The New Mommy Wars Are About Power. Not Parenting.
This isn’t about kids vs no kids. SAHMs v. working moms. It’s about whether women get to live the life they want.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the "mommy wars" of the 90’s. The endless discourse about stay-at-home moms versus working moms, the magazine covers … working moms saddled with guilt about not being there for their kids, SAHMs chastised for not being ambitious enough.
We were told it was about choices. Working mom or stay-at-home mom. Career or family. That these were personal decisions, a matter of values. As if everyone had equal access to both paths. As if either came with the support women actually needed.
The working mom without affordable childcare. The stay-at-home mom without financial security. The endless invisible labor expected of both.
By keeping these two camps of women apart, by sowing division between them, it kept them fighting one another, instead of the system that made both of their lives more difficult.
This week I asked my IG audience if they had thoughts about the mommy wars and got HUNDREDS of response. Different decisions, different lives, but two things I heard a lot: women felt judged, and that finances did not always give them a choice. After all these years, we are still here, still trapped in the same conversations that were designed to divide us.
You have probably already seen the news stories about the Trump White House’s plan to increase the birthrate. $5k baby bonuses. Scholarships reserved for married people. Fertility tracking lessons so girls can be taught when they are most useful for reproduction. Medals for women who have six or more children reminiscent of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. It sounds absurd.
Because they know exactly why women are having fewer children. It’s not a mystery. It’s not moral failing. It’s the simple math of living in a country that has gutted support systems until there’s nothing left to catch you. Where paid leave is a fantasy for many workers. Where housing is hard to reach and wages have stagnated while billionaires build bunkers and politicians issue talking points. Where grandparents are not available to watch the kids because they have to work through their retirement years and daycare is more than half our paychecks, PLUS you’re a neglectful parent if you have your kids watch themselves after school like so many did in the seventies and eighties. (Shoutout to my fellow latchkey kids)
And somehow, after all of that, the government has the audacity to turn to us and ask why we are not choosing to birth more children faster. They have the nerve to act surprised that women are hesitating, questioning, calculating the cost. They want to pretend the problem is personal ambition or cultural decay or selfishness, anything other than the truth: that they built a country where choosing to raise a family often feels like choosing to drown. They built a system that demands everything from women who finally have alternative options, and now they are shocked that some of us are not lining up to sacrifice ourselves at the altar of their broken dreams.
It is not that women forgot how to nurture. It is not that we forgot how to love. It is that we looked at the reality they created and realized that love alone would not be enough to survive it. And for that, they blame us. For that, they offer us medals instead of childcare, slogans instead of safety, empty promises instead of real structural change.
A lie that is being sold on my FYP is that our exhaustion comes from chasing masculine goals instead of embracing feminine energy. That true happiness lies in staying home, raising many children, depending financially on men, surrendering ambition for softness. That feminism lied to us, and that if we would only return to the natural order, if we would only make ourselves smaller, quieter, more nurturing, more obedient, we would be happy again.
It is not a coincidence that this surge of “soft life” content is happening now, just as the administration is laying the groundwork for policies that reward women who marry, who have children, who stay home, who comply. They are not separate movements. They are two sides of the same project: to make systemic collapse look like personal failure, and to sell women on sacrificing their futures for a system that already proved it will not save them.
What is becoming more and more clear to me is that women don’t want the binary of being a SAHM or a career gal. We want autonomy to live the life we design.
We want the option to have a fulfilling career inside or outside of the home and if we have children we want systems in place to support that choice—affordable childcare, flexible and empathetic employers, healthcare for our families that doesn’t depend on one parent having a job with one of the few companies that still provides decent health benefits.
There is a concerted effort right now to turn back the clock on women’s rights, to say that good mothers are those who stay home. Good mothers are those who homeschool. Strong men are those who don’t allow their children to be put in daycare and can afford to have a wife who doesn’t work. This propaganda comes laden with moral judgement and is directly connected to policies being enacted by this administration.
For example, Trump recently issued an Executive Order that directed the The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to eliminate the use of disparate impact litigation, which is a way they enforce laws to protect people who were treated differently because of their race or sex.
I think that the people who judge us for whether we have children or not, whether we stay at home, or work outside the home, are not the people who matter. Because people who are posting rage-bait about how feminists hate stay-at-home moms aren’t trying to have a good-faith conversation about supporting motherhood. They are trying to push a political agenda that hurts women.
They want the power to make the decision for everyone.
We want systems and policies that support families. We want a culture that sees parenthood - not just motherhood - as integral to society’s success, and understand that not everyone’s family has to look the same.
The fact is, choice is not enough. We want autonomy. We want a purposeful life. We want to define what that purpose is for ourselves and we want our choices to be supported and respected.
And that’s the real threat, isn’t it?
Women who own their lives. Who claim their political power. Who walk away from those who hurt us. Who build governments that support women and families, not corporate empires or billionaire fantasies of colonizing Mars. Who see through the false wars and refuse to fight them. Who understand that our exhaustion isn't weakness, it's evidence of a system that can no longer contain us.
What can we do?
→ sound off in the comments with your ideas, here’s a few from me:
Let your friends and family know you don’t judge them for their choices, and mean it. This is especially imporant for younger folks who are bombarded by this content online.
Talk about how politics and policy can change to offer real support: paid leave, affordable childcare, addressing maternal mortality, bodily autonomy and reproductive justice & more.
Push back when someone tries to frame this as a “lifestyle” issue instead of a structural one.
And most of all, remind the women around you that they deserve more than survival. They deserve power, dignity, and real choices that come with real support.
News:
Yesterday, a bipartisan group of House members revealed their new More Paid Leave for More Americans Act yesterday. The bill establishes a 3 year pilot program for partial coverage for 6 weeks for people earning near or below a State’s average weekly wage.
The US is one of only six countries in the world with no federally mandated paid leave, and one in four women return to work just two weeks after giving birth. Find more info on paid leave here.
This is a small step forward, it will be interesting to see how our pronatalist, or as
called it, bronatalist, Republican Congress and Administration responds.
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This is one of my favorite things you’ve ever written. As a pediatrician and a mom, I think about this issue a LOT, and talk with families every day about motherhood. There is so much pressure to do all of it “right” too. This part of your article really resonated: “women don’t want the binary of being a SAHM or a career gal. We want autonomy to live the life we design”. YES. Thanks, as always.
All of this is so true! And, as a SAHM of two kids - even with relatively good support from family and good health insurance, there’s no way I want to have more kids. I love being a mom, but mentally and physically going through pregnancy and childbirth and the first year of a newborn again is not something I want for my life. I want to show up for my kids as a person who loves them, has the emotional capacity to support and nurture them, and also has my own hobbies, interests and friendships.