Labor Pains of the Feminine Feminist

​She spreads her hands across the fresh linens, her wedding ring snagging the bedding covered in baseball bats and badly drawn helmets. The baby cries. There’s food, now unrecognizable on the floors and cheerios in her hair. She rocks the baby on her hip, warming a bottle and looks out at her suburban neighborhood. “Is this my dream? Or is this what I’m told my dream should be?”

​Every young woman knows the look; the one you get if you’re over the age of 21 and aren’t feeding a toddler with one hand and baking banana bread in your corner lot suburban dream house with the other. Time and time again women are lured into believing that they will never know true joy, true fulfillment until they hear the cries of their newborn babe and bare the labor pains of bringing a new life into the world. A woman will never truly be a woman until she wears a wedding band, is someone’s Mrs. and learns to put her family’s dreams in place of her own. She is told to stop dreaming, stop creating and to start searching for the nearest Whole Foods market to help ensure her little ones’ nutritional needs are being met.

​Young women are giving up their educations, their degrees, their chances to explore the tops of mountains or simply run their dream business for this idea of “true womanhood.” Forced to choose between motherhood and having their own identity apart from their children, many women have and continue to suffer with “Housewife Syndrome,” an epidemic mainly affecting middle-class women, also called the “feminist illness.” Housewife Syndrome symptoms included depression, anxiety, loneliness, boredom, or simply just the desire to have their own identity and the undeniable gnawing question of, “Is there more?” This question proves dangerous to any woman longing for higher education, a career, or simply a life not involving late night feedings and finger-paints.

​Experts and Freud followers alike see this stirring as silly nonsense from neurotic women. “If a physician of high standing, and one's own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency—what is one to do?” (The Yellow Wallpaper). Stay quiet, bake the bread, make the beds, iron his shirt, breastfeed your children. Instead of encouraging a woman to find herself in creativity or seeking a higher education, books on how to be the “Better Mom” and toilet train their two year old in three easy steps are forced down their already suffocated esophagus. Any woman who wants to be a surgeon, a politician or an engineer is just a sad, confused feminist, forgetting the true American dream: to be a stay at home mother, engrossed in the dreams of her children and the career of her husband.

Highlighting a statistic from Kathleen Gerson’s, “The Unfinished Revolution,” when a group of women were asked what they would do if they were no longer able to be in an equal partnership relationship, 75% of women stated they would rather divorce their partner than to remain a housewife. Not so shockingly, when a group of men were asked the same question, 70% of the men “said they hoped their wives would, ‘de-prioritize’ their career and focus on homemaking” (The Unfinished Revolution). Though told we are equals, when faced with the choice, we are told to back down from our dreams, our fulfillments, for his.Many women are convinced that putting off their own education to get a jump-start on child-rearing is the wisest, most feminine choice. The proof lies in the fact that 49%of stay at home mothers have a high school diploma or less (pewsocialtrends.org).

We are only equal when we know who we are as women without motherhood. We are only fulfilled when we know that we are not broken women when the desire to raise up children is lacking. We are told our minds must be changed; there is something wrong with us if we are not confirmed with our ultimate purpose while scrubbing urine stains from a crib or serving jellied toast to our husband as he whirls off to his career. We are applauded when we devote our lives to seeking out a husband and baring children and we are patted on the back, greeted with a shake of the head and a “Oh, honey…” when we chase our dreams and attempt to enter the work field.

We are taught to kiss our dreams and husbands good bye every morning, tuck away our self-fulfillment and sweet children every night, staring at a peeling wall of Yellow Wallpaper until we go mad. We do not want to dismantle motherhood, we simply want our rights back; our right to make bottles of milk or make cures, our right to discover ourselves outside of a hospital room, rearing a child in pain. We want to educate ourselves; create ourselves for ourselves, not our spouses or offspring.

The mother, the wanderer and the scholar are all women, all made with life to give. Sometimes, this life we bring into the world does not bare our genetics, but our dreams, our knowledge, our work made by our hands not our wombs. The feminist woman can in fact be a feminine woman, even without the cooking apron and spit-up cloths. We do not desire to trump men. We desire to be an equal to men; to fight beside them or work alongside them in a career. Women desire to choose to bare a child or to not, to stay at home to raise children or join the work force, or both. The feminine Feminist is saying, “We want to partner with you as your equal, in the home or on the battlefield and the opportunity to choose which is best for us.”