What is motherhood writing for?

In a recent conversation with the writer

Tracy Clark-Flory

, I mentioned I’ve had my eye on a very interesting backlash that has emerged on the heels of an explosion of writing about motherhood. Over the past year, we’ve seen many think pieces and essays attempting to refocus conversations about parenting on to the joys and merits of having children. Some writers have claimed that the discourse has gotten too negative. Others feel like the mom jokes are getting old, and some reassurances that things will be okay would be nice.

In a piece for The New Yorker, Jay Caspian Kang writes of “left-leaning, middle-class Americans” who “speak of kids as though they are impositions.” Kang’s piece is in essence a review of a recent book by Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman, titled What Are Children For?, which Kang calls “an engaging, literary investigation into why so many highly educated, financially comfortable women in the United States are ambivalent about having children, and how we should actually think about that decision.”

The slide from “many women” to “we” here is worth exploring. Kang notes that Berg and Wiseman consulted “dozens of Zoomers, millennials, and Gen Xers,” and the respondents were in fact highly educated— almost 70% had a graduate degree. This hardly feels to me like a comprehensive and diverse enough sample for a book-length treatise on how “we” should all be talking about the decision to have children. But Kang insists this doesn’t preclude the authors’ wider analysis, since he believes the discourse of parenting is being shaped by this demographic.

This feels like saying the parenting discourse is being written exclusively by the elites— but Kang also admits that What Are Children For? sometimes feels very online, which begs a few questions about what discourse we are actually talking about.

Either way, the charge that perspectives on parenting are being steered by elites is not the only claim that overlaps significantly with rhetoric we tend to hear from the right. Kang frames his take as a response to alleged liberal and progressive “anti-natalism" and appears to agree with one idea presented in What Are Children For?, which is that the left’s personal decisions about parenting are just too influenced by politics and the state of the world.

He also doesn’t seem to take issue with the book framing itself as a corrective to what Berg and Wiseman perceive to be “liberal neuroses about having kids.”

The focus of such correctives is often the question of whether it’s appropriate to have children in a burning world. In pieces like these, there is always a lot of talk about people who choose not to have children because of climate change. Largely absent from such analyses, however, is serious consideration of the very real danger pregnancy and parenting poses to women’s bodies and lives today, the sheer reality that people are being forced to have children by the state, or meaningful discussion of whether women might understand better today than ever before that having children frequently makes them second-class citizens in their own homes.

These are hazards of parenting, I might add, created by and large by pro-natalists who allege that liberals and progressives are “anti-child.”

Both Kang and the authors of What Are Children For? believe it’s nevertheless worth examining the “faulty logic” people use in their decisions to have children later, or not at all, or to hem and haw about having kids—a perfectly reasonable thing to when considering whether or not to have children. It’s telling, too, that such writing tends to dance around whether the issue is with women’s decisions specifically.

Kang admits that while he entered parenting without much forethought, he knows that his “wife thought much more about the ethical implications of having children.”

Then he claims:

we don’t talk in a public and philosophic way about children as objects of love nearly as often as we describe them as obstacles or means to an end. Liberal writers and thinkers don’t frequently opine on the joys of bearing and raising children, or the tremendous social good that it brings.

Is the “we” here women? As someone who studies the literature of motherhood and the cultural and political narratives around parenting, I can confidently say this is just not true. Even in my mostly liberal, mixed-class California suburb, socially today it is off-limits for women to talk about children as though they are simply a thorn in our side— especially among those with higher incomes and education, who tend to be devotees of intensive parenting styles.

What’s at the heart of this backlash instead, I think, are often much larger questions about how we understand the vast range of cultural genres through which women now work out and testify to their identities, politics, and reproductive lives.

People’s attitudes toward those genres are as complex as the genres themselves, so

Sara Petersen

and I decided to try to hash some of this out. Sara has been studying and writing about the nostalgic, highly sentimental maternal narratives that crop up online for years, as captured in her book Momfluenced and her newsletter In Pursuit of Clean Countertops. She also recently published a fantastic interview with Moira Donegan, one of our best feminist thinkers, in which they discuss pro-natalism and what it feels like to be a woman without children today.

‘Snuggle’ 2022 by Madeline Donahue, who you can find here.

