What Feminism Gets Wrong About Motherhood

Growing up, I had no idea just how influential the feminist movement was in the culture. Though I wasn’t familiar with radical feminists like Betty Friedan or Simone de Beauvoir, their influence was profoundly felt in the subtle and not so subtle ways we were encouraged as women to see staying home and raising kids as “less than”. 

Friedan referred to the home as “a comfortable concentration camp” and she pushed the idea that the only “productive” work for women was that work performed outside of the home.  Simone De Beauvoir denied the real differences between men and women and is famous for her quote, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” and encouraged women was to behave like bad promiscuous men, rather than call men on to fidelity and virtue.

Beauvoir argued, “No woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one. It is a way of forcing women in a certain direction.’

Those ideas took root in the culture at large, and though Beauvoir’s perspective always seemed irrational to me, the pressure to go to big name schools and get a lucrative career was very real.

I remember sitting down with my high school counselor, clearly disappointed that I was not applying to Harvard, Yale — or at the very least Cornell and Duke — but that small, no name Catholic school in the middle of the rustbelt? Preposterous!

She thought I was wasting my gifts and talents, but after explaining that my parents would only pay for those big name schools if I attended one year at Franciscan, she made plans to help me apply during my Freshman year of college to those more prestigious schools, and off I went to bide my first year in the Rustbelt of Ohio.

Spoiler alert: I never ended up leaving that small Catholic school because something unexpected happened in that first year at Franciscan. I actually began to study the great books and the great minds that went before us, and I have to say that encountering so much truth in so little time kind of blew my mind!

It was through this education that an entirely new world began to open to me.  I could see that the pressure I had felt all those years was really the pressure to imitate men, not discover my call to be the woman God had created me to be.

I could also see this attack on women and motherhood was nothing new.  Open the Bible to Genesis 1, and you will see that, in the beginning, there was a marriage, and that marriage was very good. You will also see a serpent who hated that marriage and their union with God; you will witness his efforts to break their trust in God and each other and to lose sight of the good life they had been given.

He began with the woman, and soon after the man followed. The couple allowed themselves to be duped, and sin entered into the world. 

The beauty of our merciful God is that He gave to that couple and to us a promise of redemption in Genesis 3:15. God foretold the ultimate triumph of the “woman and her seed” against the “serpent and his seed”, but with that promise came a warning of the hatred that would continue between Satan and the woman, between her seed and his seed.

Ultimately, Mary and Jesus were the fulfillment of that promise, but this promise also points out that motherhood would be the battleground that Satan would choose, over and over, in his attempts to overcome and defeat God’s plan for the family and the world.

Why attack motherhood? Perhaps it’s because a good mother can do so much good in the world and a bad mother can do so much harm.

Yes, fathers are incredibly important — vitally important — but mothers have always been the gatekeepers when it comes to their children, and it is the mother’s connection to the child that protects and enfolds the soul of their child to nurture and form them until they are ready to fight their own battles.

The truth is, mothers make countless decisions for their little ones — from the food they will eat to the influences that will form and mold their imaginations as they grow up. She is a natural teacher to them, and often is the first to introduce them to Jesus and the truths of the faith from a very young age.

Knowing the influence that a mother has, it makes sense that Satan would go after the mother to get to the family.

Feminism in many ways mimics the lie of that serpent in the Garden. It promises women so much, but delivers so little. The truth is, modern day feminism ignores the fact that a woman is different from a man and those differences go down to her very heart and soul. 

To try to define success the way that feminism is telling us to define success would be to ignore the fact that our fulfillment in this world could never be defined by job titles, bank accounts or in rejecting our own children.

Ultimately, both husband and wife share the same mission: to love God and their spouse with all that is in them and to lovingly accept the children that may come of this love and raise them in the faith.
Noble work, indeed!

Fidelity to this mission is the most important thing they could do for each other and for the world. For it is “in the  family that one learns the love and faithfulness of the Lord and the need to respond to these”. (Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Catholic Church, # 210) It is in the family that we discover our God-given destiny.

Because men and women are different, their roles in this mission will look different, too.

A woman’s body is a marvelous thing! She can grow and birth and nourish her child for the first few years, but the mother is also specially equipped to grow and nourish her child’s soul in profound ways.

The mother has a special place in preparing a child for their God-given destiny, and God gives to mothers gifts that will help her to do this.

St. John Paul II’s Letter to Families (1994) states “Love causes man to find fulfillment through the sincere gift of self.” This is the paradox of the Gospel message and we see this lived out in motherhood every single day.

Truly, it is in that pouring ourselves out as a gift to others that we discover the woman that we were created to be, that amazing woman God had in mind from the beginning of time. 

To be honest, especially in those early years, there were days where I would look around and wonder if I was “making a difference” — or even worse, to wonder whether I was making a mess of things! There were days I didn’t feel cut out for this kind of hidden work, plugging away in my home.

Looking back now, I know that was an attempt of the Devil to make me give up — to convince me I was wasting my life and none of this “dying to myself” would do any good in my family and in the world.

It was in those days, especially, when I needed to remind myself that the devil is a liar, and his very attempts to discourage me were proof that I was on the right track and that my work did matter and that God saw it. and my kids saw it, and John saw it too!

I also had to remind myself that one day, I would see the fruit of it all. And that is the truth of the matter. You will only see the fruit looking back. You will only be able to see the good you did in retrospect, and that takes faith.

If you’re having one of those days or have had many of those days recently, I would love to encourage you to never give up that fight! It is so worth it!

Honestly, it’s why the devil’s gonna chase you down with this lie that all you’re doing inside the home doesn’t matter — because it’s literally the most beautiful and most important work any of us who happen to have kids could do with our lives, so keep going!

To every mother and spiritual mother reading this, I hope you know that your life of love for others has immeasurable value. Your love is irreplaceable, and you have a very special role in that battle which is going on around us for the soul of our culture and especially for the soul of our own family members. 

So thank you for all you do. As Catherine of Siena said, “be who you were created to be and you will set the world ablaze.” May your motherhood set the world around you ablaze with the fire of God’s love.

Author’s Note: So much more that I could say, and I do realize that there are Catholics who have tried to reclaim the title “feminist” and given it a Catholic meaning, but simply put, I’ve never adopted that term because I think that the modern day understanding of the term has gone so far off the rails, I simply don’t see it as salvageable. But would love to hear other perspectives on this. Please do share!

Have a lovely day!