FEMINISM & MOTHERHOOD

I'm going to commit heresy right now by questioning feminism - but have you ever noticed that feminism never talks about motherhood? I heard a fun fact the other day (I can't prove it's true): only 3% of academic papers on feminism contain the word “motherhood”, or address it at all.

And yet 99% of women are mothers.

Doesn’t that seem strange to you?

The most influential feminists of the second wave, Germain Greer, Simone de Beauvoir, never had children.

Think about that for a second: they never carried a child in their bellies. Never gave birth. Never spent a single sleepless night with a baby or toddler that needs them or is throwing up or pissing out his arse.

They never had to finish work at 3 to rush to pick up the kids.

They never stared into the eyes of a child that they made and felt the mixture of fear and awe and joy and love and tiredness that only a mother knows.

How can they possibly talk of women’s issues?

Indeed, feminism, and so called feminists, in my estimation, conveniently avoid the topic of motherhood altogether - it seems to cover everything but - work, involvement in public life, sex.

And this all seems fairly intuitive when you are a Maiden - these are the things that matter to you.

But once you’ve crossed over that threshold into motherhood, this all seems absurd.

It does to me at least.

As a girl growing up in the 1990s, I had all the opportunities my brother and male cousins and friends had. I don’t take that for granted.

I was asked, mostly by the older men in my life, what I wanted to be.

They of course meant what I wanted to do, as a job.

How I wanted to earn money.

Th