---

Sara

A couple weeks ago, I talked to Moira Donegan about pronatalism. Pronatalism sometimes looks like overt alt right stuff - tradwives raising their own personal armies of white children and rejoicing that childless cat ladies will “exterminate themselves.” Etc! But I’m also noticing a particularly liberal bent to what might be called pronatalist anxiety in recent essays exploring what the impact of online discourse about parenthood (and motherhood specifically) is having on individuals’ choices. And I’m so bewildered! It’s hard for me to fathom that Motherhood Discourse could actually be moving the needle on people’s personal choices? And even if it IS, I’m struggling to care? I say this as someone for whom maternal dread essays would’ve been a GIFT pre-motherhood. As it was, I hopscotched into motherhood completely clueless, and like, I’d far rather be pleasantly surprised by how beautiful motherhood can be than horrified by how shockingly hard it is. 

Amanda

I love the term pronatalist anxiety, because I too feel like I’m seeing this everywhere, and you’re right— while it might not be as overt as the stuff we’re hearing from JD Vance, a lot of recent, more liberal writing betrays a similar distrust of women to be able to make their own reproductive choices and an anxiety about the stories we are telling about motherhood and the family. We’re seeing a lot of hand-wringing, for instance, as you point out, about whether mothers are being too harsh in their depictions or discussions of motherhood— the danger being that it might make women less willing to have children. This feels like informed consent to me. But I see some of this anxiety about the message we might be sending young women even in the much more nuanced and thoughtful (and viral) Vox piece on millennials’ supposed maternal dread.

The timing of this is quite curious. First, I think there is still plenty of sentimentalization of motherhood and the family and children. We need not worry that there is enough of that, truly. There is also plenty of political rhetoric discouraging women from remaining single and encouraging them to have children. See for instance: Project 2025, the entire Republican platform, and most popular representations of family life.

So, here we’ve had several years in which the conversation about motherhood in America— and care more broadly— has exploded in response to the child care crisis and the pandemic. And now, in the past year or so, we’re seeing a bunch of writing that is not only of the “what about the children” mentality, and not only deeply skeptical of women choosing not to have children, but also coming from this place of analyzing the “discourse” around motherhood to try to determine if it’s swung too negative. It feels a bit… soon?

Sara 

Many of these essays argue that the Motherhood Discourse might inaccurately present a binary representation of motherhood for folks thinking about having children (or even folks considering the lives of their parent friends). The maternal joy essays might lean too hard into bliss. The PPD essays might lean too hard into the gritty difficulties. In her essay, Parenthood’s PR Problem, Nahman describes going to lunch with her brother and feeling conflicted about performing a certain kind of easy motherhood, as if her performance has the capacity to illustrate her new maternal personhood in all its clarity OR has the capacity to potentially sway those around her on parenthood. Or even that her maternal performance might inaccurately mark her life as smaller, less interesting, or less creative than it was prior to having children.

As in this essay by Elissa Strauss, Nahman is self-aware that this particular anxiety might very well be a personal conundrum rather than a widespread social issue, but I still found myself utterly unable to relate. I’m 42. I have three kids, the oldest of whom is 12. I think Nahman’s in her mid 30s with one baby, and she’s still very much in her new motherhood awakening, which we’ve all been through! But reading this, I just felt like I was living in another century on another planet. While I absolutely went through a destabilizing identity shift upon becoming a mother, I don’t recall EVER spending time considering how my participation (or not) in online motherhood discourse was impacting undecided readers, OR whether or not my performance of motherhood was impacting undecided friends and peers. I think this simply speaks to how our personal contexts impact our perception. I get the sense that many of today’s new mother writers approached motherhood much more thoughtfully than I did. I never once had a serious conversation with myself about whether or not I wanted kids, or even WHY I wanted kids. For various reasons, I approached motherhood with a hardwired conviction that Of Course I Would Do This. I don’t recommend this approach!

Amanda

Yeah, I can’t say I had that experience either. This idea that our maternal experience should be a public relations effort is… baffling to me. When I was a new mom, I can recall being concerned that people around me who did not have children for whatever reason didn’t realize how hard it was— that if my baby was crying (or I was lol) it made it seem like I was crazy or didn’t have my shit together. I was very aware of other people’s judgements, but I didn’t view my own maternal experience as an effort to convince other people to have children.

Sara

Right! And Nahman is explicitly clear that she’s not intending to convince anyone on the question of motherhood. But her anxiety is fascinating to me. She seems to be saying that she used to view motherhood with wariness, but now has found so much richness and fulfillment in the role, and wants to be sure other wary young women know that that’s possible? Or that they can know it’s possible to not make motherhood one’s personality? But from my perspective, the idea that motherhood can be a noble, fulfilling endeavor is the DOMINANT narrative, and has been . . . pretty much forever? I find myself wondering who/what we’re concerned about in this question of good/bad maternal PR? It seems to me that while perhaps liberal thinkers on the coasts are starting to seriously consider opting out of motherhood in increased numbers, many American women are still making their choices based on the dominant cultural narrative of womanhood and motherhood. I live in New Hampshire, and am the leftiest of lefties, but the culture of a small college town in NH is very different from like, Brooklyn or Berkeley or whatever.

