Did Someone Blow the Whistle on Motherhood?

Happy Mother’s Day from all of us here at The Free Press! To mark the occasion, we’re publishing an essay by our newest columnist, Caitlin Flanagan, that tackles what has become one of the most contentious questions of our time: Why are so many young women ambivalent about motherhood? We also, in yesterday’s Weekend Press, ran a piece by Larissa Phillips about the joy of having adult kids, and a piece by Danielle Crittenden about the heartbreak of losing one. Each of these essays captures something so often missing from the so-called Mommy Wars: the mystical, almost inexpressible love of a mother for the child she birthed into existence. We hope you enjoy them. —The Editors The biggest event in the history of women—bigger, even, than suffrage—was the invention of the birth control pill, which became available in the United States in 1960. For the first time, women had the ability to decide if, when, and how many children they were going to have. When that was combined with the first stirrings of modern feminism, women were finally able to do what men had been doing through the ages: break into factions and tear each other apart. The Mommy Wars will bury us all. The Mommy Wars were originally a project of the 1980s and centered on a question still at the heart of the current iteration: If a woman can afford to stay home with her children, should she do it? At this point, about 70 percent of American mothers either work or are looking for work, many of them because they cannot afford not to, which would seem to make the question moot. Even Working Mother magazine (est. 1979) threw in the towel a few years ago, because how many things can a career woman do with a rotisserie chicken? Over the past two decades, however, a much more consequential division between young women has quietly and then loudly emerged: the one between mothers and women who are “childfree by choice,” as they often put it. I know many such women, and you probably do too. If so, you can attest that they don’t seem torn up by the decision. In fact, they made it in exactly the way men beg women to make decisions: logically and on the merits. They know that having a baby would unmoor them from many things they cherish about their lives: the freedom to do whatever they want, untethered by round-the-clock responsibility. They have hopes and dreams about their futures, and they want their earnings to go toward fulfilling them, not toward parenthood. Most of all, they know that babies are a lot of work and that women do most of it. They want to sleep on their own schedules, not on baby time.