Our motherhood experiences are designed for us by men
Our motherhood experiences are designed for us by men
We aren't free to be the kind of mothers we always imagined
We begin our individual motherhood journies when we’re still children ourselves. Someone buys us a doll for Christmas. We watch our mothers or aunties nurse babies or change diapers. We see women pushing strollers in our neighbourhoods. TV shows and movies depict mothers in a certain way—making cakes, making cookies, making magical Christmas scenes, volunteering at schools, chiding their sons with a chuckle because “boys will be boys,” chiding their daughters with a furrowed brow because “girls should know better,” and centring their feminine lives around the children and maybe a dad.
Cultural narratives feed us expectations without our conscious awareness. We pattern-match and learn implicitly from what we observe. When we’re told that something works a certain way, we look for evidence that supports it, without even meaning to, and when evidence contradicts it, we find excuses.
We learn that our kids will be like this. Our spouse will be like this. We will look, act, and be adored like this. Motherhood will culminate with adorable grandchildren who adore us back, children who appreciate everything we did for them, and a legacy and funeral to die for.
If we don’t like the motherhood and domesticity models we observed as we grew up, we will look for a woman doing things differently, and we’ll plan to be like her. If we lack an inspirational model, we might design a custom aspirational model if our imaginations are powerful. We’ll believe sincerely that this Motherhood Barbie’s aesthetic, accomplishments, independent flair, relationships, and self-confidence are achievable.
At no point does it occur to us that motherhood is rigged.
I recently heard writer Katherine May say on the We Can Do Hard Things podcast that her autism diagnosis didn’t surprise a friend of hers, who said, “Oh, that’s why you always disappear at parties!” It did surprise Katherine, who thought she liked parties; it was just that each individual party she attended just happened not to be the sort of party she liked.
This reminds me of how we each experience motherhood. We think, it’s not the case that motherhood is rigged to serve men and capitalism, with mothers as scapegoats for all social problems; it’s just that each of us as individual mothers is failing in the exact same ways. Coincidentally.
When we permit ourselves to question whether we’re individually really such bad mothers (so inefficient, lazy, inept, selfish, or whatever we’re being set up to conclude), the secondary explanation is that this is just what motherhood is like! This is what kids are like! This is just how it is! It’s unavoidable. It’s natural.
This is the subtext of countless parenting and women’s magazine articles. To make us feel better about our state, we’re offered patronizing back pats and #1 Citizen for Social Contribution lip service awards where we’re dubbed “Superheroes” and “SuperMoms.” If our work is backbreaking, if it drains us of our health, that’s just motherhood for ya! Welcome to the club! Here’s your lip service commendation!
Men own these magazines. The advertisers of these magazines are companies who are owned and run, in large majority, by men. Men own and run most media networks. Men run most religions, most political offices, most art galleries. Somewhere, some man usually has the final say in what messages make their way to us.
Is it really a coincidence that motherhood-related content has historically put motherhood forward as a holy, powerful, social role embodied by the most feminine, desirable women? And is it really a coincidence that we’re told the best mothers stay at home? Is it a coincidence that being a “bad mother” is arguably the worst thing a human can be—so counter to nature—while bad fathers have historically been the norm, to the point that dads today are still praised for low bars like watching their children for a weekend, or playing with their kids at a park.
We’re sold an idea at every turn, from the time we’re little. It’s silently communicated, and it’s overtly communicated:
Good women are good mothers and good mothers sacrifice themselves for their children.
“A good mother would lay down her life for her children.” When we hear this, we know it means throwing yourself in front of an oncoming car to push your child out of the way, or throwing yourself over your child to be a human shield in an earthquake. But the collection of the implicit messages, plus this explicit message of heroic self-sacrifice, along with the societal rage directed at us when we express complaints or needs, tells us that “laying down [our] lives” in sacrifice means surrendering our identities as individuals with ambitions and dreams.
Meanwhile, free childcare is almost non-existent in North America. Even if parents put themselves on waitlists the moment their child is born, they may not get into a child care facility.
Meanwhile, the wage gap is real.
Studies show that men are more likely to be promoted if they have a family, whereas women are penalized for being mothers. Employers know that dads need stable work to care for their families and that children need stability, which means the dad is less likely to want to leave his job and move around. So, men are rewarded for having children.
If women stay home to raise children, they have a harder time getting back into the workforce. If they have a harder time getting back into the workforce, they will struggle to provide for themselves and their children. This leaves them dependent upon their partners. If their partners are abusive, this leaves them trapped. If they don’t have money to hire a lawyer, this leaves them vulnerable in child custody matters and makes it much more difficult for them to obtain child support if they want to leave their partner.
Renowned sociologist Dr. Arlie Russell Hochschild coined the term “the second shift” in the ‘80s, to describe the extra work women do when they work outside the house and then come home. Even if both men and women work outside the home, women still do more work inside the home. One study has shown that this gap has closed dramatically but that only speaks to social statistics. In individual homes, many women still experience this discrepancy of labour.
In my conversations online with men, they emphasize how they do home repairs, they mow the lawn, they take out the trash, they put up Christmas lights and do other dangerous work. But smart women in my comments sections point out:
Home repairs, lawn mowing, trash removal, Christmas lights, etc, are all periodic tasks, whereas cooking, laundry, and cleaning are daily tasks. They are constant. And often, the work is only noticed when it isn’t done.
Home repairs are deeply satisfying with a clear before and after. It’s socially rewarding work that adds monetary value to the home. People cleaning floors and walls don’t get the same appreciation.
