When Women Attack Each Other, the Patriarchy Wins

This isn’t about all of us “getting along.” It’s about redirecting the anger and blame.

A few years ago, I decided to take it upon myself to “solve” the growing rift between mothers and childfree women. With a few strokes of my keyboard, I believed that I could help childfree women feel properly empathized with, and then make a heartfelt case for why I, as a mother, deserved their empathy (and support). I believed that my measured tone and earnest pleas might help women without children genuinely understand my plight.

Perhaps needless to say, my story, “As a Mother, I Celebrate Childfree Women,” didn’t go over too well. I bridged no rifts, healed no divides.

Where did I go wrong? Though I tried very hard to conceal my rage, the truth was that I was pretty pissed. The country was still reeling from Covid, and I was furious that mothers continued to be overworked and overburdened, that our labor both inside and outside the home was constantly devalued, that we so often felt condemned for making others pick up our “slack” at work while we picked up the slack for a broken childcare system, that no one else had much interest in speaking up for us, and that as a society, we had entirely lost sight of childrearing as a collective responsibility.

I didn’t set out to attack childfree women (quite the opposite, in fact), but many childfree women who read the story felt attacked. They were tired of mothers implying that childfree women should be using their “extra” leisure time to help out with other people’s children, and in doing so, further implying that they didn’t have other valuable ways to use their time. Here’s an excerpt from one comment:

By the end of reading your article, I was livid. You say that as a mother, you celebrate childfree women, and it seems to me that you only celebrate us for what we can do for you as a mother. I am sorry but I am not going to advocate for mothers in the workplace. There are plenty of people doing that, and it's still not enough, no. But me? As a childless woman, I am going to advocate for childless women in the workplace, thank you very much. That's where I want to put my energy.

I more recently received an angry comment on a Substack story about opting into, or out of, motherhood:

I never got paid extra for taking on your work responsibilities while you were out on maternal leave (paid or unpaid) or other child-related obligation over the subsequent couple of decades. Maybe in your next life, you’ll put a little more thought into your life-changing decisions. But please don’t expect me to take up the slack at work in the meantime.

I could feel these women’s rage, and their comments sparked my own deep-seated rage. All of us clearly felt, and continue to feel, profoundly harmed by a system that devalues our labor and fails to acknowledge our contributions.

But none of us were accurately naming the harm, nor naming who (or what) was actually responsible for it. Turns out, when we do this, we’ll inevitably find we have more that unites than divides us.

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The Men in Charge—a phrase that I use synonymously with the capitalist patriarchy because the people who hold the reins of our economy and so-called democracy are still overwhelmingly male—have figured out how to very effectively pit women against one another, in the workplace and beyond.

Their tactics are almost brilliant in their nefariousness. Demand so much of workers that we’re all exhausted. Fail to prioritize contingency plans for anyone who needs to take time off. Punish caregivers (disproportionately women) who take time off. Then tell other women to “pick up the slack.”

It’s not just mothers vs. childfree women. It’s also “working moms” vs. stay-at-home moms, tradwives vs. feminists, married women vs. single women… the list goes on and on.

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Perhaps no story better illustrates the depth to which we’re all being manipulated than the story of Phyllis Schafly, a woman whom I expended enormous amounts of energy very intensely hating over many years. Even typing her name still triggers bile at the back of my throat. I hated her before it was cool to hate her (yep, I’m hipster like that), before the Hulu miniseries Mrs. America inspired many other women to join me in my loathing.

Schlafly is best known for her successful fight against the Equal Rights Amendment, but I first learned about her in the context of her work organizing against a universal childcare bill that passed both the House and Senate in 1971 with broad bipartisan support. Every time I wrote my monthly childcare check for an amount that surpassed my mortgage, I thought about that bill. It died at President Nixon’s desk, where he unexpectedly vetoed it, and I was pissed at Nixon too. But I was fucking furious at Phyllis Schlafly.

The sting was in the betrayal. How could a woman do this to other women? A woman who had six kids of her own, a woman who, despite her advocacy for homemakers and “traditional” families, was unapologetic about taking up space in the public sphere?

