I was thinking today about how putting a ton of effort into finding the best daycare for your 12 week old is lauded but putting a ton of effort into breastfeeding is looked down on. We live in an absolute clown world.
What a weird truth-no one tells a mom trying to send her baby to the best daycare “don’t be a martyr” or “you don’t get a trophy” or whatever but they sure love to say that to breastfeeding moms or home birth moms or natural birth moms etc….
When my oldest was born, I was induced and made it to 8.5 cm before the pitocin contractions were too much for me to handle. I ended up with an epidural and someone told me it was fine because it “didn’t need to be a hero.” And they’re right- I didn’t! But I also knew that epidurals come with risks and that wasn’t the original goal. Most people don’t understand this.
Which is so condescending really! The implication with those statements is that whatever it is you are trying for is your aim out of a sense of pride and competition…which is just weird really!
Women are the divine creators through which man surrenders his seed in hopes of immortality through his children.
Women have the capacity to care, more than men do.
If any are the machines, then it is man who is the machine.
We rise before the sun, work all day until the sun goes down, then return to spend the few remaining hours with our family. Man toils and defends his goddess and children, loving them though they love him not.
“Where is the righteous demand to mother?” YES!! As always I resonate so deeply with your reflections about motherhood and the state of womanhood within our culture. I think we’ve really lost our way. I’ve never heard anyone say “I’m more than just a lawyer” or “more than just a teacher”. It’s perfectly fine for us to align ourselves with selling our bodies/labor to capitalism. That can be our whole identity. But if we want to align ourselves with our biological imperative to become mothers who feed our babies from our bodies, that is somehow unacceptable.of course it’s not to say that all women should be mothers or that no women should work. Our culture would be so much better off if it was mother centric.
Also what a great point! No one does ever say “I’m not just a doctor” (or lawyer, judge, or pilot). They also don’t say “I’m not just a gas station attendant” (or sanitation worker or cashier or whatever)…so I don’t think this is a class thing. What I have heard, however, are things like “I’m not just a stripper” or “I’m not just a sex worker”-again, female physiology is at play in language here. When a role is tied to the female body, it becomes something to hold defense against. For very different reasons of course, but I think there is something to that.
I completely agree! I wonder if it’s because as women we’ve become so disconnected from our biology that anything that reinforces it becomes an enemy to us almost? I feel that there’s so much to say on this topic alone! I do feel that we onto something.
And I also agree that mothers can be perceived as self centered for wanting a mother centric culture. But we are completely forgotten from most feminism discourse/ discourse about women. Also we are literally the ones who make society. We bring the people into the world and raise the people that will makeup society as a whole. Why should the culture not be centered around us or at the very least make things as easy for us as possible?
I agree! Culture would be much healthier and well regulated if it centered mothers and children. I feel like when we as mothers say this, others perceive it as self-absorbed but I think those others are missing the point. The point is that that would truly make life more enjoyable and satisfying for all people and communities, and even industry, in general.
“When liberal feminism prioritizes these sorts of “rights”, which are actually demands usually born of egotistical and hedonistic desires, it sets to transform us into the Femina Machina- the female machine.”
— ugh so powerfully said!! Beautiful work and absolutely thought-provoking. Thank you for writing.
“Where is the righteous demand to mother? Where is the righteous demand to not be labeled as economic capital (whether that be as a part of the workforce and as taxpayers or as literal economic goods when it comes to egg donation and surrogacy)?”
Yes to these words 🙌 also loved the reference to The Aeneid…semper femina indeed (also that would be a fabulous name for a podcast!)
This article makes some very valid points about how culture as a whole views and treats motherhood, and why it needs to change. I also think the pill and abortion are importance tools for women to navigate the current world, and those that try to block access to them seek to do so to the detriment of women. Both of these things can stand side-by-side to achieve better outcomes.
