I really appreciated hearing a feminist conversation that didn't shy away from the subject of motherhood. (I also appreciated Meghan sharing her thoughts on why she chose to not have children — a lot of the child free movement can be oversimplified.) It's nuanced and I think when we talk about female equality, we glaze over just how central being able to carry and give birth to another human being is to being a woman.
My biggest issue with the solutions people recommend for parity is they either want Lean In-style feminism that puts the onus completely on a perfect powerhouse of a woman, or there's an expectation to just pay women to stay home. I think to come to an actual solution, we need to rewind even further and understand that throughout human history, we have had different ways of conferring status or wealth to people based on their contributions to society. It's only a relatively recent phenomenon that we have had a system where people show up to work, sit in front of a computer and are rewarded with imaginary numbers in an imaginary piggy bank on their phone.
Part of being "a mom" 200 years ago didn't just entail saving peaches for your darling children, but also running a household, educating your children and contributing to the community. Even women who didn't marry or have children were expected to contribute to this system. This did confer status and value to women (although they were still not considered directly equal to men).
I don't want to be accused of romanticizing the past (because in many ways, life was much more difficult for women in 1822), but I think there is something to be said for women having value beyond a paycheck or sexual appeal. Perhaps we just need to choose to value women for what they are instead of just expecting them to be more like men. 🤷🏻♀️
Aug 8, 2022·edited Aug 8, 2022Liked by Meghan Daum & Sarah Haider
I also applaud the real talk about motherhood. When I quit my job -- after having my first child and because my female boss would not welcome me back part-time -- I interviewed (ironically) with a man at another company who said "Motherhood, It changes everything, doesn't it?". I worked for that non profit for 20 hours a week for 12 years, because they let me set the terms and paid me well. The baby had, indeed, changed everything. I remember finding a book at that time titled "The Irreducible Needs of Children". Well, yes. It is so demanding to be a mother and it is different from being a father, though I hesitate to say that out-loud and I speak only for my family. But my husband could walk out the door without looking back when we had a newborn while I felt like I had a wire pulling me back to my children after 5 hours away. I couldn't imagine leaving from 7 to 7. All mothers face these choices. My best friend hired a nanny and went back, happy to be at the office. I did child care and work with no great career strides at the end of the day. But it worked for me. I hated Lean In when it came out and I still do. My joke then and now was "women don't want to lean in--they want the flexibility to go to a child's game or be with their child while still earning a living". I wish we had more conversations like the one you two had today, but I think words like biology and the idea that children might have "irreducible" needs sound antifeminist and so are not spoken about. And I write this as a feminist raised by a feminist. Oh, and men and part time work for men and women are clearly part of the "solution" but in this country, I won't hold my breath on real changes in how much is required by "work" and I wonder how many men are dying to be home part time to watch the kids (as I was).
The discussion about Patrilocal family dynamics was interesting. One thing that should probably be mentioned is that patrilocality is also deeply intertwined with the practice of sex-selective abortion and infanticide. Because male children and their families stay with their parents in these societies, having a son is effectively your retirement plan while a daughter is an extra child you have to invest in whose payoff will go to her husband's parents. Therefore in situations where a family can only afford to support a limited number of children (or their prevented from having more by e.g. the One Child Policy in China) there is actually a strong economic pressure on parents to abort or abandon female infants rather than invest any resources in them.
I love this podcast so much! You are hitting all the right subjects! I was where you guys are way back in 1999. The orthodoxy just wasn't adding up and I lifted the bottom of the tent and took my first peeks outside. It's such an interesting place to be. I now call myself conservative but that's the only anti-Left label I know. Seeing where you guys end up may alter that. I'm wondering if you'll find a third way. Loads of energy has gone into the vilifying of conservatives. When I met them, one after another, the stereotypes started to fall apart. Nobody's perfect but there's never been a group of people (in recent history) so completely boxed in by the media. It's the cornerstone of keeping people from looking out of the tent. "Yeah, the Left has gone off the rails but at least we're not racists and xxxxxx-phobes." I can hear you choking on your words when speaking truth. First of all bravo for knowing that truth will always win and you have to go there no matter how painful. This is the most exhilarating thing about your podcast. I'm fist pumping and saying, "yes!" out loud quite often throughout. Please remember that truth should not get caught in your throat when discussing a sound and good theory. Wisdom is stronger than intelligence in these matters. I could go on quite a bit but I'll end it here saying thanks for another great show!
