Motherhood As Army Building

Moira Donegan *almost* wants to get another cat

I’m a diehard You’re Wrong About fan, and when I saw

Moira Donegan

listed as a guest on a recent ep, I knew it would be good (spoiler alert - it was). As is usual with You’re Wrong About, I learned about a chapter from history of which I’d been wholly ignorant. In this case, Moira told Sarah all about the Jane Collective, a grassroots feminist group that not only helped people access abortions in the 1970s, but learned how to provide abortions themselves.

In addition to writing her newsletter about feminism, brilliantly entitled,

Not the Fun Kind

, Moira writes a column for the Guardian, where she regularly eviscerates public enemies such as J.D. Vance. She’s also a writer in residence for the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University; one of my favorite book reviewers; and was responsible for the infamous “Shitty Media Men” list, which she compiled during the height of the #MeToo movement in 2018.

Moira is, in short, a force.

And she HAS A PODCAST. Which I didn’t know until listening to Moira’s Jane Collective You’re Wrong About ep. And guys - the podcast is. so. good. Moira cohosts In Bed With The Right with Adrian Daub and I’ve been happily binging it since learning of its existence.

Today, I can’t WAIT to share my interview with Moira about all things pronatalism. We cover Ballerina Farm, childless cat ladies, the conservative obsession with declining birth rates, tradwives’ blithely chatting about building their own armies and waiting for their enemies to “exterminate themselves,” and how so many of our current moral panics about women and their bodies are simply new versions of an old song that no one should want to sing anymore.

Sara

Can we start with the history of pronatalism in the US?

Moira

The notion that conservative families give birth to children as a deliberate, conscious, political strategy is actually a really old one. There's an excellent book on the pronatalist trend in evangelical Christianity called Quiverfull that I really recommend. It charts the movement through the past several decades. This is not a new trend.

What is new is its positioning on social media as an aspirational lifestyle and a consumption style that can be mimicked and sold very effectively to large audiences online.

So when it seems like all of a sudden you can't look at your phone without seeing a tradwife and all of a sudden you can't open the newspaper without seeing a pronatalist op-ed, that’s a change in scale, rather than a change in the of substance of what we're seeing.

Sara

Yeah, that makes sense. Most of us are familiar with the tardwife who meets all the millennial aesthetic requirements. Flowing hair. Neutrals. Pastel infographics. Shaker cabinetry. I guess I’m wondering when the aesthetic power of such tradwives might lose its power if it’s helping to endorse blatantly violent messages about, you know, the “extermination” of childless cat ladies.

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Moira

Some of them are much more aggressive than others, and some tradwives are pretty explicit white nationalists. An influencer called wife with a purpose was very avowed about her racist and white supremacist worldview and her pronatalist project was all about the production of white children.

Sara

I remember the white baby challenge.

Moira

And then there are people like Hannah Neeleman, the ur-tradwife who does not explicitly conceal her politics. I think you can definitely get a feel for Hannah Neeleman’s worldview, but it's really not aggressive. She is very much talking about her affirmative vision rather than her perceived political enemies.

And I think there’s a real marketing strategy at play there. Somebody like Ayla Stewart (wife with a purpose) is necessarily going to have a pretty low ceiling. Because explicit white supremacy, antagonism of large swaths of the human population, these are things that scare away an audience member who is not yet firmly committed to the politics that these influencers are trying to promote.

Whereas somebody like Hannah Neeleman or, you know, Nara Smith for a different sort of  aesthetic - those are people who have a kind of novelty and strangeness that is, at least on the surface, when you first encounter it, somewhat non-threatening. They seem like curiosities. Or they seem like pretty pictures that you could buy. You know, I think Nara Smith's work as a commercial model dovetails a lot with her work as a tradwife influencer. And Hannah Neeleman's past life as a ballet performer involves a very similar skillset to what she is doing in her work as an influencer. 

They are making their lifestyle seem appealing and happy rather than antagonistic, angry, or vengeful. And that means they can draw in a lot more people. It also means, I think, that they can be a little more insidious.