I suppose my questions and commentary are more about WHY these things are so necessary in our society. Why do women feel the need to essentially temporarily sterilize ourselves with pseudo hormones that can have harmful side effects? Why do so many women not feel open to life when it is a normal, healthy biological impulse? The answers are vast, complicated, nuanced and often very difficult. I realize this, I have experienced both of these things personally-but I do think it is important to look at the overarching societal theme of prioritization of female productive/social utility rather than natural inclinations of the woman.
Definitely big and interesting questions! Hearing people’s individual experiences about them for me creates an impulse to empathize and marvel about how people’s lives actually are, and why.
Absolutely, this conversation’s salient points on the beauty of care and potential in mothering (there are many!) would benefit from a more nuanced understanding of other POVs that prioritize those values even through different means. An “us-versus-them” perspective inevitably houses blind spots, even though it also can receive applause from folks who already agree
This is interesting….I haven't thought about this issue in this way before. Where do comparisons or similes that have a positive implication fall? Ex. Enjoying a high production of milk in the case of twins for example and referring to oneself as a milk machine with a more positive connotation
A good question! I do think it is about tone, and I am thinking back and over the course of my combined 11+ years of breastfeeding I probably have uttered similar words as a joke if I’m honest! The context under which I wrote this, and the original person who used the term “lactation machine” was doing it in a way which coded as very bitter and holier than thou (comparing herself to women who heavily identify with their status as nursing mothers and are proud of it), sparked these thoughts on how language is used to equate the female body with machinery. That being the case, I only thought about it from that bitter perspective but this is a good thought! All in all, part of me thinks comparing ourselves to machines in any way is dehumanizing but also the part of me with a sense of humor thinks that is just not-picky 😂
Yeah it's tricky because if one associates a machine with efficiency, consistency, reliability then that has its merit! Like, a family that gets out the door on time after finding a good routine is "a well oiled machine" and I think kids love stuff like that! But yeah, I don't ever want to speak in a way that implies women can be replaced by machines, because that's a logical step at that point right, that whays the harm in replacing us?
When you adopt the label with joy rather than bitterness, I think. The connotation of a mother chortling over being a milk machine who keeps her twins fat & happy is very different than one complaining she's not a milk machine to her toddler who hasn't weaned yet...
Really appreciate this response on interdependency, and I think it could be applied to a lot of discussions on mothering and also even on the question to have children at all.
Thank you! And I really appreciate all you write in turn; it is no joke that motherhood changes you profoundly if you let it & one of the biggest changes I've seen in myself since even becoming pregnant is how much my soul rebels at the awful mess that's been made of womanhood & motherhood by modernity. Finding a voice that articulates it better than I can has been a balm -- especially because my local internet milieu (at least the parts of it I talk to on social media, vs just read silently on Substack) is such a very strange and sad distillation of no-longer-young women who have swallowed the worst of the world's lies about what a woman is.
The weirdest interaction with that for me postpartum was a very good friend of mine asking me if breastfeeding was "really weird"; I'm still ruminating on how to answer that fully, even eighteen months later. Because it's not weird!! It is the least weird & one of the most wonderful things I have ever done, but the fact it's seen as a weird fringe practice by some social subset of women (who surely consider themselves "feminist") is mindboggling to me...
Similarly I have another acquaintance who longs to have a child but who has decided & was applauded for declaring she's going to exclusively pump because breastfeeding creeps her out. And, it sounded like, she'd bought into the pervasive misperception it's somehow easier/more efficient/better for mom than breastfeeding... I tried to gently course-correct on that based on my own experiences with it NOT being any of those things, but I am a little ashamed I was not better able to articulate an argument for actually giving breastfeeding a shot vs just "pumping is not what you've been told it is".
(I am personally grateful for free breast pumps because while I have not strictly NEEDED mine, it really helped me be less anxious about feeding my kiddo with a poor latch as she & I got ourselves sorted out and into a rhythm. Similarly I'm glad for it now, two days post-appendectomy, since it let me keep my supply going & offer her milk even while I was hurting too much/too drugged up to nurse her for a bit. But the use of tools to rescue imperfect nature is a far cry from replacing it entirely out of the mistaken impression the tools are an improvement!)