Hey, guys, I'm sort of wandering around the internet looking for places to put my dumbfounded sorrow over Salman Rushdie. Sarah, I was wondering if you have any wish to talk about what we can do to support ex-Muslim groups and writers. Thanks--Jess
Finally, people saying the truth about stuff! The way motherhood is presented to society is a lie. While listening to the episode the first time, I wanted to comment here. The more it went, the more I had to say. So much in fact I went on to write on my own substack. However, it got so long that I won't be done in a while so I came back here!
Life has been presented to me in a very unrealistic way. As a kid, I had no clue how to 'human' so I had to copy people around me. When adult life came, I ended up engineer, marrying a guy I would be with for 17 years and having 2 kids with him. I HAD IT ALL! Except that I was miserable, though financially stable. I was being told I was part of the elite, and that professional women must have kids and work full time (and overtime if possible), and travel for work, have friends, stay in good physical shape, dress professionally, drink wine, and also be nice (understand : never be hysterical or as I see it, convinced). Plus, I could not possible be unhappy because I was thin (yup, been told that).
In a few years of living in hell, my world fell apart (or rebuilt itself, depends on where you stand). I divorced, got a new spouse, snapped twice (long sick leave), quit 3 jobs and ended up quitting engineering altogether to become my spouse business partner. I am the closest to a stay-at-home mom I can be, except that I also fill my heavy needs of intellectual stimulation.
The only way for me to be mentally stable after that was to compromise (meaning to let go) money-making (I am lucking someone is providing for me). You see, what people won't ever say is that they shouldn't have had kids. I shouldn't have. Doesn't mean I don't love them, I do (especially now that they grew into humans able to think for themselves and funny to talk to). My life would not have been lost if I hadn't had them and I don't think I would die alone any more.
We have cheap daycare here in Quebec, as well as maternity leave. We are lucky. However, kids are so emotionally unstable and demanding, it's scary. I definitely saw a huge positive impact when I stopped sending mine to daycare (before, lunch and after school daycare). They got calmer, felt safer, and the whole dynamic was healthier for everyone. Emotional crashes disappeared from our household.
This need to be economically and socially successful was not mine. It had been imposed upon me by my family, friends, teachers, the media, everyone. The minute I leaned from it, I changed my perspective. It made life so much easier. From my perspective, I cannot understand how some women (with vaginas) can sincerely want many kids and also social and economical success at the same time. Every woman I know who did both failed one side, and it was always the children side.
I was very happy to hear that a good mother is not a friend-mother. My mother was not a good one, and she never played with me, but that's not what she did wrong. She just was not honest nor open with me. I started feeling good with my mother role after divorcing, because I did not feel the pressure to put every minute of my precious free time in entertaining my kids anymore. I could just love and care for themselves MY way.
The prison analogy was good also. The only thing I would add on the top of that is that it's a self imposed one. I isolated myself in my own prison for so long. The fear of looking like a bad mother, or simply not the "normal mother" was making me sick. I ended up losing weight and not sleeping. But losing weight is a form of social success... Yay! (sarcasm)
I start trusting feminism again when I hear such conversation. Women empowerment through sex seems more to me like men that finally found a way to get to sex while convincing women it was their idea.
Finally, are we going to stop pretending that women and men are interchangeable? We sound like my kids arguing on a subject they know nothing about.
Great episode! It's a bit of a relief to hear discussions like this from you and Louise Perry (Mary Harrington is another good one on the topic). I always felt that the narrative of having it all and work-life balance was a lie, and the incompatibility between being the kind of mother I would want to be and an individual devoted to solitude-dependent creative pursuits was a major factor in my choice not to have kids. I relate to what Meghan said about the "child-free" rhetoric. It perpetuates the idea that there is a hard line between people who want kids and people who don't, with those who opt out being blithely concerned only with personal freedom when in reality there is a grey zone of ambivalence which includes both women who choose to have kids and those who don't.
At 57:05, I guess the arguement boils down as follows. Risk factors for adults harming children are (male) > (female) ... and ... (less shared genetics) > (more shared genetics). And, all other things being equal, I should be more willing to let my kids be looked after by my brother & his wife than by my sister & her husband.
I would admit to Sarah that, here in the West, this isn't an issue I've thought about much*. And now that I do, it seems to make sense. And if I could pull a lever to switch Pakistan from a patrilocal to a matrilocal system, this would be a good reason NOT to. (My thanks to fellow commenter Pongo2. A couple of new words for my vocabulary!)
But unlike Sarah, I DO feel like I need to see the studies. Just because X is riskier than Y doesn't mean that I actually need to care about X. What are the absolute risk values here? Do I really need to think about this issue at all? And if so, how do I balance it with other risks and costs and benefits?
* - And this may be largely because, as she says, it's yet another issue that we can't comfortably talk about in the West. (Another example of why free speech, and not just in the legal sense, is so important.)
