I grew up steeped in the value of gender equality. I can still remember a heated conversation around the coloring table at preschool—I was the kid arguing “There’s no such thing as girls’ colors and boys’ colors.” My all-girls high school had the unspoken motto of “Beat the boys.” We were encouraged to work hard and dream big; to become scientists, lawyers, and engineers. Our teachers rarely suggested traditionally female careers like teaching or nursing, and “the M word” (motherhood) was never mentioned.
Abigail Favale perfectly describes the kind of feminism I was raised in:
The classic feminist argument affirms sex role fluidity—a woman can do whatever a man can do. Thus, a different notion of woman’s essence is presupposed: namely, none. Instead, women and men become essentially interchangeable, essentially the same. Because a woman can do anything, she no longer is anything in particular.
As a result, I grew up very disconnected from my femaleness. Unlike other girls, I never wore pink. I never put on makeup. I never did my hair. Skirts, breasts, and menstrual periods were just minor inconveniences to be overcome in an effort to “beat the boys.”
Parenthood: Struggle for Equality
As a young adult, I thought that finding a compatible partner meant finding someone exactly like me—a man who shared not just the same values and beliefs, but the same interests and tastes, the same sense of humor and style of communication. I expected a partnership to involve two people working interchangeably toward their shared goals.
When I eventually got married and then pregnant, it was the first time I began to understand my female body as something intricately designed for a distinct purpose. And yet, once I had given birth to our first son, nursing seemed to be the only thing that distinguished my role from my husband’s. I had somehow come to parenthood with the idea that my husband’s and my relationship with our son would be more or less the same—our “parenting” would be equal and identical.
But things never seemed to work out that way. My husband’s approach to raising children was fundamentally different. At times, we had opposite beliefs about what our son needed from us. My husband thought he needed more independence, but I thought he needed more connection. He thought I was being too gentle, and I thought he was being too firm. Because of this, our family life felt like a struggle. Our innate tendencies were always pulling in different directions, making it hard to reach the elusive goal of “equality.”
