Chappell Roan is not wrong
The “is motherhood good or bad” discourse erupts yet again
Quick reminder that Care for Writers: The Workshop is now open for registration! One cohort is already half full, and the other is nearing half full as well. I also announced earlier this week that this spring I have very limited spots open for 1-1 work with writers. Read all about both options and get paid subscriber discounts here.
Tomorrow (Friday), I’m also teaching a 1-day online workshop on essay revision for Write or Die, called Detangling the Braid: Revising Essays with Multiple Arcs. It will run 10am-1pm PT/ 1pm-4pm ET. Register here.
The month my book came out, The Federalist, a far-right online magazine, published a piece with the headline: “Enough With Our Horrible Media Boosting Women Who Publicly Regret Their Children’s Existence.”
I’ve mentioned this piece before, so I’ll just summarize some of its main points: according to the author, there is a “disgusting genre” of writing by feminist women in our “rabidly pro-abortion media” that airs “their dirty diapers — er, laundry — to a national media audience,” as a “clear ploy on the media’s part to convince readers: See, this — these things, these messy children — is what happens when you don’t let women get abortions!”
The piece explicitly names an excerpt from Touched Out published at The Guardian— a section about the disorienting process of watching Me Too unfold when I was a new mother, seeing more clearly how my girlhood and relationship to my body were defined by rape culture, and learning how to parent in a culture that presumes women will give up their autonomy for motherhood, all at once.
The Federalist writer says of the excerpt: “Montei doesn’t explicitly use the word ‘abortion’ in the passage, but she preaches the foundational message on which abortion activism depends: that it’s not fair to mothers for their children to make demands on them, especially inconvenient ones. In her last sentence, she mourns ‘what I hadn’t known before consenting’ to becoming a mother. What she would have done if she had ‘known,’ the reader is left to wonder.”
The section from my book in question is not about wishing I had an abortion, but about the complexities of agency, violation, embodiment, and choice for women in this era. It is also about feeling like so much about motherhood had been hidden from me when I was girl, as I consumed almost purely sentimental images of the role, and the pain that disconnect caused me in early motherhood.
And while I’m happy to embrace that my work “preaches” any ideas that are foundational to the fight for abortion healthcare, in no way are those foundational ideas, at any time in my book or in the serious feminist thought I’ve encountered, equivalent to the claim that it’s “not fair to mothers for their children to make demands on them, especially inconvenient ones.”
But this muddying of the waters is common in both neoliberal and conservative rhetoric about motherhood—as is the idea that reproductive autonomy is somehow related to the culture of treating kids as general nuisances. Anti-abortion rhetoric relies, in fact, on this false opposition: between children’s rights and women’s full humanity and citizenship.
The Federalist article, however, is obviously not interested in exploring the real foundations of the fight for abortion healthcare—that is, the common-sense assertion that impregnable people are human and deserve full citizenship under the law. Nor is it interested in unpacking how most right-leaning parents tend to be the most authoritarian, and therefore more likely to treat their kids as inconvenient bugs.
Instead, the article pokes fun at teen mother Brooke High, who couldn’t get an abortion in Texas, for her account of how being forced to become a mother when she was a child uprooted her life. The piece also cites other brilliant reporting on women who were forced by abortion bans to carry pregnancies to term against their will, and the effectforced motherhood had on their lives, citing for example Merritt Tierce’s stunning essay, “The Abortion I Didn’t Have,” as evidence of a genre of feminist complaint.
In this way, the piece works hard to cultivate intense paranoia about what women should and should not say about their sense of agency in parenthood, especially in public settings, by using phrases like “Can you imagine hearing from your mother… [insert any thought about how abortion or consent has shown up in their own lives]???” The primary takeaway of the piece is that women must dwell in gratitude for their children, and shut up about everything else, lest they damage their kids forever.
This week, Chappell Roan is being attacked again for remarking on Call Her Daddy that all her friends who have young children (specifically the under 5 set) are “in hell.” None of those friends are sleeping, she said, and also, the light has left their eyes. The Cut declared that “A Bunch of Moms Are Mad at Chappell Roan” citing a flurry of TikTok videos about “whether motherhood is wonderful or the worst thing that can happen to a woman.”
Some have accused Roan of being “negative”, feminist websites are asking if motherhood needs a rebrand, and mothers on the internet have kicked into full gear defending motherhood as… not hell. Even the conservative women’s mag Evie swiftly entered the fray, claiming that Roan has too much #maincharacter energy to understand “the idea of loving someone with your whole heart.”
Sigh. Lots to unpack here. I was reminded of this 2023 Vox essay, titled “How millennials learned to dread motherhood,” a headline that flattens the nuance the piece actually contains. I worried aloud then (in an earlier version of this essay) that the headline would set recent conversations about care and motherhood back quite a bit, as people took it as a sign that we’ve simply gotten too down on motherhood (as though there are only two ways to talk about motherhood!). Unfortunately, I was right.
