Motherhood: A Higher Calling

By Selwyn Duke

What is the most important job in the world? Is it being the president of the United States? Is it being a scientist working on cold fusion, now considered the “holy grail” of energy innovation? Is it toiling away as a researcher seeking a cure for cancer? Is it being a military general, protecting the homefront from external enemies? While all these jobs matter, a lot, they all pale in comparison to another job: That of the person who gives birth to and helps raise the presidents, scientists, researchers, and generals: mother.

This is because motherhood isn’t just a job, or even just an adventure. It’s a calling.

Sadly, though, it’s a calling that has been called in this modern age many things most unflattering. There was a time when a “stay-at-home mom” was identified differently: a “mom.” But it has long since ceased being an unchallenged norm, and the challenges are now quite abnormal. In 2012, Democratic political strategist Hilary Rosen said that Ann Romney, wife of then-presidential candidate Mitt Romney, had “actually never worked a day in her life.” As Crisis magazine pointed out at the time, too, such sentiments are uncontroversial in Rosen’s milieu. They also have an interesting pedigree. Friedrich Engels, co-author of The Communist Manifesto with Karl Marx, wrote that “the first condition for the liberation of the wife is to bring the whole female sex back into public industry.” French feminist icon Simone de Beauvoir even suggested this be accomplished by force. “No woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise her children,” she stated in 1976. “… Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.”

De Beauvoir certainly was right on one matter: Many women, even today, will make that choice. Rosen is a lesbian who lived with another female, adopted children, then separated; Engels was a childless man who, back in the 19th century already, had not a wife but a “partner”; and de Beauvoir was a childless, polyamorous woman. As for the “normals,” though, a 2015 Gallup poll found that 56 percent of women with children under 18 preferred staying home with their kids to having a career, and a Motherly survey last year showed that more are now doing so, too — 24 percent in 2023 vs. 15 percent in 2022.

These women are choosing that higher calling, often while not even fully grasping that it is higher and not fully realizing that the careerism they’re rejecting may glitter, in the right light, but is not gold. No one explained this better than happy-warrior philosopher G.K. Chesterton. Commenting in the early 1900s on “women’s liberation,” he found humor in how stenography was a common female career path at the time. 

“Ten thousand women,” Chesterton noted, “marched through the streets shouting, ‘We will not be dictated to,’ and went off and became stenographers.”

This was, of course, considered “emancipation”; really, though, today the “mother” (i.e., stay-at-home) role requires emancipation from the Beauvoirists’ stigmatization. Chesterton did this beautifully in his 1910 book What’s Wrong with the World? in a chapter not surprisingly titled “The Emancipation of Domesticity.” To wit:

When domesticity, for instance, is called drudgery, all the difficulty arises from a double meaning in the word. If drudgery only means dreadfully hard work, I admit the woman drudges in the home, as a man might drudge at the Cathedral of Amiens or drudge behind a gun at Trafalgar. But if it means that the hard work is more heavy because it is trifling, colourless and of small import to the soul, then as I say, I give it up; I do not know what the words mean. To be Queen Elizabeth within a definite area, deciding sales, banquets, labours, and holidays; to be Whiteley within a certain area, providing toys, boots, sheets, cakes, and books, to be Aristotle within a certain area, teaching morals, manners, theology, and hygiene; I can understand how this might exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow it. How can it be a large career to tell other people’s children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one’s own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? No; a woman’s function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute. I will pity Mrs. Jones for the hugeness of her task; I will never pity her for its smallness.

That hugeness, too, reflects the status’ specialness. An employer might have numerous employees and, no matter how gifted one might be, replace him as he would a factory-machine cog. Oh, a woman might upon retirement have a going-away party, but she does in fact go away and pass away from thought. A good mother doesn’t go away and is thought of even after she passes away. Thus is there a film I Remember Mama and not I Remember Call-center Worker Debbie From Cubicle C.

Yet more can still be said. A devoted mother is a shoulder to cry on when the crying needs to be done, she’s there to share in the laughter and joy when the laughter and joy come, she’s present to teach the moral lessons when the morality will hit home, and she’s around to model virtue when the modeling will most matter. Just as with inspiration, the highest quality of quality time can’t be scheduled. What’s more, to paraphrase Jesus, there is no greater love than when a man dies for another. A dedicated mother rejects the lure of the world and dies to herself, sacrificing herself for her children, subordinating her wants to their needs, being the shoulders on which they stand and the wind beneath their wings.

Of course, all this sounds glamorized enough to make a cynic cringe. Speaking of which, the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg once said on the matter, “Motherly love ain’t everything it has been cracked up to be. To some extent it’s a myth that men have created to make women think that they do this job to perfection.” And while many would say she probably could’ve been a far better stay-at-home mom than SCOTUS justice, she misunderstood. With people being imperfect, no one is truly worthy of being a president, scientist, researcher, general, father, or mother. Someone must be, though, and only humans are available to fill the role. Even more significantly, this isn’t about the impossibility of living up to an ideal, but what role for a woman is ideal.

Fulfillment of it is ideal for society, too. The family is the central building block of civilization, and mother is a central building block of the family. To quote Chesterton one more time, “This triangle of truisms, of father, mother and child, cannot be destroyed; it can only destroy those civilizations which disregard it.” Father, daycare center, and child are no equivalent.

It is said that the “hand that rocks the cradle rules the world.” The more mother is present and is that hand, the less likely it is to be a darker one, such as government, that may rock the pillars of civilization as it raises the kids — and Hell.

                     This article was originally published at The New American.