I’ve thought of myself as a feminist for about two decades.
Though I’ve always been a fiesty, tomboy-ish female, I was first exposed to formal feminist thinking at my liberal arts college. I connected deeply with the smart, thoughtful women I was surrounded by who also identified as feminists. I loved my women’s studies class, taught by a soft-spoken dark-haired woman who I totally admired, and clearly remember one project where I analyzed primary sources to create a presentation on a local woman’s experiences as a schoolteacher in the late 1800s.1
A handful of years later, I was the founding language arts teacher at a girl-focused charter middle school. We regularly read feminist philosophy as part of our professional development, and I was in constant conversation with like-minded women (and one man—hi, Jacob, if you’re reading!) about how to create empowering curriculum and experiences for these coming-of-age young women. Some of my most memorable and meaningful life experiences come from those six years.
So yeah, feminism has long been a big part of how I think about myself and how I think about reality.
I left teaching shortly after getting married. I was totally burned out and ready for a change.2 It was at this time when I started having questions.
Not long into our marriage, we started trying to begin our family. I quickly realized a horrifying thing: I knew virtually nothing about my female body or female fertility. How could this be? I’m a feminist! Pro-female! How could I not know the most basic information about my body? Why was this not part of my feminist training or the feminist conversation? I did not feel empowered when I realized I literally didn’t know a woman could only get pregnant a few days a month—I felt embarrassed.
Months went by, and we weren’t getting pregnant (despite now understanding how it actually works). It felt so frustrating. I thought you just got pregnant if and when you wanted to! During this time of struggling to conceive, I came across a book at the library I really connected with, a searing, brave, and deeply sad memoir about a woman who wanted children but felt that basic information about female fertility had been kept from her. And now, it was too late.3 We eventually did get pregnant after seeing some specialists and dealing with a health issue of mine that had gone undiagnosed during the years of my busy career, but the woman’s story stuck with me.
I knew I would be primarily home with my babies, as that was a discussion my husband and I had when we were dating. But I had this idea that I was going to do it in a feminist way (I remember thinking this). I wasn’t going to be a normal SAHM; I was going to be a cool SAHM. (Lol. Vibes of this post.) Either way, I felt confident in my decision to be at home while my children were young, because it was my choice, and feminism is about choice.
Then I actually lived a while as a SAHM and realized that staying at home with your kids is not in any way an approved feminist choice. I wrote a blog post outlining my thoughts and experiences around the choice of stay-at-home motherhood and feminism on the little blog I was keeping at the time and it was cathartic AF.
Oh, let me rewind a bit, because there was another thing too that made me go hmmm. When I was pregnant with my first and educating myself about birth and the state of things surrounding birth in this country (it’s… not pretty—IYKYK), I remember thinking, where is feminism on this? The vast majority of women will have the experience of giving birth, and there’s plenty of anti-woman things that routinely occur, but yet I’d never heard a word of feminist rhetoric about birth. Not ever.
As time went on and I did the work of an at-home parent, I realized just how much work it was, and again I thought, where is feminism on these taken-for-granted tasks that women (at home or not) do?4 The cleaning, the cooking, the organizing, the mental load… all of it is an incredible amount of work, more than I knew before I did it myself. At some point I read a memoir called Women’s Work5 and remember sitting in stunned silence at these truthful, resonant words (and later posting them to Instagram where other women too very much connected):
No problems, right? Right, no problems. Still, it felt like I had a problem. The cold reality of my gender was dawning on me. I'd known enough, already, about harassment and domestic violence and pay differentials and the incessant, exhausting focus on how you look and laugh and talk. But it had all been basically manageable—not ideal, certainly, even enraging, but navigable—right up until the baby came. It was motherhood that forced me to understand the timeless horror of our position. The obvious, hidden-in-plain-sight reason women had not written novels or commanded armies or banked or doctored or explored or painted at the same rate as men. The cause was not, as I had been led to believe, that women had been prevented from working. Quite the opposite: we had been doing all of the work, around the clock, for centuries.
Those last two lines! Women haven’t been prevented from working; women have always worked. But the cultural (read: feminist) language is that women who go to a job outside the home are working and women who stay at home with their children are not. Hm.
At some point in early motherhood I began learning even more about my menstrual cycle (beyond its basic fertility functions), and I was amazed. I read the work of Kate Northrop and Alisa Vitti. I learned that women’s hormones run on a monthly cycle, whereas men’s hormones run on a 24-hour cycle. I learned how intimately knowing our own womanly rhythm can help us live our lives in tune with the way we were made. And again, I thought, I was so into thinking about womanhood for so long! Hoooow did I not know these things?
Finally, in the last few years, I’ve started to learn about a topic that’s blowing my mind: masculine and feminine energy and polarity. This has opened up a whole new reality for me. I’ve learned I’m sorely lacking in feminine energy and I also realized I had long believed femininity was weak and undesirable. This topic has been not only intellectually insightful but also super helpful in my actual life. I’ve learned (and am very much still learning) to be more “in my feminine”—and I honestly feel stronger and more empowered than ever.
Given all this, I’ve been forced to ask an uncomfortable question: Is feminism pro-woman? It seems like the most… basic quality of feminism, yet the things I’ve seen and experienced make me feel like feminism…doesn’t like the things associated with women?
Then one day it hit me. In the irony of ironies, feminism6 centers men and holds them and their experiences as the standard to aspire to. It tells women that to be strong, to be empowered, they need to be more like men.
Avoid the work of home and children—do real work out in the world instead.
Strive 24/7 to achieve and produce. Lean in. Hustle. Take charge.
And because we want you to be like men, we’ll tell you nothing of the realities and beautiful capabilities of your female body.
I thought feminism was about honoring women—what they experience and who they are. Confusing, indeed.
I loved this project, because I believed then (and still do) that women’s stories and women’s lived experiences matter.
I worked in very high-needs/ high-stress environments my whole teaching career, starting with Teach For America in Los Angeles, then moving to the founding of the charter school, and ending my career in another notoriously high-stress charter school network.
The book is called The Big Lie: Motherhood, Feminism, and the Reality of the Biological Clock. The author is a Harvard grad and has published another memoir as well, about domestic violence, which I want to read. (I love women truth-tellers, no matter what they’re telling the truth about.) Also, this is getting to be a thing—women not being able to have children or as many as they would like, because they thought the right path was to go after education and career and that having kids would just… fit in somehow. I’ve both read about it as a larger reality and had conversations with individual women in my life. Ugh.
There is some feminist talk of this topic now, stemming mostly from Eve Rodsky’s book Fair Play, which is becoming quite popular. More thoughts on this to come.
By Megan K. Stack. Again random find at the library. Apparently God speaks to me through books.
I’m speaking of mainstream feminism, the one that dominates modern American culture. I know there are other streams.
P.S. Regarding the below: this is the whole written post, but the audio version (where I read the post out loud) is only accessible to paid subscribers. Subscribe to One Tired Mother at $5/month to get not only post audios but also podcast rants that are too spicy or vulnerable for all the Internet to hear.