Well I am truly so grateful to have you as a reader and so encouraged to hear my writing has made you feel less alone♥️
As for the comments about breastfeeding being weird and creepy, that is a very pervasive (and specifically Western) line of thinking unfortunately. Many years ago I worked as a “peer counselor” for breastfeeding women who used WIC’s services and the amount of people who said the same things to me, along with “my man won’t let me bc my titties are for him🤦♀️” was….unsettling. It’s all the result of many years of an ongoing cultural campaign against natural law in my opinion.
I do think pumps have their place! I have pumped as well (very susceptible to clogged ducts here and also during nursing strikes). My gripe is less with their utility and more with the fact that society has deemed free breast pumps through insurance as a fix to mothers leaving their babies too soon-because that isn’t fixing the problem, it’s a band aid solution. The fix is allowing them to be home for, in my opinion, at least a couple years (yes I said years) instead.
Totally agree on pumps -- I guess what I wish is to be in a society that still saw it as reasonable to provide these expensive pieces of medical equipment for free for Mom's peace of mind as she stays at home, vs as a replacement for her staying home.
I think the idea of interdependence is important. When the narrative is everything one loses or gives up what one gains is lost or undervalued and I think it can be part of the conversation without telling people what they have to value and how much.
Even more important as we battle the transhumanist agenda that’s been infused into every part of corporate culture -> to occupy and deconstruct woman into our parts and then sell us out in the market. I don’t see this slowing down but knowing resistance exists brings hope.
In my read-through of the Aeneid, in book 5, one of the winners of the boat-race is given a slave woman (Pholoe), who is NAMED, and whose valuable attributes are specifically identified as being a weaver (skilled at Minerva's craft) and nursing twin boys. I wrote a short piece where I imagine her speaking to the highest status woman among Aeneas's followers, Pyrgo, a noble serving woman from Priam's palace. (No, I'm not in favor of slavery or forced marriages, nor do I think wives should be the slaves of their husbands. I'm trying to put things in the context of the times.)
Here is an excerpt from that, where I imagine that her extra milk, from feeding twins, may have saved the lives of other babies.
--excerpt--
Pholoe returned to her chair then. She was still anxious, but Pyrgo had chosen her for her ability to stay calm in danger. She had picked her up in Crete, back when they had thought they were to settle there, and the Cretan weaver had had an uneventful pregnancy and easy birth, even with twins. Not even the storms that had shipwrecked them on the shores of Libya had interrupted her milk. She had saved the babies of the ladies with the littlest ones.
“Courage, child,” she said. “The danger is no worse than it ever was. And you are still needed.”
Pholoe pressed the amulet of her previous owner, the father of her children, to her heart, on the end of its golden chain. He had been a sailor on the single ship that had been lost in the storm that led them to Carthage.
Thank you for sharing this excerpt, Mary. I saved the post to come back to (and the whole series you have). Your Substack looks fascinating, excited to read more!
“Where is the righteous demand to mother?” 😮💨🙌🏼 So grateful for your voice!
Thank you Amber ♥️
This was my favorite line too! 💪🏻
I was thinking today about how putting a ton of effort into finding the best daycare for your 12 week old is lauded but putting a ton of effort into breastfeeding is looked down on. We live in an absolute clown world.
What a weird truth-no one tells a mom trying to send her baby to the best daycare “don’t be a martyr” or “you don’t get a trophy” or whatever but they sure love to say that to breastfeeding moms or home birth moms or natural birth moms etc….
When my oldest was born, I was induced and made it to 8.5 cm before the pitocin contractions were too much for me to handle. I ended up with an epidural and someone told me it was fine because it “didn’t need to be a hero.” And they’re right- I didn’t! But I also knew that epidurals come with risks and that wasn’t the original goal. Most people don’t understand this.
