I was struggling this week to think of what to write about before I log off for a family vacation and online detox next week. Fortunately, Cartoons Hate Her launched a phenomenal article directly into my inbox that helped me put together the thoughts I’ve been having lately about the societal conditions that make motherhood relatively bearable or unbearable.
Her article, entitled, “Your Enemy isn't Feminism or Capitalism. It's ‘Not Being Rich.’”, follows on the very interesting discussion between Elena Bridgers and Darby Saxbe about the extent to which modern feminism (girlboss!) has spelled trouble for mothers who face a plethora of sex-specific issues that are largely ignored by the DINK-heavy American mainstream. CHH’s argument is, essentially, this: going back on women’s liberation or having a glorious communist revolution is not likely to make anyone’s lives concretely better, least of all mothers’. According to her, the world we yearn for is not per se a world where the government subsidizes breastfeeding, nor one where women are systematically excluded from the workplace, but simply a world where we have more money and leisure. This world, essentially, but with an extra 300k a year. As a little treat.
It’s important to note that Bridgers, a liberal feminist herself, was by no means advocating for some kind of 1950’s RETVRN, nor was Saxbe arguing for a transition to the USSR. CHH understands this too. But her point was simply that if there is no realistic alternative to the world we live in, capitalism and feminism alike, then it is unlikely we are truly longing for that alternative. On the other hand, lots of people are richer than you or me, and since they can’t stop posting about it on Instagram it makes a great deal of sense that they’re the ones we secretly envy. What’s really stopping mothers from “having it all”, then? First, not being able to hire maids and nannies (hence our longing for the “village no one wants”), and second, being forced to choose between the higher standard of living accessible to a two-income family and the leisure that comes from a one-income household. Both of these cease to so much be problems if you’re making a million dollars a year, and are inevitably problems if you’re not.
CHH is notoriously descriptive, rather than prescriptive, which is largely a good thing, particularly in a world where ideological fantasies blind us from seeing the world as it really is, right now. But if she’s right about this, then I think there’s a fairly obvious prescription.
Motherhood can only be deeply fulfilling for the kind of person who can use and enjoy leisure, who can be a worthy part of a village, and who, most of all, is not tyrannized by the interminable longing for unlimited material possessions. So become that kind of person!
Although in grad school I started working more on nonconsequentialism (particularly the conflict between utilitarianism and women’s rights!), my undergraduate background is primarily in Aristotelian virtue ethics. Virtue ethics is neat because, although it is typically too amorphous for rationalist young men on the internet, it does tend to line up with common sense. One of its main precepts is this: your desires are not context-less, but the result of your habits. If you cultivate certain habits, your desires will change accordingly. You might not be able to imagine yourself not craving processed food or porn, but with a little discipline you could find yourself wanting them less and less. Similarly, if you don’t currently resonate with things universally recognized to be beautiful and good, like Russian literature, classical music, or the fact of having extended family, then you are not helpless; you can learn to love and appreciate them.
Acquiring virtue is not an easy process, in large part because things of deep and enduring value—the kinds of things that are really worth desiring—take time and a cultivated sensitivity to appreciate, which is not the case for high fructose corn syrup or TikToks or pornography or Shein hauls or just having loads and loads of money.
There is, of course, a really detrimental kind of poverty that does ugly things to the human spirit. I am not talking about that, or claiming that parents should learn to be happy raising their children in such circumstances. I mean only that a family earning enough money to be “doing just fine” by any historical standard is missing out on a historically rare opportunity to have a fulfilling and leisurely life, including giving the mother all the time she could possibly want with her children. All that is standing in their way are their priorities. As CHH, put it, “being a SAHM is not prohibitively expensive, but it feels that way if the opportunity cost of dropping out of full-time work is high.”
Her point is that many women with who face the decision between a 200K salary and the leisure of staying home (while continuing to be provided for by someone making at least that much) would, all things considered, rather have the 200K. I suppose that is fine. But in the wake of even relatively wealthy women complaining that they wish that they “did not have to work”, it’s hardly fair to refrain from pointing out that they do not, in fact, have to work. They do not even have to want to work! To put it as gently as possible, if they were the kind of person who longed for an extra 200K of disposable income just a little less, then they would be much happier overall. If becoming that person is an option, maybe they should give it a try! That is the promise of virtue ethics!
By the way, I’m not insisting here that all mothers be stay at home mothers. I suspect that lots of mothers, like myself, would be happiest to work part time, flexible hours at a job that they find meaningful. That too, of course, comes with economic tradeoffs. (As my readers may know, I work part time as an adjunct philosophy professor, which is not terribly profitable, but is loads of fun.)
The role of moral habituation is the same for the possibility of having a “village”. Ease of communication and travel means that theoretically it should be much easier to maintain contact with a real life community, especially family, that can take care of each other in times of special vulnerability, particularly through the trials of motherhood. Is it true, as CHH asserts, that no one wants that village?
