself out constantly to make up for the "deficit" my "poor" children have to endure by having so many siblings. You are right that the underlying issue is that motherhood is always wrong. It's sad and discouraging.
I had to learn this lesson myself, and I’m glad to see you articulate it here. I’m childfree and thought of myself as personally victimized by motherhood discourse when I was younger. What I learned is the misogyny we all face is about motherhood, whether we’re moms or not. I face a misogyny that sees me as worthless because I’m *not* a mother, and it took me too long to realize that’s the same misogyny that treats mothers as nothing *but* mothers; it’s all about ignoring a woman’s personhood and seeing her as nothing but a babymaking machine for men.
I’m so sad for the years I spent angry at mothers, thinking all the things you mention here. I could have learned a lot from witnessing friends’ paths into motherhood, and I could have lent a progressive voice to their (our) fight much earlier.
Oh, they will figure it out in a decade or so. When they are also fucked over by the system after they climbed to whatever unsteady precipice they thought they landed on, and then find out, as I did, that it's a man's world--they will realize. I was a young feminist once, I've never STOPPED being a feminist, but I laughed at SNL mom jokes and joined in the men teasing the mothers--and guess what? My feminism has only GROWN in relativity to realizing that the so-called feminist men I was around would STAB ME in the back in heartbeat--and so now, I'm an uber-feminist. And I'm a mom. Feminists who do not energize around and INCLUDING mothers are stupid, a joke. They will learn their lesson the hard way.
Imagine if a guy was pitching “Masculinity and Fatherhood” - I’m sure they wouldn’t have told him the audience was too narrow like they did for “feminism and motherhood.” After all, everyone has a father, or knows a father, right?
Also it’s sad that men can put on their LinkedIn “Father. Husband. Entrepreneur. Coach…” etc and still get seen as both competent AND relationally aware/kind, whereas a woman who puts “Mother. Wife. Scientist…” etc in her LinkedIn will be seen as incompetent and not worth listening to, since being a mother/wife apparently cancels out everything that follows.
My tagline is Wife, mother, teacher, author of sexy romance novels. I got a job. :) teaching college. We should all just throw it in people's faces. Yes, I'm a mom and a professor. And?
Whew Zawn this is a fabulous article! You were very adept at outlining the framework of diseased elements swirling around feminism and explaining how this affects the overall health and effectiveness of feminism today. I am so relieved to finally find someone who understands the issues us mothers face and the larger societal impacts it causes!! Thank you so much for your work it is invaluable!