A Young Single Woman’s take on Maternal Feminism

Our capacity to create and sustain human life is a tremendous power from which society can recognize and then begin to organize around.This framework challenges the current predominant social assumption that the sexed female body is less than fully human and therefore an inferior existence.

Those words on the Big Ocean Women website stood out to me.

We all grow up with the knowledge that we, as women, have the ability to carry children for nine months, but I’m not sure we think enough about how amazing that is. Our bodies can literally create and sustain a human body. Not only can it create it, it develops it.

God creates us.

A woman also creates us.

We literally share a power that God holds.

So why, because of this, does society tend to view women as the “lesser” or “weaker” sex?

I, personally, have no idea.

Why, also, does society put down a woman who chooses motherhood as her job, saying it’s not as good as a woman who works elsewhere? But, a woman who works and isn’t there for her family is bad, too?

I want to make this very clear: it is amazing for a woman to choose to work. It is also amazing for a woman to choose to be a stay-at-home mom. But these need to be viewed on the same level, because they are both work. And one of them is personal, voluntary, emotionally and physically taxing, and demands 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

There are no vacation days with motherhood. And yet, it is frequently less valued. Women say that they’re “just” a mom. People lose interest in talking to someone who’s “just” a mom.

It is amazing to be a mother, and we need to celebrate that.

Female inventors should be recognized and celebrated.

Female CEO’s should feel accomplished and be rewarded.

And mothers should be recognized, loved, celebrated, thanked, and respected every single day.

To me, maternal feminism means viewing the job of motherhood as equal to jobs in the workplace. Maternal feminism is not judging mothers but helping and encouraging them. And most importantly, maternal feminism is viewing the ability to create children as a power that we share with God.