I think she’s right that some people don’t want it in any respect; all they want are maids and nannies. But I don’t think this is universal, or even that it makes a lot of sense. Isn’t it conceivable that a woman who had all the hired domestic help in the world would still feel isolated and unsupported, just as someone who hires a therapist might still find themselves in need of a friend? I think it is more likely that people do want a community, a real community, but that desire conflicts with desires more important to them, like freedom from meddling. So, all things considered, we don’t want a village.
But maybe we should!
If our reluctance to have other people in our business, if our wishes to maintain strict boundaries about who sees our newborn or babysits our children, if our dread of being asked to help someone move or prepare a casserole for a meal train were all inscrutable and immutable desires of the human heart, then there would be no point is trying to erect a “village” in the face of those urges. But maybe these inclinations do not represent the best we have to offer the world, and thus perhaps we would be better off nailing them to the cross for the sake of something better. One famous problem for utilitarianism is that human beings have a matrix of conflicting desires. We do not just want sex and money; we want sex and money and love and fulfillment and friendship, and we want babies and freedom from babies, just like we want God and freedom from God. The sensible thing to do is not then to try and have everything we want, but to unify our lives around what we want most, which includes managing the desires which conflict with that goal and habituating ourselves to a life where we are not in danger of being ruined by them.
Most people have a whole set of desires that are in conflict with living in community and being supported, for instance in motherhood, by a “village”. Villages are tough! Parents are problematic, in-laws are overbearing, and aunties are meddling. But, thankfully, the amount that we are annoyed by other human beings is not a static characteristic of our immortal soul. The loneliness and cruelty of our world suggests, correctly, that any kind of happiness will require relying on people who are not perfect and who will frequently have opportunity to offend us. I was struck the other day by a coworker casually mentioning that he and his pregnant wife were contemplating permanently cutting off his parents, due to their “not respecting his boundaries”. (The boundary in question was his demand that no one ever suggest to him that he, a college drop-out, might return to college.) Another coworker sympathized wholeheartedly, saying, “biological grandparents aren’t important. You can always find some nice old couple to play that role if you want.”
This is false. In the entire world I do not believe there are any nice old couples whom one can trust to “play the role of grandparents” without occasionally saying things you don’t like, all the more so if you are bristly and irritable to begin with. Of course you could have a sort of sushi conveyer belt of old couples to rotate through as soon as each overstays their welcome, but that is pretty different from what I think of as the “role of grandparents”.
Do my parents and grandparents and in-laws and brothers and sisters say and do things that I don’t like? All the time. But my desires for comfort, control, and to never under any circumstances suffer the indignation of my “boundaries” being overstepped are desires directly at odds with my primary goal: that is, raising my own children in the context of a community. And further, I recognize that the huffy, indignant feeling I get when a friend asks for help with a laborious task or a family member suggests something I don’t like is not a sign of my own moral purity and their unfeeling wickedness. It is a feeling that in most cases, for the sake of my own survival and flourishing, I am better off ignoring.
It should be mentioned that not only does this sort of intentional moral habituation provide the resilience required to live peaceably in an IRL community—the kind of community that is invaluable if you need to do something hard in your life, like give birth to a child or go through a nasty breakup—but it also makes you a better and happier person all around. My husband is a great example of this: he has the unique trait of being thoroughly easygoing and gentle-hearted, but without any hint of passivity or cowardice. This is so disarming that patrons at the bar where he works sometimes directly ask him “how he got this way”. He just tells them the truth: he binge-read Francis de Sales’s Introduction to the Devout Life in college and modelled his whole personality after it. That’s virtue ethics, baby!
Finally, and I think very importantly, virtue ethics provides a prescription for freeing ourselves from the corruptive influence of consumerism, which tells us that we are by nature bottomless pits which cannot help but endlessly desire drunk elephant skincare and labubu dolls, which assures us that no real human being would ever voluntarily elect for time with her child over an extra 200K a year. But this would only be true if we had no control over what we wanted, if we were not able to habituate ourselves to prefer meaningful things over expensive ones.
I am not claiming that this “turnaround” is terribly likely on a societal level. As Wendell Berry reminds us, we are pretty deep in the mire.
In keeping with our unrestrained consumptiveness, the commonly accepted basis of our present economy is the fantastical possibility of limitless growth, limitless wants, limitless wealth, limitless natural resources, limitless energy, and limitless debt. The idea of a limitless economy implies and requires a doctrine of general human limitlessness: all are entitled to pursue without limit whatever they conceive as desirable — a license that classifies the most exalted Christian capitalist with the lowliest pornographer.1
The end result of unrestrained consumptiveness is misery, both for a society and for the individual human being. The quest to materially “have it all” sends the witless human being into the insatiable maw of the advertising industry, and from there into the lowest pit of hell. Even if you are not able to save America, then, you have a duty to at least save yourself, and, by extension, the people around you, who are most of all the potential victims of your selfishness.