I really appreciated hearing a feminist conversation that didn't shy away from the subject of motherhood. (I also appreciated Meghan sharing her thoughts on why she chose to not have children — a lot of the child free movement can be oversimplified.) It's nuanced and I think when we talk about female equality, we glaze over just how central being able to carry and give birth to another human being is to being a woman.
My biggest issue with the solutions people recommend for parity is they either want Lean In-style feminism that puts the onus completely on a perfect powerhouse of a woman, or there's an expectation to just pay women to stay home. I think to come to an actual solution, we need to rewind even further and understand that throughout human history, we have had different ways of conferring status or wealth to people based on their contributions to society. It's only a relatively recent phenomenon that we have had a system where people show up to work, sit in front of a computer and are rewarded with imaginary numbers in an imaginary piggy bank on their phone.
Part of being "a mom" 200 years ago didn't just entail saving peaches for your darling children, but also running a household, educating your children and contributing to the community. Even women who didn't marry or have children were expected to contribute to this system. This did confer status and value to women (although they were still not considered directly equal to men).
I don't want to be accused of romanticizing the past (because in many ways, life was much more difficult for women in 1822), but I think there is something to be said for women having value beyond a paycheck or sexual appeal. Perhaps we just need to choose to value women for what they are instead of just expecting them to be more like men. 🤷🏻♀️
I also applaud the real talk about motherhood. When I quit my job -- after having my first child and because my female boss would not welcome me back part-time -- I interviewed (ironically) with a man at another company who said "Motherhood, It changes everything, doesn't it?". I worked for that non profit for 20 hours a week for 12 years, because they let me set the terms and paid me well. The baby had, indeed, changed everything. I remember finding a book at that time titled "The Irreducible Needs of Children". Well, yes. It is so demanding to be a mother and it is different from being a father, though I hesitate to say that out-loud and I speak only for my family. But my husband could walk out the door without looking back when we had a newborn while I felt like I had a wire pulling me back to my children after 5 hours away. I couldn't imagine leaving from 7 to 7. All mothers face these choices. My best friend hired a nanny and went back, happy to be at the office. I did child care and work with no great career strides at the end of the day. But it worked for me. I hated Lean In when it came out and I still do. My joke then and now was "women don't want to lean in--they want the flexibility to go to a child's game or be with their child while still earning a living". I wish we had more conversations like the one you two had today, but I think words like biology and the idea that children might have "irreducible" needs sound antifeminist and so are not spoken about. And I write this as a feminist raised by a feminist. Oh, and men and part time work for men and women are clearly part of the "solution" but in this country, I won't hold my breath on real changes in how much is required by "work" and I wonder how many men are dying to be home part time to watch the kids (as I was).
The discussion about Patrilocal family dynamics was interesting. One thing that should probably be mentioned is that patrilocality is also deeply intertwined with the practice of sex-selective abortion and infanticide. Because male children and their families stay with their parents in these societies, having a son is effectively your retirement plan while a daughter is an extra child you have to invest in whose payoff will go to her husband's parents. Therefore in situations where a family can only afford to support a limited number of children (or their prevented from having more by e.g. the One Child Policy in China) there is actually a strong economic pressure on parents to abort or abandon female infants rather than invest any resources in them.
I love this podcast so much! You are hitting all the right subjects! I was where you guys are way back in 1999. The orthodoxy just wasn't adding up and I lifted the bottom of the tent and took my first peeks outside. It's such an interesting place to be. I now call myself conservative but that's the only anti-Left label I know. Seeing where you guys end up may alter that. I'm wondering if you'll find a third way. Loads of energy has gone into the vilifying of conservatives. When I met them, one after another, the stereotypes started to fall apart. Nobody's perfect but there's never been a group of people (in recent history) so completely boxed in by the media. It's the cornerstone of keeping people from looking out of the tent. "Yeah, the Left has gone off the rails but at least we're not racists and xxxxxx-phobes." I can hear you choking on your words when speaking truth. First of all bravo for knowing that truth will always win and you have to go there no matter how painful. This is the most exhilarating thing about your podcast. I'm fist pumping and saying, "yes!" out loud quite often throughout. Please remember that truth should not get caught in your throat when discussing a sound and good theory. Wisdom is stronger than intelligence in these matters. I could go on quite a bit but I'll end it here saying thanks for another great show!
Hey, guys, I'm sort of wandering around the internet looking for places to put my dumbfounded sorrow over Salman Rushdie. Sarah, I was wondering if you have any wish to talk about what we can do to support ex-Muslim groups and writers. Thanks--Jess
Finally, people saying the truth about stuff! The way motherhood is presented to society is a lie. While listening to the episode the first time, I wanted to comment here. The more it went, the more I had to say. So much in fact I went on to write on my own substack. However, it got so long that I won't be done in a while so I came back here!