Amanda

Right, exactly. There are plenty of depictions of motherhood as rich and fulfilling— as you have written about at length! We have plenty of “online discourse” that covers that area. Not to mention all of history, in which the sentimentalization of motherhood has been the dominant story we’ve told about women and their presumed biological destiny.

So, this kind of writing feels very much like a backlash to the robust feminist writing we’ve seen on care and parenting, a sort of don’t-get-us-wrong parenting is good too moment. But then I think you have this other strain of criticism that often feels rather uninformed about the literature or Discourse™ it is critiquing. So for example, there’s this idea that young people today are “a landscape of beleaguered people who have leaned a bit too far into their political and cultural beliefs”— that they’re not having children because they don’t have any hope for the world or they have miscalculated their ability to have an economically secure and emotional fulfilling life if they have children. Which is then folded into this idea that those who are critical of the conditions in which we parent today are not giving full throated defenses of public schools (totally disagree!), or see children as the problem.

That’s all just a vast oversimplification of the really diverse range of writing on care and motherhood that has circulated in recent years, and frankly, an oversimplification of decades of feminist work. The misread strikes me, though, as inseparable from a larger distrust of women to make their own reproductive choices, which is somewhat implicit or subconscious or just under-explored in this kind of writing.

Why don't we see the falling birth rate as an example of informed consent or as a sign of women feeling more capable of opting out? Why must we connect this to an under-appreciation of children and of care or to wrong thinking (and: there are lots of ways to care for a community beyond giving birth to children)?

And how on earth can anyone write on the subject of reproductive choice today without seriously reckoning with the context in which young people are making decisions about having children, namely the state forcing people to have birth in the US right now and the danger being pregnant poses?

Either way, a lot of this writing points to either “online discourse” or “progressive and liberal” writing on parenthood as the root of the problem, which feels vague and vast. Do you think these phrases are euphemisms for something else?

Sara

Great question. My kneejerk response is that these are disparaging and misogynist euphemisms. There’s a long history of viewing “motherhood lit” as indulgent, navel-gazing forms of emotional, insular writing. As if essays about motherhood aren't always implicitly about larger social constructs and issues. I asked a friend, who’s been undecided about motherhood for as long as I’ve known her, what she makes of the supposed parenthood PR panic, and she (I think rightly!) points out that her decision is so entirely about herself (her lifestyle, contexts, etc) as to preclude any serious sort of impact the discourse could have on her decision. She mentioned that sure, when she spends time with a stressed out mom friend, she retreats to her childfree home and feels relief. But she also says that those instances don’t fundamentally shift the needle for her on whether or not she wants to have a child herself. And even if it did, why is that bad? Like, why are we concerned that women might make the choice to not have children without fully considering how much maternal joy they might be missing out on? Are we truly worried for these women? Or are we worried about something else? 

Amanda

Yes, why do we see it as a problem if women or anyone makes reproductive choices for say, personal reasons and as a kind of political strategy, or simply with an awareness of the context in which they would be pregnant and parenting? That question I think needs a lot more direct engagement in these pieces.

And why would it be a problem if, after seeing a friend struggle with modern-day motherhood, a woman decided not to have children? Unless of course we think not having children is a problem in and of itself.

And so this is what really gets to me about these think pieces. They often fail to interrogate their underlying assumptions about the really urgent political stakes of motherhood and the family right now.

And as you say, perhaps that’s part and parcel of a culture that dismisses “motherhood books” as not having much to say. Because in fact, nearly every book on care or motherhood I’ve read in recent years talks at length about communal caregiving, public education, social safety nets, how interesting children are, and so on— and they are littered with caveats about the writers’ love for their children, the beauty and joy of care, and a litany of other qualifiers/apologies to offset their critiques of motherhood writ large. My own book explicitly critiques the normalization of maternal suffering. It also has a whole chapter about maternal pleasure. 

So maybe, even in the genre of the so-called “motherhood book” (a term I hate, but it’s slightly useful here) or essays about motherhood, there’s this assumption that motherhood remains a kind of public relations effort between women. Most authors I know who are mothers are hyper-conscious of not giving anyone the wrong idea about whether or not they are a good and loving parent.