You can learn more about Ayla Stewart (wife with a purpose) and her frightening rise to power, in this excellent book, which I quoted ALL over Momfluenced.

Sara
It's the carrot instead of the stick.

Moira

Exactly.

Sara

I want to talk about Jay Caspian Kang’s piece for the New Yorker, “How Liberals Talk About Children,” which is mostly about Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman’s book, What Are Children For, and which seems typical of certain progressive forms of soft pronatalism. Here are a few snippets:

Within this larger discourse, Berg and Wiseman see a landscape of beleaguered people who have leaned a bit too far into their political and cultural beliefs, trading in the joys of life for an overly determinative belief that children will suffer inescapable misery . . . In between, the concerns of women who think that they must delay or possibly forgo having children are seriously considered, discussed, and then gently, or sometimes forcefully, countered. It’s not that Berg and Wiseman believe that everyone should have children. It’s that they think the arguments against having children—beyond “It isn’t right for me”—need a bit more friendly interrogation.

And I have to ask, why are these writers so concerned with people’s individual choices? And why do they view such choices as fodder for public debate?

Moira

You know, I found What Are Children For really curious. The book sort of goes through arguments against having children and attempts to refute them. And it does so based on this kind of fundamental presumption that other people need to convince them that their decision to not have children is okay. That all of us who are not having babies need to convince Berg and Wiseman that that is an acceptable choice that we are making about our own lives.

I think there is discomfort with some of the social upheavals that have happened as a result of the feminist and queer liberation movements. Family really does mean something different now than what it meant when our parents were growing up. It often means something different now than it did when we were growing up. And that is a very destabilizing set of changes that scares people.

This is an intellectual trend that has a ton of historical precedent. In moments of great social upheaval, when there are changes to the ways that human beings are organizing society, the way that they're organizing the course of their lives, the way that they're interacting with one another, when those changes are happening at a really big scale, conservatives tend to retreat to pronatalism almost as a kind of security blanket that will protect them against these, like, social monsters that are hiding under the bed.

There are a few historical moments we can look to.

In the latter half of the 19th century, there was rapid industrialization in the United States. That meant that people were leaving their rural agrarian economies in their hometowns to come into the cities, to work in factories, to live crammed really close together in very different kinds of social arrangements. This completely changed the way a lot of people's lives looked.

And there was also, at the same time, a massive influx of immigration. So suddenly you've got these new people. They don't look like you. They don't speak the same language as you, and you and your kids and all your friends are living really, really differently than you did when you were growing up. You're living in new places, you're having different life courses. You might be having sex with people who you're not married to. (Gasp as I clutch my pearls!) 

But what you saw in this era of the 19th century was a big rise in pronatalist sentiment, and it was particularly directed at white, Protestant, native born American middle class women. There was this notion that they were not having enough children, that they were being outbred by the large immigrant populations, especially from Catholic countries like Ireland and Poland and Italy. There was a massive public anxiety.

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And there were tons and tons of editorials about the naughty, decadent, self indulgent things that these women were doing instead of having babies. They're going to the opera. They are drinking alcohol with men. It all sounds a lot like what we hear from the JD Vances of the world who talk about childless cat ladies as a moral problem when what they're actually identifying is their own demographic anxiety.

And something happened again in the 1940s. When all the men went away to WWII, women entered the workforce in large, large numbers and entered highly paid, highly skilled, high status jobs. And this changed (for a while) what marriage looked like. It changed what families look like. It changed what women's lives looked like. This is after the depression, when abortion had become much more common and much more visible.

This also provoked a ton of anxiety about what our families were going to look like, about what the nation was going to look like after, about who was going to be a full member of society and who was going to dominate culturally and economically.

And what you got was a very deliberate cultural and policy change that sent those women back into the home. This created the 1950s nuclear family, the 1950s housewife, and what we call the baby boom. These were not historical accidents. These were policy choices that came as a result of anxieties because of social change.

