Having a baby is wonderful, but it isn’t the root of ‘female empowerment’
Forty-odd years after the launch of the feminist movement, “trad wives” are once again icons. I am particularly fascinated by the Ballerina Farm Instagram account, run by 33 year old Hannah Neeleman, a Mormon, beauty-pageant winning, Julliard-trained ex-ballerina. She left the city for a farm in Utah where she raises eight children with her husband. Her account is jammed with pictures of domestic bliss, bringing her 9 million followers.
No crime in any of this. But something she said at the 2023 Mrs America pageant made me wince. Asked about “female empowerment,” she replied: “After I hold [my] newborn baby in my arms, the feeling of motherhood and bringing them to the earth is the most empowering feeling I have ever felt.”
My general response to comments like this has always been disappointment: is this really where we’re at, when women now have the kinds of freedom and opportunity at their fingertips their grandmothers would have killed for? But I wasn’t a mother, so I couldn’t be sure that my reaction wouldn’t be the same as Mrs Neeleman’s.
Now I am a mother with a delicious peach of a five-week old daughter. She is addictively cute to me, gorgeous and lovable. But do I feel that “bringing her to earth” was “empowering”? Far from it. Work is what makes me feel empowered and that is why I am continuing to do it even as my baby sleeps on my chest in a sling.
In fact, the baby has nothing to do with empowerment. Why would she? She is the result of nature doing what nature does. I am lucky to have her. But I can’t help but feel that Neeleman’s viral statement is not only far from enviable, but as I suspected long before motherhood, represents a very sad downturn in women’s horizons and a sore misunderstanding of what empowerment is.
