Leftist Western Women Push for Less Family Structure

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Originally posted on May 23, 2019.

Libby Emmons, writing in The Federalist, suggests that “everyone should acknowledge motherhood’s importance to society.” Women, explains Emmons, “should stop demanding liberation from motherhood,” only then will those feminists in Western countries, and the global underclass of women in domestic service overseas, be able to care for their own children. She writes (abridged):

There are motherless villages in Indonesia where so many women have entered domestic service overseas that their whole communities of children grow up unmothered. Living with relatives, or old enough to take care of their own siblings, these children receive remittances from distant mothers. The women are hired as domestic help and, in doing the work for other families, they can’t afford to personally take care of their own.

Mothers who work for wealthy families in countries far from their own are an international underclass of women without whom the world’s upper-class women who strive to have it all could not even attempt it. The only way wealthy mothers can unburden themselves of motherhood and pursue their economic value in the workforce is if there is an underclass of women who do the work of mothering, for which their families pay a high price.

While leftist women in the West push for less family structure and more centralized child support, they disrupt not only their own families but also families around the world.

American women protest in costumes from “The Handmaid’s Tale” because abortion rights are being curtailed by voters, but the real handmaids are those in the developing world bearing and then raising the children Western women won’t. In the advocacy for more freedom for women to enter the workforce without worry for their children, the trend of women not raising their own children trickles down globally.

If American women want equality, it must be global equality. We can’t gain our freedom by exploiting those who are willing to trade it for their children’s future. A better answer than increasing outsourced child care is to make it more possible for women to mother their own children. Women should stop demanding liberation from motherhood, and everyone should acknowledge motherhood’s importance to society.