There is far too much talk already of “quiet rebellions” and “slow living”, so I will make my call to arms against consumerism very short and not very sentimental. Stop buying things. The more you possess, the more you will desire, and the unbridled desire for Things has no end or fulfillment; it is perpetually hungry and perpetually empty. If you wish to partake in a “quiet rebellion” against capitalism, then there is only one thing to do: stop buying clothes and snacks and gadgets and toys and streaming subscriptions and doordash and e-courses and skincare and makeup and labubus and lounge sets and jewelry and supplements and candy and vacations. That is rebellion, and it can be done as quietly as you please.
I have focused so far on mothers (and by extension, fathers), who have so much to gain from learning to “settle” for un-optimized riches and the annoyances of a caring village. But anyone who habituates themselves in this way is doing their part in building a world more hospitable to mothers. As any mother will testify, there is immeasurable impact to even knowing one person who sees their work as beautiful and valuable, and who is utterly liberal with their own time and resources. I don’t think this is an outlook we can establish in a whole nation by top-down policy or welfare, but it is one we are fully capable of inculcating in ourselves, in our families, and in our communities.
On the other hand, any person given over to the bottomless pit of consumption will inevitably themselves be consumed by selfishness and vice: they are inclined to see the world not as something to be aided and loved but something to be chewed up and eaten. This is an attitude, on the societal level, that is brutally unfriendly to the vulnerable, most especially mothers and children. It is impossible to acknowledge the “value” of care work if we do not really acknowledge the value of anything, if we think of value as something that belongs primarily to cold, hard cash, and only to anything else insofar as it can be bought and sold on the free market. In such a world, what “use” are grandmothers, mothers, or helpless infants? In such a society,
they assume — and this is the orthodox assumption of the industrial economy — that the only help worth giving is not given at all, but sold. Love, friendship, neighborliness, compassion, duty — what are they? We are realists. We will be most happy to receive your check.2
Wendell Berry, “Faustian Economics” (the World-Ending Fire p. 208)
Wendell Berry, “Feminism, the Body, and the Machine” (The World Ending Fire p. 249)
I agree that we'd all be happier, and society would be healthier, if we backed off the wealth porn and hyper-consumption and learned to slow down and become more mindful. But that's not the reason why a lot of women return to work after having kids.
If your husband is making more than ~$150k/year as a W2 employee, he probably has a "greedy job". If you opt out of the workforce, holding on to this job becomes incredibly high stakes, especially in the post-2008 employment environment where layoffs are frequent and companies go from market leaders to turnaround cases in half a decade.
So where does that leave the SAHM? If the job says "jump", the husband says "how high?" If that means a move across the country every 2-3 years away from the support network you worked so hard to build? So be it. If that means that husband is constantly in meetings from 7a - 7p, you're doing all the parenting alone, even if it's been a bad day and you're overstimulated and at the end of your rope.
Motherhood is wonderful, but it's also physically and mentally taxing, to different degrees for all of us, based on how we're wired. Living in a situation where you can never get a predictable break is crushing. You stop dreaming and planning, because there's always a 50/50 chance that your dreams and plans get rugpulled every time.
You're effectively in a throuple with your husband's job. And this is MOST corporate jobs if you're a "high performer" who is trying to avoid layoffs. It's up or out.
TL;DR: if you want to go this route, the man has to approach it with just as much intention as the woman. A SAHM + a husband with a greedy job is a recipe for burnout, depression and resentment.
I think there are a couple blind spots here.
First, if both mother and father are making >$200k, they almost certainly work in an expensive city. That means the choice is almost certainly not mom going back to work or mom staying at home and the family taking fewer, cheaper vacations and buying fewer luxuries. The choice is very likely between mom going back to work or mom stays at home, the family moves somewhere they can then afford, then dad spends 2-3 hours commuting every day and is effectively not part of the family 5 days a week and mom ~never meaningfully talks to adults.
Second, very few women have a career with the kind of flexibility of academia and writing. A woman's options are usually go back to work and be with her kids less than she'd like or stay home and 15 years later do... My mother was a nurse, so had the flexibility to be able to go back and get the same job she used to have. But most jobs aren't like that! For most professional women I'd venture the primary constraint isn't can't spend money like we could as DINKs but blocking myself from any real hope of the kind of fulfilling work I'm interested in and good at.
I agree that being less stuck in current ways of conceptualizing things might open things up a bit. But it's definitely true that you block yourself off from a huge proportion of work options in your 40s, 50s, and 60s if you exit the workforce from ~30 to ~45.