Devaluing Children and Motherhood

In July 2023, I walked away from academia and tenure after 15 years as a professor. This decision in and of itself was not so unusual. It is the 21st century, and plenty of people change careers, after all—especially in this post-2020 age of the Great Resignation. What shocked both friends and strangers alike, however, was what I decided to do instead. Instead of opting for the more typical alternative career choice for ex-academics, such as a consultant or UX researcher, I decided to stay at home full time (aside from some freelance writing and editing) to homeschool my children. “What a loss to the profession,” several friends and former colleagues commented. A couple of friends made tradwife jokes, all in good humor, about my becoming a stereotypical housewife. For what better image to evoke as the exact opposite of a serious academic professional, that stereotypical disheveled creature of crumpled tweed, elbow patches, and eyes perennially red from grading far too late into the night, powered by an excess of caffeine and peanut butter consumed straight out of the jar. With a spoon.

For the record, while everything else applies, unlike most male colleagues, I never did own a tweed jacket with elbow patches. Yet I am no tradwife frolicking in flower fields in a sundress and milking cows for cameras, rest assured. For one thing, sundresses are really not practical for either hanging out at flower fields or milking cows, I hear. But aside from the tradwife social media cosplays, too many married women today, evangelical and secular alike, have generally internalized the message that feminist writer and cultural icon Betty Friedan first articulated in her 1963 bestselling book The Feminine Mystique—even if they have never read Friedan or even heard of her.¹ Friedan was a writer and journalist who was fired from her job for pregnancy, back when this was normal. She saw her contemporary stay-at-home moms (and, of course, herself) as bored, oppressed, and depressed. In response, she wrote her book as a manifesto for miserable modern married women’s liberation.² (She had hoped that her therapist would cowrite the book with her. Alas, he turned down this irresistible offer.)³ An educated woman, in Friedan’s view, could never be truly fulfilled or happy if her life sphere were restricted to the domestic life. But what does such a view suggest about the value of motherhood and its essential companions—children?

Fast-forward 60 years. In August 2022, Bloomberg broke a sensationalizing news story, confidently asserting that “women not having kids get richer than men.”⁴ There it was, set forth already in the title of the article, a bold economic argument that put a price on human relationships and human life, leaping far beyond what Friedan, who was no absolute enemy of marriage and motherhood, had originally advocated. Marriage, the article aimed to show, cost something to women. And, of course, so did having children. In other words, if you are a woman and your chief aim is building up wealth and personal security (as the article presumes it surely should be), then your best course of action is clear. First, do not have children, and second, maybe marriage is not a good idea either. Here is an argument for a life of singlehood (albeit presumably not celibacy), and one that conflates economic wealth and career success with that more elusive and less easily measurable goal—flourishing.

I read this article a few months before I had finalized my decision to walk away from academia, but I did read it as a married mother of three children. To be honest, it made me angry. The argument boldly put on trial women like me—married and mothers—and found our lives and choices lacking. To be clear, it did not affect my joy in my family, but it was upsetting to learn that the article’s author might look at women like me with pity mingled with outright hyper-Friedanian disdain. I can only imagine what she would have said about my career change.

There is no denying that single women experience significant challenges, and the church should do more to support their flourishing. And yet, there is also no denying that our surrounding culture is increasingly more hostile to motherhood and family.

Before I go on to address responses to this article by experts, I must acknowledge an important point. There is often a perception in evangelical circles that church life is rigged to include and support mothers and exclude single women, making them feel lacking in much the same way as the Bloomberg article did for me. There is certainly some truth to this perception—although the precise degree varies depending on the specific congregation, theological tradition, location, and so on. There is no denying that single women experience significant challenges, and the church should do more to support their flourishing.⁵ And yet, there is also no denying that our surrounding culture is increasingly more hostile to motherhood and family.⁶ The cultural hostility to one group of women, in other words, in no way negates the existence of similarly intense hostility to another group. This brings us back to the Bloomberg article and the obvious question: Is this true? Are childless women really wealthier and happier than mothers?

