I had an exchange with someone today regarding the value of motherhood. Should people who believe it’s more important state that fact? Or will this harm or demoralize (etc.) others? This seems to relate to other things I’ve written and am writing about feminism and mental health and subjectivity so, although I didn’t originally intend to post these notes, I decided to send it to my subscribers. My interlocutor (anonymous, in case he/she doesn’t want to be credited) is in quote blocks, below.
Leave your thoughts in the comments if you like!
Original Post:
Every time I write about the need to make space for motherhood and the need to respect and honor our physiology, whether we choose to have babies or not, I get comments suggesting I believe all women should be banned from the workforce or think every woman needs to have tons of babies.
To be clear- I do not in any way believe women should not work nor am I ever prescriptive about motherhood and procreation. I do however believe that motherhood and the work of the home, especially when our children are little, is more important than any paid work we do. I do believe that when women choose motherhood, we need the space and right to prioritize it for both ourselves and our children alike, and that that space has the power to impact all aspects of society positively.
The fact that these sorts of comments are so common when these topics are discussed really reflects a cultural environment of biological-imperative related defensiveness, likely due to just how out of alignment with our cultural physiological design we collectively are.
Or maybe they don’t actually read what I write 😂
Responses:
“…I do however believe that motherhood and the work of the home, especially when our children are little, is more important than any paid work we do.”
Well, there’s the source of the issue, I would say! If raising children is more important than any paid work a woman can do, what does that say about the lives of childless women? I don’t think that’s a reading comprehension issue. I think some people just flat out disagree with you. I definitely do.
Religious sisters, teachers, doctors and nurses, farmers, cops and firefighters, all sorts of women do work that is of comparable importance to raising children. Many women pursue both, and find comparable meaning and value in both (I’m a nurse with a kid, and that’s definitely how I feel.)
I think we should avoid setting up a hierarchy of meaning and importance in the first place. There are lots of ways to contribute meaningfully to our communities and to give honor to God.
Well different people have can have subjective values. Her believing that this is the most important activity is simply her personal belief. I don’t see why that would upset anyone. I agree with her: the creating and raising children is the most important kind of human activity, since it’s to the extinction of humanity. Most other jobs aren’t even necessary for human life. They’re only existed for maybe a century, or less. We could absolutely do without them.
Having said that I can’t understand why her opinion or my opinion or your opinion would provoke anger. Argument, yes. Could it be insecurity on the part of people who feel inadequate or judged because they don’t have kids? I’m truly asking…
As you say — people disagree about things and like to talk about their disagreements!
I personally think it’s corrosive to the a community to argue for the importance of some roles over others. I don’t see any benefit to it. I do see, especially in the instance of pitting mothers against childless women (many of whom desperately want children) the pain and shame it causes. And again, for what? To what end? What is being served here?
Yes, the race would go extinct without the raising of children. I’m pretty pro-natalist and totally agree with you here. We should also celebrate mothers for their foundational work.
But we would all starve to death without farmers and fishermen. We need defensive armies to protect us, and cooks to feed them. We need people to care for the sick. We need artisans — potters, weavers, metalsmiths. We need priests, leaders, and scribes to record history, prayers, and the basic contracts that are part of even a simple agrarian community. Society would utterly fall apart without all those specialized roles. Not since the days of hunter-gatherer tribes have individuals or even small family groupsproduced all that was needed for the continuance of life, from babies to cooking pots to the food to put into the pots to warm winter boots to protection from the invading hordes — we’ve been specializing for millennia. Read the Iliad, or the Bible!
I think raising children is very, very important work, no less important than leading armies. But it’s wrong and even harmful to insist that it’s the most important thing. No one thing is the most important. We’re all in this together, and we all need each other.
How could it be harmful or corrosive to a community for a private individual to share that they believe a certain job or role is the most/more important?
Because it sends a message to those without that job that they are less useful/important. This in turn corrodes community bonds.
If people repeatedly hear that their role and work in the community is less important than that of others, the usual reaction from most normal people (unless the person is VERY far along on the path to sanctity!) is to feel like they aren’t appreciated or aren’t full members of the community. This in turn often leads to distrust, alienation, leaving the community, maybe a sense of “ok if you don’t care about me then I won’t care about you either,” etc. Is that ideal? Would an actual saint feel that way? No. But that’s reality. That’s how people feel when they hear, over and over, how their contributions aren’t as important.
And again I ask — why do we have to say this? What do we gain by setting up people with one kind of vocation as “more important” than people with another vocation? It’s very easy to say “mothers are amazing! we love you and we need more of you! We really encourage all women to pitch in and become mothers in whatever way they can! You do such fantastic work! We couldn’t do this without you!” — true things that totally need to be said — without downplaying the contribution of others — so again, why?
There’s a distinction that should be made between some kind of concerted message (which would be coming from leaders of institutions) and a single person stating their opinions.
Secondly, hearing that your work doesn’t matter could be demoralizing. Hearing that it is less important than some other kind of work? No. I don’t think so. If I repeatedly hear that drivers don’t matter, and I drive trucks, that could effect my morale. If several people tell me that they think ambulance drivers are more important than truck drivers I cannot see that making any difference to a mentally healthy adult.