I liked a lot about that Vox essay, which is of course volumes more carefully researched, reported, and written than the anti-abortion piece I discuss above. I, too, after all, have explored for years what the author of the Vox essay calls the “crisis frame” of motherhood (including at Vox). I have noted many times that the “hot mess” or “bad” mom, the touched-out mom, these are cultural tropes that betray ideologies we take for granted as simply the way things are or must be, and that we therefore often subscribe to, perform, accquiesce to, or identify with unknowingly. They are cultural images that normalize and even valorize maternal suffering, rather than question how such images of mothers play into thinking that is foundational to anti-abortion rhetoric: namely, that it is women’s natural and cultural role to give up their bodily and psychic autonomy, to suffer for and serve children and husbands.
The Vox essay claims that recent depictions of motherhood tend to focus on the hard parts of parenting, rather than the pleasures of caring for children, and ends with a call for more positive images of motherhood to counterbalance what the author calls the “angst” and “anxiety” that surrounds motherhood today. As Lyz Lenz wrote in response, “I understand the impulse to ask where the happy mothers are. We are here.” But, she continued, “In an era where our rights to bodily autonomy are being taken away and mothers are facing jail time for stillbirths — and only a few years out from historic shutdowns that crippled mothers by forcing them to be the social safety net — branding the life-threatening decision that motherhood has become as a marketing problem is missing the forest for the cute baby snuggles.”
Even so, the false binary between “positive” and “negative” depictions of motherhood continues. As Sara Ahmed writes in her book, Complaint!, becoming a “feminist ear” to women’s complaints is one way we can “learn how complaints are not heard.” Ahmed writes, “To hear complaints, you have to dismantle the barriers that stop us from hearing complaints.”
The latest Chappell Roan pile-on highlights one aspect of this conversation that is frequently unheard: discussions about maternal representation tend to dismiss, moralize, erase, even pathologize the experiences of women without kids, and even more the experiences of queer women without kids.
Women blaming themselves for attitudes toward motherhood is not new. As I write in Touched Out, feminist proponents of twilight sleep thought that the pain of childbirth might be responsible for the dread many women feel as they contemplate motherhood— they thought knocking themselves unconscious in labor and delivery might make the dread go away.
But women without children are also frequently blamed for other women’s attitudes toward and experiences of motherhood, and for everything from a failing economy, progressive politics, toxic internet culture, and sociopathy (which, to be clear, occurs at a rate of 3:1 men to women). Such claims are echoed, too, in neoliberal writings, usually by white women with certain economic privileges, who claim motherhood is inherently transformative and transcendent, and that images of liberated women without kids are somehow damaging the motherhood scene.
Care, to be clear, is transformative. And in our lonely, isolated cultural moment, we need more of it. But one need not be a mother to care for other people, or even for children.
Happy images of moms are also, more simply, not the way to restore complexity to the vast genre of motherhood. “Motherhood” is a loaded term that we use to reference many things. To what might women even being referring when they challenge the merits of motherhood? The criminalization of pregnancy? The difficulties of navigating privatized childcare? Domestic inequality and the tragedy of heterosexuality? The centrality of the nuclear family? Reproductive violence and an absence of postpartum care? Racism and environmental disaster? Financial precarity and economic dependence on men? The presumption that they will endure a loss of their identity and career and social status, and wear it all with a smile?
When we say “motherhood,” most are talking obliquely about a range of social, economic, political, personal, emotional, psychological, and physical ideologies, scripts, roles, and issues. Complaints about motherhood by straight women are often, in large part, complaints more rooted in the domestic inequity of heterosexual marriage and the failures of the nuclear family as a social and economic unit, rather than the work of caring for children. Is this why the light has left the eyes of Chappell Roan’s friends? Because the women are the ones losing the most sleep, and the erotic has left the building, as has their sense of equality in their own homes?
Either way, I do think we should worry about how sentimental and nostalgic depictions of motherhood might “hurt our cause,” as the author of that Vox essay put it, especially given that the conservative actors who want to turn us into “walking coffins” are calling explicitly for such depictions.
Refusing to paint the maternal with the broadest brush possible is not in competition with the notion of valuing care more broadly— it is the very expression of that desire. We must ask ourselves, especially if we are writers or artists, whether our work is expanding the archive of representations of motherhood, heterosexuality, and the nuclear family—or whether we are simply replaying old tropes and archetypes to convince ourselves we are good, and to avoid hearing the complaints of others.
I was once asked in an interview to give my take on the following parenting experience: a child told their mother something to the effect of you make motherhood seem really hard, I don’t even want to have kids when I grow up! What nagged me was the idea that a child sharing that they do not want to have children when they grow up is some sign that their mother has failed, rather than a sign the child has learned to freely express their own autonomy.
Clearly, young people today are questioning more earnestly whether they want to have children and get married. But we could give this all another name: we might just call it informed consent.
The nuance to the topic is astounding, and you approach it so beautifully and thoroughly.
I have three children and I adore being a mom to them. But playing the role of a mother in our society is something different entirely.
All of this. And also the collective has decided to take everything as a personal attack. I think examining why a pop star’s comments on a podcast are so triggering is the kind of work so many are unwilling to do.