Sara

Right!!!!!! In Momfluenced, I wrote that “I love my kids, but I don’t always love being a mom” and spent an inordinate amount of time stressing about the inclusion of that line. I’ve ALSO started never-published essays with lines like “I don’t want to have to start this essay by convincing you that I love my children or that I love being my children’s mother.” I don’t think it’s hyperbole to point out that this supposed imperative for public expressions of maternal joy, or even, if I’m being more generous, explorations of ALL facets of motherhood, is another form of soft maternal policing. Like, sure, you can talk about your cracked nipples, but, for fear of presenting a one-sided picture of motherhood, can you also please consider the many ways in which parenthood has impacted your growth as a person? 

I genuinely don’t think the writers of these types of essays are nursing a latent belief that maternal joy is like, the BEST form of indescribably profound personal transformation available to women. But I’m trying to think of another genre or topic that is eliciting similar anxiety. Can you think of anything? This can’t NOT be a gendered phenomenon, right?

Amanda

The only other genres I can think of are those that are also highly feminized. So, tangentially related is “sad girl” poetics or literature, which just lives in a constant cyclical state of embrace/backlash— should women write about their own depression? It’s twee or gauche one moment, high art the next.

Similarly, the backlash to more nuanced— and yes, critical— depictions of motherhood begets a lot of oversimplification in terms of how this genre plays out online and in literary works. So, not only are people fretting about the more serious literary and political depictions of motherhood, they’re also concerned with how motherhood is showing up online, and they’re often equating the two.

As I mentioned, you have done a lot of work underlining just how pervasive idealistic representations of motherhood are online.

I do think there is another strain of somewhat unserious, depoliticized content online that pokes fun at children and at parenting. When I first started working on Touched Out, I was really enthralled by the image of the “hot mess” mom online. She was this completely context-less figure who just suffered through motherhood but didn’t question her place within the sociopolitical landscape.

But in recent years, I’ve noticed less and less of that online because the pandemic made care inequality so mainstream. So even in online content about feeling “touched out,” women now often connect that to poor public policy. The normalization of women’s suffering in motherhood as a supposed fact of life has not disappeared online, of course— and there’s also a parallel genre circling around men’s weaponized incompetence in marriage. 

BUT/AND that is simply an entirely different cultural genre than the emerging canon of writing on motherhood.

Sara

Yes! The Scary Mommy of it all feels almost like a relic of mid-aughts motherhood internet writing at this point (full disclosure I def wrote something snarky back in the day about like, the 20 ways in which 2-year-olds are public enemies or whatever for Scary Mommy lol). I’m SO glad you’re mentioning the very clear connection between portrayals of motherhood (online OR in person, if we’re considering how in-person performances of motherhood might impact folks) and politics. 

Will real-life circumstances for real-life mothers improve if we produce more multifaceted portrayals of motherhood online? Will they change if we write more essays about the shocking beauty of motherhood? Honestly, CALL ME UNHINGED, but the only subgenre of motherhood essay that seems likely to impact the political reality of mothers is the maternal dread subgenre. Give me ALL the essays about how the chokehold of the nuclear family fantasy is making mothers miserable. Give me ALL the essays about how mothers’ physical and mental health is suffering due to the inhumane lack of federal paid leave. Give me ALL the essays about how mothers are unable to pay for childcare or feel confident that their children are safe from gun violence. 

Amanda

Unhinged, Sara! But seriously, if we’re looking at writing about motherhood as purely a PR effort targeting other women (or another word for this: as purely political rhetoric), it’s so easy to get stuck in a vast oversimplification of the literature— and even of the online discourse TBH. As you mentioned, we get stuck in this false binary, too, where we look at this incredibly diverse cultural conversation happening around care and motherhood and boil it all down to, well, is motherhood dread or is it joy? Is it good or bad? Go or no go? One answer only, please! Or maybe, “both.” I don’t think that’s the point of this writing, personally. I don’t want it to be the point of my writing or my experience of motherhood. I don’t want to convince people how to live their lives.

Sara

Here’s a question. In her essay, Nahman writes about polling roughly 7K Instagram about which statement felt truest for them: “that parents make having a kid seem like heaven or that parents make having a kid seem like hell. For the ~7,000 participants, the vote was basically split, but when I re-ran the poll and offered a third option, “Somehow both? But something still feels like it’s missing,” two-thirds of voters picked that one instead. Only 10% said they were happy with the commentary they got.”