You’re also acting as if we live in ‘communities’. Most people do not. We work for large organizations, we drive 15 miles to get to work, and we shop on Amazon. ‘Community bonds’ in that context are members of your church and your neighborhood and your running group. No one is going to care what those people believe about the value of your job. If we lived in small, insular groups (as humans have for 99% of our history) then your argument would be stronger. Ironically the values and behavior of those groups usually reflected the idea that motherhood was the most precious role a person could fulfill. Literally the entire life of the community was based around protecting and facilitating mothers and nurses and firefighters simply didn’t exist.
Lastly, nothing you’ve described is ‘harmful’ or ‘corrosive’. Corroding community bonds is a vague phrase… but what does that mean in reality? Is the political or economic unit really going to be worse off if some people know that other people feel that they’re not the most important (or equally important) workers in the group? Most people recognize that there are much more important jobs than the ones they perform and it doesn’t seem to harm them, or their communities, whatsoever.
I’d like to propose an alternative conception: many women are lonely (as are many men) and feel insecure or inadequate and don’t like the sense that they’re being judged or weighed against others. They resent the implications that men are better leaders than women (not my assertion-just an example of a claim which would upset many women, despite it being an unimportant, lone opinion). They resent ‘unrealistic body standards’. They resent the feeling that people are judging them for not having children. If this is the problem (or part of it) this is a mental health issue. It is private citizens projecting their own insecurities onto society and onto others and demanding that the world reflect their wishes. The simply fact is that their dissatisfaction has TWO possible solutions: (1) people stop saying things they don’t like to hear (2) they toughen up and do the personal work necessary to disregard the views and opinions of others, whether they’re real or fabricated. Keep in mind: you’re not arguing that people value the work of others equally. If that was your claim we would be talking about the value of the work! Your claim is that people should not share their opinions about the relative importance and unimportance of different jobs. It will make others feel bad and damage community bonds. I think the first part is possible, to which I say ‘who cares?’ The second part I still don’t understand tbh.
I’m a man who has spent most of my life working around men. The idea that ANY of these men would bristle at the implication that doctors or soldiers or FATHERS were doing more important work than we were seems laughable to me. Most people know that lots of people have different opinions of stuff and they don’t worry about that, and almost everyone knows that their work is, objectively, not the most important work that can be done… yet they do it anyway. That fact troubles them not at all.
The reply:
First off, no, my primary claim is that the vocation God calls each person to is the most meaningful and important thing they could possibly do with their life, whether or not that involves raising children. My secondary opinion that we should shut our mouths and not judge the way God calls others is downstream of that first opinion and entirely dependent on it.
Second off, ok, I think a large part of our disagreement is that you and I clearly have vastly different life experiences. I grew up on the same family farm my great-greats built when they came over from Germany, with my parents as well as some extended family. Even since leaving the family farm, I’ve still lived my whole life in either very small towns (<2k people) or in small cities with the sort of neighborhoods where you regularly bump into friends and acquaintances. I continue to live less than 30 minutes by car from the farm. On any given day I can go for a walk or run errands and bump into my sister, or a friend from church, or my sister’s friend (whom I also know, because of course I do) or (this literally happened on Tuesday) my son’s best friend’s dad — whom I’ve known since we were in preschool together — oh and his dad went to high school with my mom.
I assure you: people absolutely care what everyone else thinks of them. Oh, do they care. You can call it ridiculous all you like, but it is what it is. Certainly one can take it to extremes, probably caused by mental health problems (on both ends of the spectrum! a profound lack of concern about what anyone else thinks of you can also be a sign of a problem). Mostly, though, I think “caring deeply what folks think of you” is just a basic human drive. We have to live with each other for decades, and “position in the community” is important.
In contexts like this, I have known otherwise perfectly mentally stable women who burst into tears when the however-many-th “just one church lady giving an opinion just one time” asks when she’s having children “because it’s the most important thing a woman can do” and she’s been trying to conceive for however many years and no children are forthcoming and she feels devalued in the eyes of the however-many-th “just one person” she is going to spend the next 40 years of her life sitting a pew over from.
And finally, yes, of course most traditional communities revolve around raising children, but the healthy ones were (and are!) pretty good at recognizing that a lot of people support that goal beyond the physical parents, and are good at valuing those contributions. Just for an easy example, I am absolutely positive that my parish community values our celibate priest just as much as we value parents, and that similar parish communities have been highly valuing celibate monks and nuns for approximately the last two millennia. As another example, the “maiden aunt” or “bachelor uncle” who never married but instead stayed on working the family farm was a fixture of years gone by. I grew up with stories of my mom’s “uncle Raymond” (her father’s mother’s brother) who did exactly this and was very much valued.
I actually think the weird modern quirk (in more conservative circles at least) is how we’re more likely to ignore the value of the Uncle Raymonds of the world because we’re so busy focusing on the nuclear family. I’m sure mean church ladies sniping cattily about someone never getting married existed then as now, but I don’t think anyone would ever have had a conversation over pints at the pub or whatever about how people like Raymond weren’t really doing the most important work (that would have been bold—he worked backbreaking hours a day on the farm). I think it was more taken for granted that everyone short of obvious freeloaders was doing their part, and that all parts were needed.