Which is so condescending really! The implication with those statements is that whatever it is you are trying for is your aim out of a sense of pride and competition…which is just weird really!
I wasn’t trying to flex, I was trying to not be numb from the waist down or cracked out!
Women are not machines.
Women are the divine creators through which man surrenders his seed in hopes of immortality through his children.
Women have the capacity to care, more than men do.
If any are the machines, then it is man who is the machine.
We rise before the sun, work all day until the sun goes down, then return to spend the few remaining hours with our family. Man toils and defends his goddess and children, loving them though they love him not.
Women are star beings..beautiful star creations.
My argument is that modern society asks us to become a parallel to itself-and that could be said for both men and women. It isn’t good for either.
“Where is the righteous demand to mother?” YES!! As always I resonate so deeply with your reflections about motherhood and the state of womanhood within our culture. I think we’ve really lost our way. I’ve never heard anyone say “I’m more than just a lawyer” or “more than just a teacher”. It’s perfectly fine for us to align ourselves with selling our bodies/labor to capitalism. That can be our whole identity. But if we want to align ourselves with our biological imperative to become mothers who feed our babies from our bodies, that is somehow unacceptable.of course it’s not to say that all women should be mothers or that no women should work. Our culture would be so much better off if it was mother centric.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us!
Also what a great point! No one does ever say “I’m not just a doctor” (or lawyer, judge, or pilot). They also don’t say “I’m not just a gas station attendant” (or sanitation worker or cashier or whatever)…so I don’t think this is a class thing. What I have heard, however, are things like “I’m not just a stripper” or “I’m not just a sex worker”-again, female physiology is at play in language here. When a role is tied to the female body, it becomes something to hold defense against. For very different reasons of course, but I think there is something to that.
I completely agree! I wonder if it’s because as women we’ve become so disconnected from our biology that anything that reinforces it becomes an enemy to us almost? I feel that there’s so much to say on this topic alone! I do feel that we onto something.
And I also agree that mothers can be perceived as self centered for wanting a mother centric culture. But we are completely forgotten from most feminism discourse/ discourse about women. Also we are literally the ones who make society. We bring the people into the world and raise the people that will makeup society as a whole. Why should the culture not be centered around us or at the very least make things as easy for us as possible?
I agree! Culture would be much healthier and well regulated if it centered mothers and children. I feel like when we as mothers say this, others perceive it as self-absorbed but I think those others are missing the point. The point is that that would truly make life more enjoyable and satisfying for all people and communities, and even industry, in general.
“When liberal feminism prioritizes these sorts of “rights”, which are actually demands usually born of egotistical and hedonistic desires, it sets to transform us into the Femina Machina- the female machine.”
— ugh so powerfully said!! Beautiful work and absolutely thought-provoking. Thank you for writing.
Thank you as always for reading Vashti!
My favourite too!
“Where is the righteous demand to mother? Where is the righteous demand to not be labeled as economic capital (whether that be as a part of the workforce and as taxpayers or as literal economic goods when it comes to egg donation and surrogacy)?”
Yes to these words 🙌 also loved the reference to The Aeneid…semper femina indeed (also that would be a fabulous name for a podcast!)
Thank you Becca! And that’s honestly such a great idea-maybe if I ever find the courage to do audio I will use it!
This article makes some very valid points about how culture as a whole views and treats motherhood, and why it needs to change. I also think the pill and abortion are importance tools for women to navigate the current world, and those that try to block access to them seek to do so to the detriment of women. Both of these things can stand side-by-side to achieve better outcomes.
I suppose my questions and commentary are more about WHY these things are so necessary in our society. Why do women feel the need to essentially temporarily sterilize ourselves with pseudo hormones that can have harmful side effects? Why do so many women not feel open to life when it is a normal, healthy biological impulse? The answers are vast, complicated, nuanced and often very difficult. I realize this, I have experienced both of these things personally-but I do think it is important to look at the overarching societal theme of prioritization of female productive/social utility rather than natural inclinations of the woman.