I do wonder if this focus on mainstream motherhood discourse is like, generational? I don’t think I’ve ever really considered whether or not I was “happy with the commentary” I’m getting from mothers. I mean, obviously, I’m fascinated with how aesthetics and momfluencer culture propagate a dangerous fallacy of motherhood as a gender essentialist fantasy, but I don’t think these writers are talking about rose-tinted momfluencer narratives. 

I do wonder if my general bafflement is just evidence that I (as a 12-year-old mother) am simply not privy to this type of discourse. Like, I don’t imagine many mothers removed from the new-mother stage are particularly haunted by whether or not they’re satisfied with the motherhood content they’re presented with? I also think it’s just self-evident that no single essay (or book! Or movie! Or podcast!) can present ALL OF THE MATERNAL experience. What do you think?

Amanda

It does seem like a strange generational shift or moment. I also feel like the idea of asking women whether they see motherhood as heaven or hell is…. not a sound polling method? Already it invites respondents into the binary (a patriarchal linguistic construction!). That said, I do see the hot-take-style conversation around motherhood really circling around this binary. Again, it’s: Is motherhood good or bad? Is it all fun or all misery? Pick a side! The more considered writing on the subject though is obviously trying to break out of this age-old duality, which let’s remember is also reflected in another age-old patriarchal duality, the one that supposes we must choose to identify with either public or private life because they are separate realms (one for women, one for men).

For me, great writing about motherhood is not really about motherhood— it’s about a messy, complicated subjective experience.

And I would be remiss not to say somewhere here that this backlash against maternal critique—and against the explosion of writing on maternal subjectivity—is mirrored in the backlash against marital critique. Basically, there is this ever-heightening critique of the nuclear family, and just as it’s reaching a fever pitch, we have this parallel discourse that’s trying to reign it all in. That discourse also often generalizes those books and says, oh all this writing about divorce is maybe going too far, what about the good parts of marriage. See here, here, and here. 

Sara

RIGHT. And of course, we’d also be remiss if we didn’t consider how tradwife ideologies of motherhood AND marriage AND the insular nuclear family are a backlash to the growing noise of mothers who feel (largely as a result of the pandemic) emboldened to speak out against systemic issues specifically harming mothers and families. Motherhood has always been political AND politicized, but I think far more people have the vocabulary post-pandemic to talk about it now than we did even 5 years ago. Some of these parenthood PR essays might be (at least in part) writers trying to locate the personal inside the political. It’s totally understandable to want to express one’s personal metamorphosis upon becoming a mother. I mean, that’s why I started writing about motherhood. But I don’t think the wider political discourse on motherhood–which includes considerations of reproductive justice, considerations of family structure, considerations of gender constructs, and considerations of bodily autonomy–precludes personal exploration. 

Amanda

Yes, and this is all related to how we struggle to talk about the link between the individual and the systemic. I hear a lot of women say it’s out of fashion to talk about their own maternal joy, and I wonder about that. It presupposes that to do so cancels out critiques of motherhood, or endangers their validity somehow. It also relies on the belief that it’s somehow un-feminist to delight in motherhood. That really feels like letting conservative talking points (a la JD Vance claiming America is anti-child) dictate the conversation. And it feels like a misread of the feminist canon. One can enjoy something as an individual and still acknowledge why others might not, and be sensitive to that different experience in an empathetic way. One can also acknowledge, I think, how one benefits from a certain kind of privilege that makes motherhood easier or more freeing, without pretending that joy doesn’t exist.

Sara

I was particularly interested in this passage in Elissa Strauss’s essay: 

With the erosion of reproductive rights and the new popularity of tradwives on social media, pointing out all that is worth celebrating in motherhood can feel dangerous, for people with my politics. And yet, if we don’t do it, what vision of feminism are we promoting for the next generation? Another one in which care is sidelined, marginalized—left to underpaid working-class women, mostly women of color, while wealthier, mostly white women leave the home and do the big, important stuff? I don’t want that either—and yet, still, how to express this?

And 100% yes, the right shouldn’t have ownership of the family values narrative. But I don’t think the right is particularly interested in putting forth specific messages about motherhood; they’re more invested in disseminating a blanket assertion that motherhood is good and right for all women. Full stop. It’s not as though essays about maternal joy are adequate ideological weapons to employ against deeply entrenched political talking points influencing legislation. And look, they don’t need to be! Not every personal essay MUST be a political exhortation. There is so much value in simply sharing our stories. 

Amanda

All the more reason I wish there was a clearer understanding of cultural genre and even medium in these conversations. And you know, I’d like to read more about maternal joy that tells us something new about that joy— beyond the ideas that motherhood makes women’s lives worth living, or that it’s the most powerful, transformative experience a woman can have.