Women Are Always Blamed for Maternal Dread
But there's another term for thinking carefully about becoming parents: consent
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, and I won’t link to it, but I’ll 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!”
Never mind for the moment how many times this author says “media” in the first few paragraphs as a way to dismiss as false anything that isn’t published in their favorite conservative publications. The piece also explicitly names an excerpt from my book Touched Out published at The Guardian— a section of the book about the disorienting process of watching Me Too unfold when I was a new mother, and beginning to see more clearly how my girlhood was defined by growing up in a rape culture, while at the same time learning how to parent in a culture that presumes women will give up their autonomy for motherhood.
The writer says of one passage in 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.”
In fact, that section from my book is not at all about wishing I had an abortion, but about exploring the complexities of agency, violation, and choice in an era when so much feels beyond our control. It is also about feeling like so much about motherhood had been hidden from me when I was girl, while also recognizing I had been primed for the disempowerment that comes with it, and the pain realizing all this caused me in early motherhood. While I’m happy to embrace that my work “preaches” 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.” In fact, my book explores how we can come to identify what’s hard and what hurts about motherhood as something external or other to the tender bonds we form with our children.
The Federalist article, however, is not interested in what’s really foundational to the fight for abortion healthcare—which is, at its most basic level, the common-sense assertion that impregnable people are human and deserve full citizenship under the law. 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 children to term against their will, and the effect that had on their lives, and cites Merritt Tierce’s stunning essay, “The Abortion I Didn’t Have,” as evidence of a kind of complaint genre.
More forcefully, the piece works hard to cultivate an intense paranoia about what women should and should not say about their sense of agency in parenthood, using phrases like “Can you imagine hearing from your mother… [insert any thought about how abortion has shown up in their own lives]???” The primary takeaway at the end of the piece is that women must constantly dwell in gratitude for their children, and shut up about everything else, lest they damage their kids forever. That old refrain.
This article, which has a very similar headline, recently got a big response. I suspect the piece was so talked about because of its headline, “How millennials learned to dread motherhood,” which flattens the nuance the piece actually contains. I am also quite certain, knowing how Vox chooses headlines, that the writer, Rachel M. Cohen, didn’t choose it. And yet I also worry that the headline will set recent conversations about care and motherhood back quite a bit, as people take it as a sign that we’ve gone too far in one direction, in an effort to swing away from the other—as though there are only two ways to talk about motherhood.
I liked a lot about the piece, which is of course volumes more carefully researched, reported, and written than the anti-abortion piece I discuss above. I also know enough as a writer and reader not to expect literally everything from one piece of writing, and I want to be careful here not to simplify Cohen’s thoughtful writing the way I think the headline does.
I, too, after all, have been writing for years about what Cohen calls the “crisis frame” of motherhood (including at Vox). I have noted many times that the hot mess or bad mom, or as I write in Touched Out, the touched-out mom, are cultural tropes that betray ideologies we take for granted as simply the way things are or must be, and often subscribe to unknowingly. I’ve found doing book press frustrating at times for this reason. While my book explores what’s under the surface and unspoken when we call on a phrase like “touched out,” people often want me to just tell moms it’s a normal feeling and it’s fine and what three tips do I have to fix it.
Cohen 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 she 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 continues, “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.”
I agree. It is also not the way to restore to any discussion of motherhood the complexity the piece is, rightfully I think, seeking in the “discourse.” In part, there is a tendency to oversimplify the complexity of that discourse itself—not unlike how conservatives point to “the media,” liberals love to point to “the discourse.” But a viral trend on TikTok, a range of writing in different genres over the past few decades, and liberal feminism cannot all be grouped together and summed up with a headline that implies we are starting to make motherhood look bad.
Especially when the far-right is explicitly calling for an end to mothers testifying to their own complex subjectivity.
One of the more compelling points Cohen makes, drawing on this piece, is that conservative tradwife culture echoes “leftist-sounding critiques of hustle culture and work.” But those spheres of thought differ in important ways that go unexplored. It’s also worth unpacking how viral and literary depictions of motherhood often blur neoliberal feminism and radical feminism together, or water down feminist economic theory, adding to the murkiness of some conversations about motherhood and politics.
“Motherhood,” to boot, is a ridiculously loaded term that we use to reference so many things. What do women dread after all? The criminalization of pregnancy? The difficulties of navigating childcare? Marriage and domestic inequity? Reproductive violence and an absence of postpartum care? Racism and environmental disaster? Financial precarity and dependence? A loss of identity and career and social status? When we say “motherhood,” what we are really talking about is a range of social, economic, political, personal, emotional, psychological, and physical issues. No wonder it makes people so anxious!
Cohen’s piece does explore this by pressing into what it is, actually, that young people dread, suggesting that straight women may be, in large part, fearful of the domestic inequity of heterosexual marriage, rather than motherhood itself. This is a point worth underlining and, as I’ve said many times, worth exploring in the broader context of male entitlement to women’s bodies and women’s work.
But if there truly is an ambient dread circling around motherhood—a sense of worry that is amorphous but also somewhat novel and on the rise—one thing is for sure: it cannot be cured by returning to the maternal sentimentality and nostalgia that got us here. This is kind of where the piece lands, though, and what I fear (dread!) too many people will take away from it.
I am all for documenting the very real pleasures of having children. I have a whole chapter in my book titled “Pleasure” and my children are scrumptious and delicious! But I do think we should worry about how sentimental and nostalgic depictions of motherhood might “hurt our cause,” as Cohen puts it, especially as the conservative actors who want to turn us into “walking coffins” are calling for those depictions.
Does that mean there’s no room to speak about or write about the delights of caring for children? Not at all. Don’t give them that false binary. But it does mean that we should continue asking ourselves, especially if we are writers or artists, whether our work is expanding the archive of motherhood and parenting, or whether we are simply replaying old tropes and archetypes to convince ourselves we are good.
Blaming women for maternal dread to avoid what actually makes women dread motherhood is, however, 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 women unconscious in labor and delivery might make the dread go away! That didn’t work out, obviously.
But we still frequently blame ourselves. In a recent (wonderful) interview, I was asked 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! There were other aspects of this story I responded to as we chatted, and I gave my little take, but ever since that conversation, what’s been nagging me is the idea that a child expressing that they may not want to have children when they grow up is the worst thing in the world—and a sign that their mother has failed!
Perhaps representations of motherhood today are making young people question more earnestly whether they want to be mothers, or wives, or parents. I’ve spoken with many readers of Touched Out who thanked me for giving them a text to read as they consider what they want their own lives to look like. This does not, in the current political climate, seem like a problem. As Sara Petersen wrote, “maybe a little dread isn’t that bad?”
“Maternal dread,” after all, could be given another name, if we allow it some space to breathe: we might just call it women carefully contemplating whether they consent to becoming mothers—in an era when many want them to have no say over their lives at all.
Wonderful post! I have four children myself (grown-up by now) and had a very successful career as a scientific researcher. I loved having children, but it wasn’t always a picnic (I am French by the way and it’s much easier here than in the US). It sounds perfectly reasonable to me to weight options before deciding on having children and I would never say that choosing not to have children is a bad decision. Basically, it is a decision that everyone should be free to make without social pressure. And the best way to do it is to know what women with children go through, in terms of emotion, self-identity and professional ambition.
“we should continue asking ourselves, especially if we are writers or artists, whether our work is expanding the archive of motherhood and parenting, or whether we are simply replaying old tropes and archetypes to convince ourselves we are good.” Mic drop!