Definitely big and interesting questions! Hearing people’s individual experiences about them for me creates an impulse to empathize and marvel about how people’s lives actually are, and why.
Absolutely, this conversation’s salient points on the beauty of care and potential in mothering (there are many!) would benefit from a more nuanced understanding of other POVs that prioritize those values even through different means. An “us-versus-them” perspective inevitably houses blind spots, even though it also can receive applause from folks who already agree
This is a very powerful essay! It should be shouted from the rooftops.
Thank you Whitney! ♥️
Well this was wonderful.
Thank you Haley ♥️♥️♥️
This is interesting….I haven't thought about this issue in this way before. Where do comparisons or similes that have a positive implication fall? Ex. Enjoying a high production of milk in the case of twins for example and referring to oneself as a milk machine with a more positive connotation
A good question! I do think it is about tone, and I am thinking back and over the course of my combined 11+ years of breastfeeding I probably have uttered similar words as a joke if I’m honest! The context under which I wrote this, and the original person who used the term “lactation machine” was doing it in a way which coded as very bitter and holier than thou (comparing herself to women who heavily identify with their status as nursing mothers and are proud of it), sparked these thoughts on how language is used to equate the female body with machinery. That being the case, I only thought about it from that bitter perspective but this is a good thought! All in all, part of me thinks comparing ourselves to machines in any way is dehumanizing but also the part of me with a sense of humor thinks that is just not-picky 😂
Yeah it's tricky because if one associates a machine with efficiency, consistency, reliability then that has its merit! Like, a family that gets out the door on time after finding a good routine is "a well oiled machine" and I think kids love stuff like that! But yeah, I don't ever want to speak in a way that implies women can be replaced by machines, because that's a logical step at that point right, that whays the harm in replacing us?
When you adopt the label with joy rather than bitterness, I think. The connotation of a mother chortling over being a milk machine who keeps her twins fat & happy is very different than one complaining she's not a milk machine to her toddler who hasn't weaned yet...
One rejoices in her interdependence with her little ones, one rejects it for hollow independence.
Really appreciate this response on interdependency, and I think it could be applied to a lot of discussions on mothering and also even on the question to have children at all.
Thank you! And I really appreciate all you write in turn; it is no joke that motherhood changes you profoundly if you let it & one of the biggest changes I've seen in myself since even becoming pregnant is how much my soul rebels at the awful mess that's been made of womanhood & motherhood by modernity. Finding a voice that articulates it better than I can has been a balm -- especially because my local internet milieu (at least the parts of it I talk to on social media, vs just read silently on Substack) is such a very strange and sad distillation of no-longer-young women who have swallowed the worst of the world's lies about what a woman is.
The weirdest interaction with that for me postpartum was a very good friend of mine asking me if breastfeeding was "really weird"; I'm still ruminating on how to answer that fully, even eighteen months later. Because it's not weird!! It is the least weird & one of the most wonderful things I have ever done, but the fact it's seen as a weird fringe practice by some social subset of women (who surely consider themselves "feminist") is mindboggling to me...
Similarly I have another acquaintance who longs to have a child but who has decided & was applauded for declaring she's going to exclusively pump because breastfeeding creeps her out. And, it sounded like, she'd bought into the pervasive misperception it's somehow easier/more efficient/better for mom than breastfeeding... I tried to gently course-correct on that based on my own experiences with it NOT being any of those things, but I am a little ashamed I was not better able to articulate an argument for actually giving breastfeeding a shot vs just "pumping is not what you've been told it is".
