The War On Femininity, Part 3: Motherhood

Have you noticed how it's practically never a good time to become a mother? When you are young, you are expected to study and "work on getting established in your career". When you are older, you should avoid having children because they all will be born with all sorts of disorders. There is a narrow window of opportunity somewhere between 28 and 35 when a good middle class girl is supposed to get married and produce a certain number of children, usually 1-2 so that they won't interfere with her career and she can return back to work as soon as possible.

Women having more children than a designated amount will often find themselves at the receiving end of some nasty remarks, sometimes even from the medical professionals (ditto for older mothers though the trend is slowly reversing due to career women getting married and starting to have children later in life).

Though in real life they probably won't go so far, internet progressives will accuse such women of contributing to overpopulation and burdening the Earth with their offspring. Yet while European ladies are expected to  restrict the number of their children they are also often encouraged to donate to charities supporting all these "poor children" of the Third World whose women apparently don't contribute to Global Warming by bearing 10+kids each.

With the birth rates in Western countries falling every year we also keep hearing how we need immigrants "to pay our pensions" so essentially we are encouraged to stop reproducing ourselves and pay for reproductive habits of other nations whose citizens then will move to our countries and inherit them.

Yet, Westerners didn't always hold motherhood in such disdain. In fact, it was viewed as sacred duty and poets were writing sentimental verses about the Hands which rock the cradle and so on while artists worked on all these Madonna and her Baby paintings. American women often married young and kept having children well into their late forties and even fifties (as demonstrated in this link). Mothers were respected and had status in society for just being mothers, not for bringing home an extra paycheck or excelling in the world of men. So what happened?

What happened was that individuals like de Beauvoir were suddenly given a profound voice in society. According to her, women found their babies "burdensome" and "maternal instinct" was non-existent. Breastfeeding inflicted "a harsh slavery" on the mother and her own baby was "a tyrant" and "a little stranger". A mother was nearly almost " a sexually frigid" and "discontented" woman whose work is not "directly useful to society" (according to Domestic Tranquility by F. Carolyn Graglia, p.p. 106-107).


However, while it's easy to blame individual feminists for changes in the society attitudes, the massive culture shift from the traditional Western family structure of provider husband and homemaker wife which predates Christianity and has endured for thousands of years didn't happen because some obviously confused ladies started venting their sexual frustrations in public. In fact, while many men nowadays blame women for feminism, it often took government efforts to enact this change.

Google has an interesting 1980s document which highlights the fact that Western governments actively pursued the policies of pushing more women into paid workforce in such countries as West Germany and the Netherlands which had long traditions of mothers being excluded from the burden of providing a living.

It states, among other things that it's the government which provides women with the majority of jobs, that government bureaucracies need "talented young women" and decries "the culture of motherhood" which prevents Dutch women from climbing the top echelons of power. While attacking the Netherlands and West Germany for their "sexism" the document suggest taking countries like Bulgaria as an example.

Well, one should say they finally succeeded, albeit to a degree, since we now have preachers decrying the fact that joint taxation of married couples is unfair since it prevents wives from working (longer hours) and earning more money while the doctors assure women and their husbands that pregnancy and childbearing don't take a toll on a woman's body and she should be ready to resume her duty to economy after a couple of months of maternity leave. And, of course, "traditional patriarchy supporters" calling housewives leeches and "kept women". Heaven help us, because we really need it...