Life has been presented to me in a very unrealistic way. As a kid, I had no clue how to 'human' so I had to copy people around me. When adult life came, I ended up engineer, marrying a guy I would be with for 17 years and having 2 kids with him. I HAD IT ALL! Except that I was miserable, though financially stable. I was being told I was part of the elite, and that professional women must have kids and work full time (and overtime if possible), and travel for work, have friends, stay in good physical shape, dress professionally, drink wine, and also be nice (understand : never be hysterical or as I see it, convinced). Plus, I could not possible be unhappy because I was thin (yup, been told that).
In a few years of living in hell, my world fell apart (or rebuilt itself, depends on where you stand). I divorced, got a new spouse, snapped twice (long sick leave), quit 3 jobs and ended up quitting engineering altogether to become my spouse business partner. I am the closest to a stay-at-home mom I can be, except that I also fill my heavy needs of intellectual stimulation.
The only way for me to be mentally stable after that was to compromise (meaning to let go) money-making (I am lucking someone is providing for me). You see, what people won't ever say is that they shouldn't have had kids. I shouldn't have. Doesn't mean I don't love them, I do (especially now that they grew into humans able to think for themselves and funny to talk to). My life would not have been lost if I hadn't had them and I don't think I would die alone any more.
We have cheap daycare here in Quebec, as well as maternity leave. We are lucky. However, kids are so emotionally unstable and demanding, it's scary. I definitely saw a huge positive impact when I stopped sending mine to daycare (before, lunch and after school daycare). They got calmer, felt safer, and the whole dynamic was healthier for everyone. Emotional crashes disappeared from our household.
This need to be economically and socially successful was not mine. It had been imposed upon me by my family, friends, teachers, the media, everyone. The minute I leaned from it, I changed my perspective. It made life so much easier. From my perspective, I cannot understand how some women (with vaginas) can sincerely want many kids and also social and economical success at the same time. Every woman I know who did both failed one side, and it was always the children side.
I was very happy to hear that a good mother is not a friend-mother. My mother was not a good one, and she never played with me, but that's not what she did wrong. She just was not honest nor open with me. I started feeling good with my mother role after divorcing, because I did not feel the pressure to put every minute of my precious free time in entertaining my kids anymore. I could just love and care for themselves MY way.
The prison analogy was good also. The only thing I would add on the top of that is that it's a self imposed one. I isolated myself in my own prison for so long. The fear of looking like a bad mother, or simply not the "normal mother" was making me sick. I ended up losing weight and not sleeping. But losing weight is a form of social success... Yay! (sarcasm)
I start trusting feminism again when I hear such conversation. Women empowerment through sex seems more to me like men that finally found a way to get to sex while convincing women it was their idea.
Finally, are we going to stop pretending that women and men are interchangeable? We sound like my kids arguing on a subject they know nothing about.
Great episode! It's a bit of a relief to hear discussions like this from you and Louise Perry (Mary Harrington is another good one on the topic). I always felt that the narrative of having it all and work-life balance was a lie, and the incompatibility between being the kind of mother I would want to be and an individual devoted to solitude-dependent creative pursuits was a major factor in my choice not to have kids. I relate to what Meghan said about the "child-free" rhetoric. It perpetuates the idea that there is a hard line between people who want kids and people who don't, with those who opt out being blithely concerned only with personal freedom when in reality there is a grey zone of ambivalence which includes both women who choose to have kids and those who don't.
At 57:05, I guess the arguement boils down as follows. Risk factors for adults harming children are (male) > (female) ... and ... (less shared genetics) > (more shared genetics). And, all other things being equal, I should be more willing to let my kids be looked after by my brother & his wife than by my sister & her husband.
I would admit to Sarah that, here in the West, this isn't an issue I've thought about much*. And now that I do, it seems to make sense. And if I could pull a lever to switch Pakistan from a patrilocal to a matrilocal system, this would be a good reason NOT to. (My thanks to fellow commenter Pongo2. A couple of new words for my vocabulary!)
But unlike Sarah, I DO feel like I need to see the studies. Just because X is riskier than Y doesn't mean that I actually need to care about X. What are the absolute risk values here? Do I really need to think about this issue at all? And if so, how do I balance it with other risks and costs and benefits?
* - And this may be largely because, as she says, it's yet another issue that we can't comfortably talk about in the West. (Another example of why free speech, and not just in the legal sense, is so important.)