Do you think that the default of most parents when they are raising a daughter is to focus their efforts on preparing her to be a wife and mother?
My guess is this approach to parenting girls represents a shrinking minority.
Today, it seems the default is to raise daughters to be independent single women.
I wonder if we’re the first civilization in history that has taken this position.
So what’s wrong with this approach to raising daughters?
I’d guess that even conservative or religious parents imagine that some combination is healthy.
Maybe 50/50 preparing our daughters to be single independent women and future mothers.
There’s a major unacknowledged tension between these two approaches that we must become aware of.
The skills, values, and intuitions that make a single woman fulfilled and successful are radically different from the skills, values, and intuitions of a wife and mother. In some cases, they can be almost polar opposites.
In fact, the way you would raise a son to become a traditional father has far more in common with how you would raise a woman to be an independent single woman than how you would raise a daughter to become a traditional wife and mother.
Here are a few examples:
Making Money - The traditional father must develop the skills and opportunity for to maximize financial provision. The same goes for independent single women.
The traditional mother will take a much larger role in bearing and raising young children and so has to learn the skill of being financially dependent on her husband while working on a team with him to manage their collective resources.
Self Sacrifice - Traditional fathers must negotiate aggressively with non-aligned partners like employers to get the best deal for their families. Single independent women must do the same.
A mother must not negotiate with her infant. She needs to care for her children unconditionally. Female agreeability is a superpower in this phase of life which can last decades but is a disadvantage in the workplace.
Household Management - Traditional fathers need to be comfortable being only indirectly involved in time-intensive elements of home life in order to maximize their competitive advantages in the marketplace. The same for independent single women. In fact, one career-focused single woman jokingly told me she needed to find a wife.
Traditional mothers embrace a larger role in the day-to-day activities in the household. This often puts them at a disadvantage in the workplace when competing with fathers and single women who have fewer household responsibilities.
These value tradeoffs are real and they impact independent single women and mothers differently.
I’m exploring this because I’d like to discuss some implications of these realities that seem unacknowledged:
Single women and mothers are not political allies. Their needs are too different but it’s advantageous for political movements to hide this reality.
Single women and mothers have very different dynamics with men. Single women are often competing with men and are sensitive to historic disadvantages that might still be holding them back. This can cause them to be highly suspicious and self-protective as they approach their relationships with men. A wife and mother has a specific relationship with one man who she must pursue total alignment, especially for the sake of their children.
Single women can benefit when men are weakened while a traditional mother wants her husband to be strong.
Parents must choose how much to prepare their daughters for independence or dependence. We’re acting as if these two approaches are the same when they couldn’t be more different and the default has become to prepare future wives and mothers for maximum independence which can be problematic for their future family.
This is why mothers and parents of daughters need to consider declaring independence from the current women’s movement. It’s not a women’s movement, it's a single women’s movement and it’s proven toxic to mothers, families, and especially to children.
When you talk about the “women’s movement” are you folding evangelical feminists into that as well like Beth allison Barr and Kristin Kobes Du Mez?
As a separate thought, I'm 29 yrs old, married with one kid (for context). As I watch my peers, I observe a HUGE challenge for women who were raised (knowingly or unknowingly) to be single/independent to find good careers, but then as they get married and have kids, they realize they feel more called to motherhood than they previously thought. Now they're torn between pursuing a career and being a stay-at-home mom, not to mention the college debt they have from pursuing that degree to pursue a career.