You might think that, after so many years of toxic feminism coming from the progressive Left, conservatives would have decided to coalesce around some consistent form of response. You’d be wrong.
On the one hand we have the tradwives whose glamorization of milling flour and sourdough bread tends to make them a rather easy target for ridicule — and, even more extreme, the red-pillers who question whether women’s right to vote was even a good thing and believe that women are naturally inferior to men. That view is obviously problematic, and The American Spectator’s Ellie Gardey Holmes already did a fantastic job breaking it down in these pages a few months ago.
And then there’s the reaction to the red-pillers, the women who know that telling women they’re inferior and ought to be entirely submissive to men is not only wrong, but also not going to go over well. They’ve apparently decided that the better message is an amalgamation of feminism: “Women get to have it all” and are “strong enough to succeed in both motherhood & [a] career,” they tell their X followers. (READ MORE: How Contemporary Feminism Endangers Women)
That message is certainly a better one and, at its root, comes from a good place. It not only promotes a pro-life culture (Dr. Abby Johnson, the ex-Planned Parenthood director turned pro-life activist, and Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life, are both major proponents), it attempts to recognize women’s inherent dignity and capability. Unfortunately, it’s also a lie — or at least it stretches the truth a bit.
The Atlantic’s Olga Khazan recently interviewed some of these women and found, perhaps unsurprisingly, that a lifestyle that includes both motherhood and a successful, “greedy” career requires a supportive husband (who perhaps doesn’t work outside the home) and an incredibly flexible job. Dig a little deeper, and you find there are concessions being made.
Simone Collins, who works with her husband to advance pronatalism, admitted that spending her afternoons working requires accepting that kids will be more “chaotically parented” by their father sometimes. Johnson said she’d missed some of her kids’ early milestones (like first steps) due to her hectic schedule, and Hawkins says that she often tells young women that trying to combine motherhood and a career “does require sacrifice.”
When Khazan interviewed Catholic University of America economist Catherine Ruth Pakaluk (who has eight children), she gave the honest answer most of us expect. “Of course there’s a trade-off. It’s massive…. If I didn’t have children, I would have done a lot more professionally,” she said. “I’m happy with this trade-off.”
Khazan’s article wasn’t exactly trying to figure out the non-feminist answer to the problem of modern womanhood either. “Research suggests that a small number of Americans without children have regrets, but most do not, ” she mused. “[A]t the same time, some parents experience regret that they chose to have kids.” Not having kids (which is what Khazan seems to imply is the fix) isn’t exactly a solution for those of us who believe life is a miracle. (READ MORE: A Miracle Baby Is Surviving His Mother’s Brain Death, and the Left Is Outraged)
I’m no expert on the whole feminist matter, although I’ve certainly given it plenty of thought as of late. I recently got married and am preparing myself for the eventual arrival of children, making a home, and trying to balance all manner of odd jobs outside the home (which I genuinely enjoy). This question — how ought women to balance household and family responsibilities with work outside the home — is becoming increasingly relevant to my own life. At some point, I’ll come to a crossroads and have to make hard decisions about which things to prioritize.
You can blame biology or the patriarchy if you’d like, but the fact of the matter is that women, as a general rule, are better at keeping a home clean, children clothed and entertained, and dinner on the table than their husbands. The feminist narrative is so pervasive in our society that, no matter their upbringing, most women recoil a little when they hear that — after all, we’ve been told that lifestyle is a form of slavery for decades, and maybe some part of us believes that.
What we aren’t told is that women who opt for the career of “stay-at-home mom” have chosen the better part. G.K. Chesterton, as feminism was just beginning to get its legs under it, remarked that the modern tendency to refer to domesticity as drudgery made little sense to him if drudgery was (as feminists intended) supposed to describe hard, trifling, and colorless work:
To be Queen Elizabeth within a definite area, deciding sales, banquets, labors and holidays; to be Whiteley within a certain area, providing toys, boots, sheets, cakes and books, to be Aristotle within a certain area, teaching morals, manners, theology, and hygiene; I can understand how this might exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow it.
How can it be a large career to tell other people’s children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one’s own children about the universe?
This, perhaps, begins to get at the heart of the matter. It’s not that a woman shouldn’t work outside the home — the Left tells us that it’s difficult for the modern family to live on one income, and the Left (for once) is right. Women can have careers and enjoy their jobs. They shouldn’t feel immensely guilty when their husbands step in to handle the growing stack of dishes in the sink or the monstrous beast of laundry getting out of hand in the basement.
But, when a woman sits down to try to figure out whether she can take on that extra project or accept a promotion at work, her first and primary question should be: “Will I still be able to make a home and nurture my kids?” Deep down, it’s that’s the question she wants to answer anyway.
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