If you watched Mrs. America, you might know the answer to this question. Schlafly wasn’t initially all that interested in childcare bills, or the ERA. In fact, according to writer Carol Felsenthal, who profiled her for Chicago magazine in the 1970s:

[Schlafly] told me that, in 1971, when a friend asked her to speak against the proposed ERA, she had little interest in it, and, if pressed, would have said she was sort of for it. She saw it, she said, “as something between innocuous and mildly helpful.”

What Schlafly really wanted to speak out about was foreign policy and nuclear strategy. And while I do not support her pro-nuclear stance, you can’t deny that on the rare occasions she had an opportunity to speak on these topics, she did so with expertise and poise. As a case in point:

But other than throwing her a small bone here and there, the Men in Charge would have none of it. After all, she shouldn’t be worrying her pretty little female head over Man Things, like international politics. She should be out there saving housewives from the horrors of feminism! And because Schlafly was a shrewd woman who understood that this route would offer her the most direct path to political influence, she took it.

The Men in Charge were also shrewd. They knew that Schlafly would be able to very effectively channel the brewing resentment that some women felt toward a feminist movement they saw as devaluing traditional “women’s work” – that is, care and domestic labor. They knew she would be able to channel it better than any man because she spoke “homemaker,” and they were right.

The tragic irony of Phyllis Schlafly was that she wanted exactly what the feminists wanted, the same feminists she so convincingly rallied against. In return, the feminists hated her with the same ferocity as modern-day feminists hate tradwives.

And round and round we go.

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I’m well aware that calling on women to blame the Men in Charge is entirely unoriginal. If anything, the patriarchy has become an overused buzzword, bandied about to describe the root of everything that is wrong with our society, and world.

Schlafly would most certainly roll her eyes. She once said, “The feminist movement taught women to see themselves as victims of an oppressive patriarchy... Self-imposed victimhood is not a recipe for happiness.”

It’s not enough to blame the patriarchy; we also have to find our common ground. How is the system hurting all of us, and what needs to change? As I argued in a prior piece, Where Feminists and Tradwives Can Agree, it could be argued that the tradwife movement, while extreme and kind of scary, is rooted in a recognition that when women work for the paid economy, the paid economy does not work for them.

I can’t say I disagree.

This is not just about uniting around a shared enemy, but about co-creating a system that acknowledges and rewards our vital contributions—the contributions we make both in the home and in the public sphere.

Reproductive justice, a feminist framework created by a group of Black women in Chicago in 1994, is a great place to start. I learned about it only recently after writing The Choice That Pro-Choice Voters Don’t Talk About, which inadvertently summarized many of its core principles. The movement not only centers marginalized identities, which have historically been left out of mainstream feminism, but it is built around the core belief that all women have:

the right to have children;
the right to not have children and;
the right to nurture the children we have in a safe and healthy environment.

I love that reproductive justice includes the important right to opt out of having children, while also recognizing that women who opt in should be able to have access to the time and resources that raising healthy children demands. This is a vision that, while not all-encompassing, can potentially unite both mothers and childfree women, partnered women and unpartnered women, women who participate in the paid economy and women who are unpaid caregivers.

We can squabble about who’s working more, or who’s working harder, or who has it worse, but all this squabbling is hurting us. Yes, some divides might be more intractable than others. Yes, we are still accountable for our actions and behaviors. Yes, we should still hold other women accountable for theirs. Yes, we should still feel empowered to engage in healthy debates with women who offer perspectives that differ from our own.

But before you feel tempted to attack another woman, pause and take a breath. Ask yourself, what is the source of my rage? What is the source of her rage? Is she being harmed by the same system that is causing me harm? Are we both being played?

Getting to the source is not self-imposed victimhood—quite the opposite, in fact. It can offer us common ground and a clearer path forward. Let’s not forget that the Men in Charge stoke divides to maintain their grip on power. And while we circle one another in the ring, taking shots, they watch from the stands, gloating and counting their cash.