Motherhood Only Feels Like A ‘Penalty’ Because Of Feminism

There’s a quirky couple’s ritual that happens daily all over America. A wife will excitedly tell her husband how much she saved on an item she just bought. “It was half off!” she says with deep, satisfied pride. The response, often offered with a raised eyebrow, “But how much was it?” His follow-up, sometimes said out loud is, “Wouldn’t we have saved more money if you hadn’t bought it?” But for the wife, the big thing was the discount. It is girl math.

This isn’t the only girl math to which we’ve become accustomed in the U.S. Most women in America live with some form of the odd calculus sold to us by feminism. We believe, unwittingly, that we can do everything we want, all at once, without any trade-offs or negative consequences. We can have it all! Eventually, however, in one way or another, the pain of this girl math hits home. Sooner or later, women realize that we can’t have it all.

This revelation is apparent in a recent New York Times piece titled, “Motherhood Should Come With a Warning Label.” In it, writer Jessica Grose discusses the results of over 2000 women interviewed about the effects motherhood has had on their careers. One woman from New Jersey said, “‘I was not prepared for how inflexible work would be, how expensive it would be, and how much our society and economic systems are built off of taking my labor as a mother for granted.’” “Her words perfectly illustrate the ‘motherhood penalty,’” Grose explains. The mothers interviewed spoke of the real challenges, sometimes very emotionally, such as the loss of salary, pension, and 401K damage, absence of a safety net, difficulty reentering the workforce, and so on. While all of these are issues with which so many struggle, there remains an elephant in the room that feminism has never been able to shake: a working mother is one woman trying to do the work of two.

Most women have been encouraged since birth to dream of a career, while little is said about the demands of also raising a child well. As I heard someone wise say recently, it isn’t hard to take care of children, but it is hard to do anything else while doing it. I’m not suggesting that women forgo work, but it is important for us to know that trying to do both a full-time job and raise children — especially during certain seasons — is very challenging. The fact that the 2,000 women interviewed seemed surprised by this reveals that we somehow haven’t done a good job of informing women about the essential importance of womanhood. We live trying to camouflage ourselves as men who just happen to have children. This has created an unnatural pressure to do or to even be two things at once.

Motherhood, meanwhile, has become secondary or optional, like getting a driver’s license or getting braces. Each requires an investment, but performing each shouldn’t get in the way of my primary focus, which is my job. Our culture emphasizes work, self-actualization, and autonomy over relationships. Young women today at prestigious colleges and law firms are being encouraged to freeze their eggs to put off having children until they are older and ready (although their bodies may not be). Few think about the real value behind motherhood not just among individuals but for the broader society. Sadly, when women do start thinking about it is when the reality hits that maybe they won’t have the family or children they expected to have.

All this pressure to excel in finance, career, and reputation has left a mark, not just on bank accounts. Many women report having fewer children than they wanted while navigating significant strain with husbands (or male partners) over the delicate balance of time, money, caring for children, and domestic chores. Women report being stressed out all the time. As therapist and podcaster Luella Jonk has said, “Most women are just looking for some peace in their life.”

We have long been fed the myth that children are the flexible variable, capable of going with the flow of various nannies and caregivers to free women up to do what many have come to consider the more important work of making money and building a career. Attachment or behavioral issues associated with shifting caregivers are now being identified in children. Babies need their mother, her body, her scent they came to know even in the womb, her nurturing, her voice, and her breast milk.

Yes, there can be surrogates, or as in the case of adoption, a new mother who takes the place of a biological mother, but babies’ needs haven’t fundamentally changed with women’s desire to work more. The girl math comes in again with the belief that we can compartmentalize our children as just another item on the to-do list, instead of ordering all of our to-dos around them; children need to be prioritized. Mental health metrics for women and children keep getting worse. The wreckage is everywhere, particularly in the increase in Cluster B pathologies, such as narcissism, borderline personality disorder, and histrionics, attributable to the absence of healthy attachment to a mother or some kind of stable surrogate.

Many will object and say that in today’s economy women must work. Yes, this is true, but much of it is because, since at least the Carter Administration, feminist policy goals have won out in trying to erase the differences between men and women. This lie has been written into our laws and into our psyches as just the way things are. They are also written into home prices, school tuition expenses, and the cost of vehicles. Having a big family can scarcely be done on one income anymore.

The real issue is that motherhood isn’t just one job among many, but the job for women. This isn’t to say that other work can’t be done around it, particularly now that there is telework and home technologies that help making a home much easier than it has ever been. It is a scandal that as a culture, we think it is somehow acceptable that women are expected to go to work in the same way men do, while children are siloed in daycares and passed around by strangers, year after year.

Many suggest that we keep tinkering with policy. Promoting marriage and having children through tax breaks is a place to start. Often, however, the typical suggestions, such as more and longer maternity leave — already in places like Norway — show that government funding is not the solution. The conversation continues, but the crux always remains: How do we care properly for children when their mother is working? Women were made, as we can see explicitly in the female body, to have and raise children. We’ve known this since the dawn of time. It didn’t become an issue until feminism convinced women that the best life to live mimicked men and prioritized work over family.  

It is understandable for women to desire meaningful work and be surrounded by a healthy community supporting her life, both of which seem absent when women stay home with their children. But the burden of motherhood, even if not eliminated, could be greatly alleviated if we didn’t speak of our children as if they are a penalty, curse, or imposition. But rather, if we acknowledged, like the women in the Times article, that children are always worth it, no matter the sacrifice.

Maybe it is finally time to apply warning labels — not about motherhood, but about feminism.

Carrie Gress is a fellow at Ethics and Public Policy Center. A mother of five, she is the author of 10 books, including “The Anti-Mary Exposed: Rescuing the Culture from Toxic Femininity.” She is the editor of the online women’s magazine Theology of Home. Her latest book is “The End of Woman: How Smashing the Patriarchy Has Destroyed Us.”