Feminists never wanted women to “have it all.” The second-wave feminists of the 1960s and 70s published consciousness-raising pamphlets and lobbied for equal rights legislation—but their practical gains took care of only one part of “work-life balance.” For them, a new breed of overburdened bionic woman who could “bring home the bacon [and] fry it up in pan” was never the evolutionary ideal. If they’d had their way, the world would have changed to spare mothers from double-duty.
In her new book Feminism’s Forgotten Fight, Fordham University historian Kirsten Swinth uncovers the all-but-lost history of the women’s movement’s advocacy for mothers. The success of women’s largely economically driven progress in the workplace since the 1970s has consistently overshadowed the reality of mothers’ unequal burden. But motherhood was central to the movement’s founding argument, which led with a call for change that’s yet to be adequately answered: The United States, for instance, remains the only industrialized nation not yet mandating some form of paid leave for new mothers.
What we tend to overlook, Swinth tells me, is how much second-wave feminists built directly on the motherhood protections the first-wave activists of the 19th and early 20th centuries pioneered. The earlier generation’s aim—protecting what they saw as women’s primary role from an employer’s demands—did not necessarily differ from that of their second-wave heiresses. Second-wave feminists simply shifted the conversation, as Swinth puts it, saying, “We don’t want employers to exploit mothers. In fact, we want to create the opportunity for them to be equal participants in the workplace, while also having what they need to raise children, without ending up impoverished.”
Childcare, maternity leave, and flexible work schedules to support mothers topped feminists’ priorities. In the late 1960s, guaranteed annual income won bipartisan backing, Swinth recounts. But male and female activists couldn’t agree on the definition of family that would grant mothers equal benefits.
At a “Benefits for Pregnant Women Demonstration” in the summer of 1973, feminist activists wheeled a demonstrator wearing a fake pregnant belly down the streets of New York City. In the early aftermath of Roe v. Wade, Ruth Bader Ginsburg—then the director of the Women’s Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union—rightly worried that the ruling’s creation of abortion rights would lead poor women to believe abortion was their best option. “Lawyers must follow up the abortion decision,” she told Gloria Steinem’s Ms. magazine at the time, “by pressing for job protection and disability insurance for pregnant women, and child-care centers.”
The women’s movement that first sparked from the cultural and economic chaos of the early Cold War years didn’t have a discrete genesis or a definite set of goals. But high among its common aims were legislative protections for mothers. The oppressive expectation that a working mother find a way to be both co-breadwinner and principal caregiver was an outcome that second-wavers feared but failed to prevent. Feminists knew that simply doubling women’s workloads wouldn’t lead to liberation.
In The Feminine Mystique, “mother of the movement” Betty Friedan diagnosed the housewife’s malaise as an absence of identity: The solution was to forge a new selfhood, outside of housework. The conceit that a woman could or should succeed on double-duty was but a distant byproduct of a societal transformation that hadn’t happened yet, and that no one could predict. But even Friedan, by the 1980s, would criticize the feminism she co-created, characterizing it as an “anti-family” movement. She felt that the movement had left her behind, Swinth says, and, “She contributed to the forgetting, by repeating the idea that feminists didn’t do anything about the family—and with such a prominent voice.”
Phyllis Schlafly had trained her immense rhetorical talents, meanwhile, on reminding mothers what was at stake were they to seek a new sense of self—that is, the only self they’d ever known. The real culprit, though, was the same force Friedan blames in The Feminine Mystique for infantilizing women while holding them to unattainable ideals: women’s magazines. And by 1982, the longtime editor of Cosmopolitan Helen Gurley Brown was marketing the next mystique to a new demographic in dire need of answers. Her book Having It All: Love, Success, Sex, Money . . . Even if You’re Starting With Nothing targeted single working women, Cosmo’s growing audience, with a myth they were desperate to believe.
“With the version of feminism magazines and media celebrated, this watered-down idea arose,” Swinth says, tracing the genesis of “having it all.” From its early 1980s obsession with the upwardly mobile professional woman, pop culture helped propagate the misleading notion “that if women just make the right choices at the right times in their lives, they can have a kind of equality, they can have beautiful children, happy families, great jobs—and institutions and society don’t need to change.”
For Friedan-era feminists, individual women’s ability to take on both traditionally male and female demands didn’t matter. They believed that to be men’s equals, they’d need the right to bear children codified, as in the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978. Also in the 1970s, laws codifying divorced women’s and widows’ right to previously shared property further protected mothers. (Non-working mothers most of all.) The Family and Medical Leave Act required some but not all employers to grant unpaid leave. But since then, national paid leave policy has seen little progress.
Even now, the generation gap swallows some momentum, Swinth says. “For younger activists coming into the movement, questions about parenting and family and childcare aren’t exactly shaping their concerns.” Instead, they like to focus on intersectional inclusion—accommodating diverse identities beyond that most traditionally female role, mothers.
For voters, it’s a different story. Most American families walk the line, raising children while both parents work, and married parents of young children vote at a higher rate than the general population. Candidates of both parties campaigned on paid parental leave in 2016—each capitalizing on a growing public need the other side has, so far, failed to fulfill.
Feminists, Swinth would have us note, shouldn’t bear the blame. Working women’s successes have overshadowed mothers’ unequal burden in recent decades, while the legacy of Roe v. Wade and the women’s movement’s radical fringes inexorably linked feminism to the decline of the nuclear family. Even from the 19th-century origins of the women’s movement, motherhood shaped feminists’ demands.
And yet the rights of mothers never were the popularly motivating pillar of the movement. Here, Swinth has a simple theory, which also implicates magazines, marketing campaigns, and the popular attention span. “Mothers are close to the most unsexy thing you can talk about,” she says, with a laugh.
