Feminism needs a makeover. In its original form, feminism worked to free women from a life without choices. Gloria Steinem’s feminism gave women the option to have brilliant careers outside the home, to forgo having children, and still lead meaningful lives. Many women needed to be freed from society’s expectations that all women should marry and have children and stay at home in the kitchen. However, the movement painted these issues with a broad brush rather than targeting those women who sought that choice. In its attempt to liberate those unhappy with traditional roles, it shifted judgment onto those who found fulfillment in raising children as meaningful work.
The myths spread by the original feminist movement were that all women were oppressed victims of men and that every woman was eager to leave home and compete with men in the workforce. Work outside the home was presented as more meaningful or valuable. Feminism touted that children were resilient from birth and any caregiver, in any setting, would suffice. Women were told they could “do it all”—have children and a career—at the same time without sacrifices.
In reality, the Pew Research Center found that 56% of women say they find it difficult to balance work and home life responsibilities. By spreading the myth that women can “have it all” with no tradeoffs, the feminist movement diminished the fact that mothering is full-time, intensely difficult, and meaningful work, especially in a child’s early years. It’s a 24-hour job without sick days or vacation, a constant and intense labor of love. In general, our culture also overlooks the importance of mothers being physically and emotionally present, especially in the first few years, which benefits children immensely. While life is long and women can be amazing mothers and have meaningful careers, it is nearly impossible to do everything at the same time well. Something usually gets sacrificed, and, unfortunately, it has often been our children.
Children are born neurologically fragile, not resilient, and certainly not capable of caring for themselves. The first three years of life are critical for social-emotional development, where a child needs the physical and emotional presence of their primary attachment figure—usually the mother—to buffer them from stress and regulate their emotions. Mothers serve as neuro-psycho-biological regulators for babies in these early years. Without that critical presence, babies don’t develop attachment security, which is the foundation for future mental health. The feminist movement did not consider the impact of the call to arms on children, and we are now seeing generations of children who suffer as a result.
Women and men were told that women should go to work or be left behind. But for women to be “modern” warriors in the fight for freedom, children were the ones often left behind—in day care or in the care of strangers. The movement failed to acknowledge the importance of mothers to children, starting a downward slide into what has become a devaluing of mothering. This devaluation has damaged our children for the past three generations.
We should learn from our past mistakes and create a new type of feminism— a ‘maternal feminism‘ that acknowledges a woman’s right to choose to stay home with her children and be recognized for her achievements, or go to work while still prioritizing her children.
It’s true that feminism encouraged women to have economic freedom, to escape the financial control of men. Economic freedom is important, but it also assumed that all men were untrustworthy oppressors and that the model of a family working as a team with different roles was archaic. Instead, that idea was replaced with the notion that men and women are in competition for supremacy and control, rather than being complementary and cooperative. This belief has continued to impact male/female relationships today. Suzanne Venker has written on the impact of the sexual revolution on marital relationships—a truth we often deny or whisper among close friends, afraid to speak out loud. We are supposed to accept that everything the feminist movement achieved was for the better. But the reality is more complicated.
The feminist movement also promoted the idea that men had a better life than women, and for women to lead satisfying lives, they needed to become more like men. It suggested that going to an office all day was more fulfilling than raising the next generation of healthy, emotionally stable children. Instead of empowering women with the knowledge that they have unique strengths and abilities that men do not, feminism encouraged women to become more like men. The irony is that this didn’t uplift the unique strengths of women; it idolized the strengths of men while marketing itself as a movement for women. Women are more socially and emotionally adept, more relationally oriented, more empathic, and more emotionally intuitive than men. We excel in executive functioning and multitasking, and our nurturing instincts enable us to heal the world, embodying the Jewish concept of Tikkun Olam or repairing the world.
Women have gained a great deal from the feminist movement, but the pendulum has swung too far. We should learn from our past mistakes and create a new type of feminism—a maternal feminism that acknowledges a woman’s right to choose to stay home with her children and be recognized for her achievements, or go to work while still prioritizing her children. We can recognize the role of women as mothers and caretakers as a superpower. We can rewrite the script that says women can do it all—all at the same time. While women can do it all in a lifetime, it requires sacrifice and respect for the time necessary to raise healthy children. That means taking as much time off as we can when our children are young, dialing back our careers in the early years, knowing we can add more to our plate as our children grow. We should stop competing with men and instead demand that our strengths as women be recognized. We can choose trust rather than fear when choosing a spouse and approach parenting as teamwork, rather than competing over who earns more or has more control.
Being a mother is a privilege, not something to be cast aside for “more important work” as the early feminist movement would have us believe. It is time to take our maternal identity back, not to a world where women had no choices, but toward a modern feminism where women can feel proud about choosing to nurture children as our most meaningful work and as an irreplaceable contribution to society.
Erica Komisar, LCSW is a psychoanalyst and author of Being There: Why Prioritizing Motherhood in the First Three Years Matters and Chicken Little the Sky Isn’t Falling: Raising Resilient Adolescents in the New Age of Anxiety.