The Cultural Lie That Turned Motherhood Into A Burden

When I talk publicly about how raising my baby is beautiful, not oppressive, feminists get mad. We never said that! they claim. To that I can only ask, Have you read second-wave feminist literature? Second-wave feminists did, in fact, call motherhood oppressive.

And ever since the ’60s, the media’s advertising for the role hasn’t been particularly good. Culture followed the feminists’ lead by portraying motherhood in an unfavorable light — both in obvious and more subtle ways. The prevailing messages always seem to reiterate the same point: Having children will ruin your life and strip you of your freedom forever.

It’s just as evident in today’s media as it was decades ago. While on maternity leave, I started watching three different shows. Each one introduced a pregnancy storyline, and in every case, the female lead chose to abort her baby. For one, it wasn’t the right time. For another, it would ruin her career. For the third, she wouldn’t be able to attend her dream school.

The state of modern television is just one of the many examples of the oppressive messaging that still permeates the media. Motherhood is portrayed as such a terrible fate that it is presented as better to terminate the life of your baby than to become a mother. As a new mom, holding my sleeping baby, I turned off each of those shows. The juxtaposition between what the media was telling me and what I was actually experiencing was striking.

Motherhood has far exceeded my already high expectations. Looking at my son’s face, I couldn’t find the oppression. It unlocked a million new horizons — new highs and even new lows — but most importantly, it brought a precious new human being into my life, one I have the privilege of raising and calling my own. There is no “sentence” more beautiful than that.

So, from my nursery rocking chair, I recorded a simple video on social media saying so.

 

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Since then, women have made their own videos highlighting moments from their lives as mothers using my video’s audio, while another corner of the internet has taken personal offense. Many feminists responded with videos declaring, “We never said that.” That’s odd because I didn’t even use the word feminist. But perhaps they recognized that the language I criticized did, in fact, stem from their movement.

“They” did, in fact, say that.

It wasn’t difficult to dive into feminist literature from the 1960s and 1970s and find numerous direct quotes from influential figures saying that motherhood is oppressive. Shulamith Firestone wrote in her 1970 book “The Dialectic of Sex,” “The heart of a woman’s oppression is her childbearing and childrearing roles.”

Other notable examples include quotes from prominent feminist writers equating fetuses to parasites and describing domestic life as “comfortable concentration camps.” The list goes on and on, so much so that I made an entire video outlining my findings.

Perhaps one takeaway from the current outrage is that many people are no longer reading the rhetoric of their movement’s icons from decades ago. Or perhaps they want to distance themselves from their more radical predecessors and present a more peaceful picture of what their movement represents.

Probably not, but one can hope. Considering that the modern feminist movement still celebrates what I view as one of the most heinous practices in the United States, I doubt it. It always comes back to abortion.

For a movement to justify such an act, motherhood must still be portrayed, directly or indirectly, as oppression. Only if motherhood is seen as a fate worse than death does the argument for ending an unborn child’s life become coherent (though still deeply flawed). They may not say it as bluntly anymore, but I believe the core tenets from sexual revolution authors to modern-day influencers remain the same.

As for me, I’ll stick with another message for the masses: Motherhood is the most important role I will ever have, and it is not oppression. Motherhood is simply the best.

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