A lot of work men do takes them outside the home where the children can’t be for safety reasons. Women do their work while parenting children, while listening to children bickering, squealing, or whining for attention.
There are good reasons for why domestic labour is divided as it is, and it’s not because mowing the lawn, putting up Christmas lights, or doing home repairs are hard. I do all of this work myself (major plumbing and electrical not included) and I’m telling you: this is easy work once someone shows you how to do it. If you can put together a LEGO kit, you can do this work. It’s fun and satisfying and I personally believe that men, in general, don’t want us to know this.
And hey— isn’t it a trope on sitcoms to have wives nagging their husbands to do home repairs they neglect for years? Mothers don’t get to neglect cooking and laundry for too long. The needs of our families demand that we do this work, but try demanding your husband perform home improvements according to a calendar schedule you coordinate! Please let me know how that goes!
I also recall a lightly humourous Lake Wobegon Story on Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion where he said,
“The real reason men shovelled the roof was that it was one more way to inspire awe and terror in their women. It was right up there with fast driving and cleaning your shotgun in the kitchen. You get out your shovel and your extension ladder after a heavy snow, and you climb up there on the roof. […] And you say, ‘If it bothers you so much, why don’t you just go inside?’ […] And you could almost see her go faint. It’s so rewarding. […] Every woman in town put her foot down on this issue once and for all and said, ‘If you want to up on the roof and fall and break your neck and you want to spend the rest of your life in an electric wheelchair with a little steering device between your teeth, fine, it’s up to you, but I will not be your primary caregiver. I will not be here at all. Do you understand?’ And so this one more custom, this one more male ritual bit the dust.”
Lake Wobegon stories describe traditional families living in a small religious (fictional) town in Minnesota with clear gender roles. Here you have the articulation of what men in the comments section of my TikTok videos allude to: Men want to be perceived as doing dangerous work. They will act like it’s a hardship we put on them, for which we owe them almost pious gratitude and worship, but these are the jobs they choose.
Or, it’s at least the case that these are the jobs patriarchal narratives tell them they need to take on in order to be “real men.” Even while feminists strive to take on these jobs and create equal opportunities for women and men to take up work they enjoy, men protest. Every woman I know who works in a trade or a tough male-dominated industry like firefighting or military service describes hostility and violence levied at them.
A lot of the labour work that men do is socially rewarded. It’s physically tough and therefore satisfying, allowing them to be paid to be physically fit. The work supports the masculine image men are socialized to project: strength, bravery, and leadership.
Men, as a general social group, want to protect and dominate in “men’s work.”
But women, in general, largely don’t want to protect and dominate in “women’s work.” We want to share it. Why is that?
It doesn’t make sense for men to cry foul when asked to take up more “women’s work” tasks because they feel too burdened already with their manly duties. This would be like women saying, “I can’t cook for the family because I’m too busy putting on make-up and getting a gorgeous blow-out.” This is analogous because primping is work, too! It’s tedious, it takes a lot of time and money, and it fosters insecurities. One way we can know it’s work is by looking at how much less time many men spend on their own appearances, not moisturizing their skin, not exfoliating, not styling their hair. One of my exes wouldn’t even iron his suits or shirts! If I didn’t do it for him, he would attend church and his job in a suit that looked like it had been placed in a small grocery bag with the handles tied in a knot and then run over with a steamroller! Primping is also analogous to “men’s work” because it’s not something we’re each forced to do beyond the gender social script that tells us we’ll be more valued if we’re pretty, just as many masculine tasks are not forced on men. They simply feel pressure from their masculine social scripts. The difference between “men’s work” and the feminine work of primping is that they call their voluntary work necessary and use it to excuse themselves from the daily necessary household drudgeries, whereas we just add our “women’s work” to our list of motherwork tasks. (Primping was so expected as the work of a desirable woman that they used to stay up later and wake up earlier than their husbands to do it, to hide the work’s existence at all!)
So.
When we put all of this together, we have a clear picture of how and why motherhood is designed to be:
feminine nurturing parenting that is taken up primarily by women
full-time, at home, isolated
a job that includes built-in benefits for dads of regular meals and homecare
totally unpaid
detrimental to a woman’s ability to maintain financial independence
And we see how this benefits male partners, intimately.
It also benefits men in general when more jobs are available to them because women have left the workforce to raise children.
It benefits male politicians when mothers are too overwhelmed, exhausted, and isolated at home to be as aware of political and economic developments as men or women who spend more time in more social spaces like their workplaces.
North American motherhood is designed to be traditional, with a woman at home with the kids and a man at work. Many women do work outside the home, absolutely. But that isn’t the social design, by and large. If it was, childcare would be readily available and would be affordable.
North American motherhood is designed to be solitary. If it wasn’t, we wouldn’t glorify homeownership and the nuclear family as we do. We’d see more intergenerational families in white culture. We’d see apartment life glamorized, with every apartment building and every group of townhouses including communal spaces for kids to play and have birthday parties, for families to cook together, make music together, build furniture together in maker spaces. We would see more lending libraries in multi-family residences. We would see mothers organizing more shared child care, with community spaces they can easily rent for that purpose. We would see mothers lunching regularly together with babies napping in strollers outside like they do in Nordic countries. If North American mothers left their babies alone outside for five minutes, someone would call the police or Child Protection Services and the internet would deride them.
We aren’t free to be the kind of mothers we imagined we’d be. We aren’t free to be as loving, as energetic, as happy, as patient as we’d like to be. This kind of mom is designed out of us through scarcity, judgment, loneliness, and traditional gender roles that don’t benefit us.
This is why I say,
motherhood needs a liberation movement.
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