Which way, Western woman?
It is a bizarre time in which we women find ourselves living. There is something irrational about a culture in which women lavish maternal devotion on dogs while simultaneously viewing the bearing and raising of their own children as intolerable intrusions on their own freedoms. In the last few weeks, Americans have been enthralled by the murder trial of Lindsay Clancy, a young Massachusetts woman who brutally strangled all three of her children. That she killed them was not disputed. Why she killed them was. Perhaps just as disturbing is the “Same, Lindsay” movement that shows women identifying with Clancy, including posting internet videos in which they use dolls in place of children to simulate abuse for laughs. How did we get here?
The West has spent decades dismantling womanhood without giving a second thought as to what would replace it. We may finally have reached an answer: empathy without judgment, self-sovereignty without obligation to others, and nurturing impulses that are detached from motherhood. Women haven’t lost their capacity for compassion: not even close. Rather, many have lost the moral order that once directed those impulses. It wasn’t always like this. Little girls used to practice for motherhood as a matter of course.
When my sister and I were children, we had a miniature Schnauzer named Pepper. We dressed her in baby clothes, bonnet and all. We’d rock her and feed her dog food with a plastic spoon from my Barbie collection. Sometimes, we’d prop her up in an old stroller and push her around the neighborhood or pretend she had an injury and wrap a bandage on her paw. Poor Pepper. Years later, as adults, my sister and I passed my newborn son between us, Gerber bananas in hand. Looking back to our childhood, I realize we had been practicing our ancient roles as the stewards of humanity. We did so because as adults, we were expected to nurture and protect those who depended on us.
Those instincts haven’t disappeared, but often the children have. Of course, it was make-believe. We knew Pepper wasn’t a baby. We were just little girls rehearsing a role that we assumed would one day become our reality, as it had for women throughout human history. That has changed. Increasingly, Western culture frames a woman’s nurturing of her own children within a family as demeaning. Schools often teach girls that to be whole, they must have identities outside of motherhood. Fine. According to Pew Research, in 2024, 60% of women were working or looking for work, compared to 42% in 1970. Then came the identity outside of marriage. Okay. In 1970, 69% of all U.S. adults were married. In 2024, Pew reports that number had fallen to only 50%. So where does that leave us? What expectations are we setting for the next generation of little girls?
Are we now just a collection of individuals whose highest obligation is to ourselves alone? Has “liberation” always meant freedom from obligation rather than freedom for a greater contribution and expansion of our abilities? I thought we were reaching for our highest selves, the best we could be.
The consequences of this shift are hard to ignore. Recently, in addition to the Lindsay Clancy case, women in Massachusetts stood and applauded a new abortion law that allows the procedure right up until the moment of birth. Similar legislation is currently being discussed in Kentucky and Idaho. These examples reveal that many women have come to believe that their strength is in taking life, rather than in giving it. Numerous women across America now celebrate late-term abortion even as some identify with a notorious child killer. Across TikTok, young mothers film themselves laughing madly while throwing water on their unsuspecting, crying babies as part of a viral trend. Is this what a hundred and fifty years of women’s suffrage was intended for? Ladies, you’ve lost the plot.
American historian Henry Adams (1838-1918) saw this coming. Writing at the turn of the twentieth century, his autobiography The Education of Henry Adams (1907) anticipated this scenario. Adams saw women as a tremendous social force whose “axis” was inward on the family and the cradle. From his vantage point, modernity and all its conveniences were beginning to knock that force from its orientation, and he wondered where this destabilization would lead. Well, now we know. Prophetically, Adams envisioned that the female force of nature would be flung outward from its rotation, attaching itself to wherever it could find a purpose. Maternal energy, it turns out, cannot simply be switched off. It seeks a substitute: a cause célèbre: a Pepper.
As a result, many women have now dedicated themselves to the nurturing of all sorts of political causes and other substitutes. It’s easy to feel compassion for theoretical surrogates for babies; they don’t wake you up at 2 am. Abstractions like saving “humanity,” rescuing oppressed populations, engaging in political activism, and yes, even identifying with a notorious mother—all offer women the feelings of compassion and nurture without demanding any obligation or personal sacrifice from them.
But compassion isn’t the same as responsibility. Loving “humanity” in general is not a substitute for loving a specific person—especially a dependent one. Women were not wrong to seek education and identities of our own. Our mistake, though, was believing that freedom required contempt for the things that made us necessary to other people. To our own people. Perhaps we also failed to consider that being needed by others might be necessary for us to live successful and fulfilling lives. Do the statistics bear this out?
In fact, in 2023, Pew Research found that only 22% of American women now consider having children “extremely or very important” to living a fulfilling life. Also in 2023, researchers David Blanchflower and Alex Bryson analyzed decades of data from the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe, and elsewhere. They found declining happiness among American women, along with poorer outcomes for women across numerous measures, including anxiety, depression, loneliness, and life satisfaction.
So, since Pepper was a preparation and not a suitable replacement, we stand at a precipice – the cradle or the cause? Which way, Western woman?
Bibliography
Adams, Henry. 1907. The Education of Henry Adams. Washington, D.C.: Privately Printed.
Blanchflower, David G., and Alex Bryson. 2024. “The Female Happiness Paradox.” Journal of Population Economics 37: Article 16. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00148-024-00981-5
Parker, Kim, and Rachel Minkin. 2023. “What Makes for a Fulfilling Life.” Pew Research Center. September 14, 2023. https://www.pewresearch.org/?p=38404
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