And now, the big elephant in the room is Dobbs. The right is attempting to return us to a time in which childbearing is no longer voluntary. Before Dobbs was overturned, childbearing was more voluntary than it had ever been, birth control was more available than it had ever been, marriages were happening later and later, women were entering higher and higher echelons of professional life and esteem, and reproductive technology was enabling people to make different kinds of families. Families with same sex partners, families with multiple different adults caring for a child, blended families, an increased number of multiracial children being born.

I think our current pronatalist movement is a direct response to these family changes.

Photo of Ayla Stewart (wife with a purpose) by Glenna Gordon as part of her project, American Woman.

Sara

That all makes total sense, but I'm still stuck on where these seemingly progressive think pieces about maternal joy are stemming from.

In the New Yorker piece, Kang writes:

I've tried to put my finger on what exactly feels alienating about modern, liberal, middle class parenting. I keep coming back to the impression that we don't talk in public and philosophic ways about children as objects of love nearly as often as we describe them as obstacles or means to an end. Liberal writers and thinkers don't frequently opine on the joys of bearing and raising children or the tremendous social good that it brings.

And I guess my response is just always like, why must we opine on those joys? Who should we be doing this for? Who does our opining benefit? I have three children. A ton of my friends have kids. We talk about the joy! We all are fully aware children have the capacity to bring joy to one’s life. I just don’t think this narrative is like, sorely missing from public discourse. 

I think maternal joy in particular is hammered into every little girl's head as a noble goal as soon as she gets her first baby doll. So I don't necessarily understand this anxiety from, again, progressive thinkers, that we’re focusing too much on the hard stuff and not enough on the joy. 

Moira

Yeah, it does have a tone of, like, why don't you ladies smile more?

Sara

Exactly!

Moira

And, you know, I agree with you. There is a tremendous amount of cultural messaging, I think appropriately so, about the joys of children and the joys of childcare. I have never been confused that being a parent is something that gives people a tremendous amount of joy.

What has happened, I think especially has happened since the pandemic, is that you see more women talking about the struggle. The joy of parenthood is no longer the exclusive message about motherhood we are receiving.

You saw a tremendous strain placed on mothers during the pandemic when schools shut down, when a lot of people were continuing to work full time and also trying to educate and care for their children full time. When people were dealing with how to keep their families from getting sick or how to get their parents a vaccine and also care for their kids and also trying to keep their jobs. The withdrawal of the social support that makes parenting possible shed a real light on how hard parenting is and how gender unequal it remains in a lot of heterosexual marriages.

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The US surgeon general just put out a letter about the stress of motherhood and the public health crisis that it's creating. So what you see is the removal of the taboo against maternal complaint. That has legitimately been lessened.

And I think this is a combination of two factors. I think on the one hand, parenthood has gotten a lot harder. It has gotten more intensive than it was when our parents were raising children. Jobs have become more demanding and create greater competition with women's parenting and caregiving duties.

But on the other hand, women are more free. There is a greater number of women's voices. They're talking to each other. They're removing the stigma and taboo against discussing honestly what being a parent really means. How hard it is and how not every moment of it is, you know, unqualified joy. And it's just much more visible now because we have social media and because we have more liberated women and more free women.

Sara

I was in a writing workshop several years ago, and after reading my piece about postpartum depression, a boomer woman was like, “Could you balance it more with some joy?”

The expression of maternal joy is not going to fix the fact that there's no universal parental leave, or prohibitively expensive childcare costs or gun violence in schools or or or. I think policy change will make mothers more joyful. Not essays about maternal joy. 

Moira

Right. You actually need to invest in childcare and not just tell people that having children and taking care of them is its own reward and that they should be more grateful. It is pathologizing individual responses and reactions to what is really a structural problem.

Sara

I do wonder if this anxiety over “not enough expression of parental joy” coming from a certain type of progressive has more to do with class and geography than anything else? I’ve read a few essays by urban intellectuals a little younger than me who are like, “why didn’t anyone tell me how beautiful motherhood would be? Why so many essays scaring me about how hard motherhood is?” And like, I just don’t understand how me writing an essay about PPD is going to counteract the deafening messaging that women are better off (and happier) having children.