Critics swiftly debunked the article’s false premises and misleading methodology, which did not include any married women in the study. Compelling data exists, in fact, that it is married women with children who are the best off economically of all categories of women in modern American society.⁷ Study after study shows that while single unwed mothers are not flourishing economically, people in happy marriages are financially better off, happier, and healthier.⁸ The happiness and health effects seem especially noticeable for men, who live longer if in a happy marriage, but women benefit too—in terms of both finances and health.⁹ Indeed, Brad Wilcox, who directs the National Marriage Project, has echoed Pope Francis in describing marriage as “a matter of social justice.”¹⁰

The veracity or falsehood of the Bloomberg article’s arguments, however, is less important than the mere fact of its existence and subsequent popularity. The very attempt in this work to propose the argument that it makes, and to do it so boldly, is a symptom of a pervasive problem in American society: the problem of devaluing motherhood and children in every sphere of modern life. That is the problem that I seek to confront in all its ugliness in my book, with the conviction that it is impossible to address a problem whose existence and full repercussions in our world and our own lives we do not recognize or acknowledge openly. It is a problem that is symptomatic of a larger devaluing of human life in our society more generally.

What is a human life worth? Are some lives more economically beneficial to society than others? And are there not ways of estimating the worth of a life that are not economically driven at all? As a historian of the ancient world and the early church, I am reminded of the way the earliest Christians challenged the longstanding values of the pagan world around them to display a love of all humanity that was utterly radical—and costly. The early Christians’ pro-life stance included, at the economic level, a radically different and selfless use of money for the benefit of others.¹¹ That we do not do so in our society today is a powerful reminder that the values of our society at large, including those of many confessing Christians within it, are values of the post-Christian culture all around rather than the church.

Editor’s Note: This essay is adapted from the Introduction of the forthcoming book, Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic (October 15, 2024) by Nadya Williams. ©2024 Nadya Williams. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press. www.ivpress.com.  

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1. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: Norton, 2013).

2. For a sympathetic yet complex biography of Friedan, see Rachel Shteir, Betty Friedan: Magnificent Disrupter (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2023).

3. Shteir, Betty Friedan, 79.

4. Molly Smith, “Women Who Stay Single and Don’t Have Kids Are Getting Richer,” Bloomberg, August 31, 2022, www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022‑08‑31/women-not-having-kids-get-richer-than-men.

5. I appreciate the work of Danielle Treweek in this area. See her book The Meaning of Singleness: Retrieving an Eschatological Vision for the Contemporary Church (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2023).

6. Timothy Carney, Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be (New York: HarperOne, 2024).

7. W. Bradford Wilcox, “Two Is Wealthier Than One: Marital Status and Wealth Outcomes Among Preretirement Adults,” Institute for Family Studies, December 1, 2021, https://ifstudies.org/blog/two-is-wealthier-than-one-marital-status-and-wealth-outcomes-among-preretirement-adults-. Erika Bachiochi also provides a historical overview of these trends in The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2021). See especially chap. 9.

8. Richard Fry and Kim Parker, “Rising Share of U.S. Adults Are Living Without a Spouse or Partner,” Pew Research Center, October 5, 2021, www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2021/10/05/rising-share-of-u-s-adults-are-living-without-a-spouse-or-partner/.

9. Brad Wilcox and Nicholas Wolfinger, “Hey Guys, Put a Ring on It,” National Review, February 9, 2017, www.nationalreview.com/2017/02/marriage-benefits-men-financial-health-sex-divorce-caveat/.

10. Brad Wilcox, “Marriage as a Matter of Social Justice,” The Atlantic, September 26, 2015, www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/pope-francis-marriage-family/407494/. Wilcox further expands on this concept as the central argument of his new book Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization (New York: Broadside Books, 2024).

11. Nadya Williams, “Pricing Human Life,” Current, September 20, 2021, https://currentpub.com/2021/09/30/pricing-human-life/.