(I am personally grateful for free breast pumps because while I have not strictly NEEDED mine, it really helped me be less anxious about feeding my kiddo with a poor latch as she & I got ourselves sorted out and into a rhythm. Similarly I'm glad for it now, two days post-appendectomy, since it let me keep my supply going & offer her milk even while I was hurting too much/too drugged up to nurse her for a bit. But the use of tools to rescue imperfect nature is a far cry from replacing it entirely out of the mistaken impression the tools are an improvement!)
Well I am truly so grateful to have you as a reader and so encouraged to hear my writing has made you feel less alone♥️
As for the comments about breastfeeding being weird and creepy, that is a very pervasive (and specifically Western) line of thinking unfortunately. Many years ago I worked as a “peer counselor” for breastfeeding women who used WIC’s services and the amount of people who said the same things to me, along with “my man won’t let me bc my titties are for him🤦♀️” was….unsettling. It’s all the result of many years of an ongoing cultural campaign against natural law in my opinion.
I do think pumps have their place! I have pumped as well (very susceptible to clogged ducts here and also during nursing strikes). My gripe is less with their utility and more with the fact that society has deemed free breast pumps through insurance as a fix to mothers leaving their babies too soon-because that isn’t fixing the problem, it’s a band aid solution. The fix is allowing them to be home for, in my opinion, at least a couple years (yes I said years) instead.
Totally agree on pumps -- I guess what I wish is to be in a society that still saw it as reasonable to provide these expensive pieces of medical equipment for free for Mom's peace of mind as she stays at home, vs as a replacement for her staying home.
I think the idea of interdependence is important. When the narrative is everything one loses or gives up what one gains is lost or undervalued and I think it can be part of the conversation without telling people what they have to value and how much.
A beautiful and poignant read.
Even more important as we battle the transhumanist agenda that’s been infused into every part of corporate culture -> to occupy and deconstruct woman into our parts and then sell us out in the market. I don’t see this slowing down but knowing resistance exists brings hope.
Absolutely agree that this is a function of trans humanist rhetoric. And the dissent is fully here, I too always feel encouraged to see it in others.
Beautiful article. :)
Thank you!
All of this is well-said.
In my read-through of the Aeneid, in book 5, one of the winners of the boat-race is given a slave woman (Pholoe), who is NAMED, and whose valuable attributes are specifically identified as being a weaver (skilled at Minerva's craft) and nursing twin boys. I wrote a short piece where I imagine her speaking to the highest status woman among Aeneas's followers, Pyrgo, a noble serving woman from Priam's palace. (No, I'm not in favor of slavery or forced marriages, nor do I think wives should be the slaves of their husbands. I'm trying to put things in the context of the times.)
https://maryh10000.substack.com/p/pholoe
Here is an excerpt from that, where I imagine that her extra milk, from feeding twins, may have saved the lives of other babies.
--excerpt--
Pholoe returned to her chair then. She was still anxious, but Pyrgo had chosen her for her ability to stay calm in danger. She had picked her up in Crete, back when they had thought they were to settle there, and the Cretan weaver had had an uneventful pregnancy and easy birth, even with twins. Not even the storms that had shipwrecked them on the shores of Libya had interrupted her milk. She had saved the babies of the ladies with the littlest ones.
“Courage, child,” she said. “The danger is no worse than it ever was. And you are still needed.”
Pholoe pressed the amulet of her previous owner, the father of her children, to her heart, on the end of its golden chain. He had been a sailor on the single ship that had been lost in the storm that led them to Carthage.
Thank you for sharing this excerpt, Mary. I saved the post to come back to (and the whole series you have). Your Substack looks fascinating, excited to read more!
You're amazing, Emily
Thank you so much for the kindness, Kinecy!
Thank you for stating the truth about this Emily. And after all of this, you can add in those who are in denial about even having a woman's body at all, despite participating in creating new humans: https://lucyleader.substack.com/p/pretending-that-trans-men-arent-really
Thank you for adding this! I just saw it somehow.
Wow wow wow! So many quotes I want to pull from this!!
Thank you for reading!