Reclaiming Maternal Dread

Moira

I think it somewhat overstates the case by a lot. I feel like every ten minutes there's a discourse cycle on Twitter when somebody who's really trying to go viral on purpose will be like, I don't think people should bring their babies to a movie theater, or, you know, something that's really clearly meant to bait people with kids. And then this trolling remark gets mistaken for a broad societal trend.

I think something else that happens when we have this proliferation of other kinds of families and other kinds of lives, is that the ability to choose differently means that people will choose differently.

And some folks are really insecure about their own decisions, and cannot handle a social world in which their peers, the people they think they should be compelling themselves to, are not necessarily making all the same choices that they are. Not everybody in your, you know, Brooklyn social circle is going to have a heterosexual marriage or any sort of marriage. Not everybody in your social circle is going to have children. Not everybody in your social circle is going to choose to balance career and childcare the way that you choose to do that. You need a core of self worth and confidence and generosity to be able to tolerate those differences. And I think not everybody has it.

Sara

I think I bristle so much when it comes to these particular viewpoints because I don't think they consider, like, the average progressive who lives in a small town or the suburbs, or really anywhere that isn’t a hub of progressive intellectualism. Again to quote the New Yorker piece, Kang says, “When was the last time you heard a full throated case for the public school, not merely as a necessity, but as a great resource, a place where children can make friends with everyone within a community?”

And I'm like, bro, EVERYBODY sees public school that way!

Moira

Literally everyone. I think the people who are writing these pieces about the supposed turn against children that they think is sweeping the nation are also people who are highly educated, tend to be highly earning, and they tend to be living in extremely liberal coastal cities.

You know, like Jay Caspian Kang, who wrote that New Yorker piece. He lives in Berkeley, and he frequently writes to the effect of, you know, being disgusted by, you know, narcissistic, decadent liberal scene he encounters in Berkeley. And like, yeah, I'm sure he does find that in Berkeley from time to time! But here's a whole other world out there. The peculiarities of your highly selective social circle which have been produced by obscene privilege are not necessarily a social reality or a broad based trend. It's mistaking the particular for the general.

Sara

Last question. Once I listened to your episode about pronatalism, I just started to see it, like, everywhere.

Moira

Dude, it's everywhere.

Sara

I mean, the American Dream itself is literally built off a moral and religious and patriotic imperative to bear children and raise them a certain way. What other pronatalist dog whistles have you noticed since you started digging into this?

Moira

Anytime anybody talks about the birth rate, my hackles go up a little bit. The historical fact that has been proven again and again and again, is that birth rates go down when women's rights are expanded. And there is fairly limited policy intervention that can make it go up.

You see places like Sweden, which has a really robust welfare state, or places like Hungary, which is trying what we might call  a positive eugenics program, trying to pay people to have as many children as possible. But for the most part, the most effective way to get women to have more children is to take away more of their rights.  

And if you want the birth rate to go up and you believe that that is more important than other social priorities, then you will become comfortable taking women's rights away. So as a feminist, any kind of birthright anxiety makes me anxious.

I also think that there has been an almost psychologically transparent fear of the childless woman, of her sexuality, of her money, of what she might do in public.

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And that has been a really unnerving postscript to Dobbs being repealed. You see it directed a lot at Taylor Swift in particular, but also at people like AOC. There are a tremendous amount of pronatalist men erecting unwholesome attention at childless millennial women, particularly those who have public facing careers. And whenever I see that, my spidey senses start to tingle and I feel a shiver go down my spine.

It's interesting to me that so much of the pronatalist energy in books like What Are Children For tends to be about shaming the childless and trying to persuade them to have children and has relatively less to do with the children who are already here or with what having children actually entails.

Once you become a mother, they lose interest in you. It's about getting you to cross that threshold and give birth. And that is conspicuous to me as well.

Sara

It's chilling.

Moira

I am a childless woman and I do own a cat.

Sara

Oh, no! Ha.

Moira

And so I have had all this weird attention on lifestyle choices that seems to me so incredibly banal and not worth becoming politicized. It's weird to understand yourself as a cultural boogeyman.

I almost want to get another cat.