Motherhood Changes You

In The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan argued that American women suffered from a malaise she called "the problem that had no name." Her critique of domestic ennui helped launch the second-wave feminist movement of the 1960s, leading to many of the advances women now take for granted. But not everything has changed. So we asked women to answer this question: If you had to pinpoint today's problem that had no name, what would it be? Read the other responses here. [2]

Having been an indifferent babysitter in my teens and an uninvolved aunt in my twenties, I didn’t have much to draw on when it came to imagining motherhood in my thirties. I was pretty sure it was going to be a logistical nightmare. I remember folding clothes in stunned shock after the baby shower.When I came home with my unnervingly vulnerable baby, however, I suddenly became aware that I could actually die, and sobbed because I thought that if I did, my husband wouldn’t have what it would take to keep our son in socks.

Motherhood changes you, as they say, and I’m not just talking about how it makes you appreciate socks. Fatherhood changes you too. Becoming a parent is unlike anything else. This is a truism, but an important one: it’s the depth and differentness of that experience, its total incongruity with the rest of life, that feminism needs to grapple with more than it has.

I don’t mean to imply that feminists aren’t thinking hard about motherhood and how it militates against gender equality. There are feminist legal theorists who say that the last bastion of sexism in our society is discrimination against mothers. There are feminist socio-biologists who say that male evolutionary biologists have gotten it exactly wrong, and that civilization derives from cooperative mothering, not from male competitiveness. Back in 1981, Betty Friedan [3] argued in The Second Stage that feminism had to do a better job defending mother and fatherhood, though a lot of women called her a reactionary for saying so.

But we’re going to have to dig deeper into the actual experience of parenting if we’re going to figure out why it still keeps forcing us out of the workplace. For instance, we need to understand how it operates at the temporal level. Time is another underrated feminist issue. The politics of time are hugely significant for women because the temporality of motherhood is strictly at odds with the temporality of work. Social historian E.P. Thompson [4], in a famous essay about the industrialization of the English countryside, identified the fight between peasants and factory owners as partly a fight between two irreconcilable orders of time. The time of the peasants—agricultural time—ebbed and flowed. It was task-oriented, that is, evaluated by how well jobs were done. The time of the factory owners—industrial time—was steady, uniform, clock-oriented, evaluated by how quickly jobs were done. But as task-oriented as a farmer’s work was, Thompson said, the farmer’s wife’s work was even more so, particularly when it involved taking care of infants. Even today, he wrote (in 1963), despite school times and television times, the rhythms of women's work in the home are not wholly attuned to the measurement of the clock.”

Motherhood follows not just a pre-industrial schedule but a biological one as well. (The two are related.) Women have to have their babies before they become infertile, and once their children are born, they have to meet their needs then, not later. As we learn more about the psychological and physiological benefits to a baby of being soundly attached to a mother or father figure, the importance of love for brain development, not just personality formation, we get an ever clearer sense of the cost to children of depriving their parents of the means to spend time with them, especially when they’re young. Under current social arrangements, however, motherhood and fatherhood clocks clash with most career clocks, so parents who spend that time often pay a high price for doing so.

This kind of thinking, though, is a little too utilitarian for my taste. It’s true that we ought to make it easier to parent because that would be good for children, and therefore good for society. But there’s another claim about parenting that feminists since Friedan have been pretty bad at making, and that is that it’s good for parents. Not having liked myself much as a child, I didn’t know how to love children until I became a mother. Mothering my children, I mothered myself, and shed a layer of callowness. My children’s fiercely animal bodies brought me alive to my own. And when I watched them see all the things I had trained myself not to see—poverty, racism, sexism, filthy public spaces—I felt responsible and ashamed. In short, I flourished, in the Aristotelian sense of the term: I became more politically aware, more physically attuned—more human.

Why should my flourishing be incompatible with my equality? Why is parenting a tradeoff, rather than a right? Why can’t career clocks accommodate us, rather than us accommodating career clocks? Why can’t I stay home with my children while they and I cultivate this humanizing bond, then return to being a competent professional without encountering lowered wages, less challenging work, and the judgments of people who think my situation reflects an enfeebled mind or will? For that matter, why can’t men have all the same things? And why aren’t more feminists fighting for them?