The Feminist Left is Pro Family. Why Not Say So?

"Why Moms Are Paying to Get Away from their Families" is the title of Toronto Globe and Mail columnist Amberly McAteer's July 31st 2026 column.  She attended a retreat organized for moms of all ages and stages, to spend a week or whatever engaging in fun activities together -- and completely away from their children.

McAteer's point is that, while we still live in patriarchal societies and families, it is true that women's lives have changed significantly.  The list of activities that most women are free to do is longer, with being major wage earners at the top of the list.  And parenting, one of the key activities that were always central to the "wife and mother role" in heterosexual marriages, is arguably but evidently more highly valued than ever by society.

The problem is that women today are judged to be good or bad in the "wife and mother" role based on the future economic and other success of their children.  Indeed, having "successful" children has increased in perceived importance so much that every mother is "expected to devote extraordinary amounts of time and all of her energy to maximizing her child's development, and her value as a person depend[s] on it…  'The standards have gone up…  and the support has disappeared' -- the village of family and community networks that helped shoulder the work of raising children [has dissipated]…  Whereas the measure of a good woman in the 1950s and 1960s was her husband's success and well-being…  women today are increasingly judged by the success of their children".

Fathers Are Changing…

Studies show that husbands today are doing more to help their wives to do both the housework and nurturing parent roles, and are especially enthusiastic about getting close to their kids and being active parents.  The problem is that they still do much less.  And they are seen by society, and often by themselves, as 'helping' the mother to do what mothers are primarily responsible for doing.  They may share tasks, but it is the mother who has the responsibility. 

What does it mean to say that a mother's role expectations are now overwhelmingly centered on being responsible for the 'success' of their children?  How does it change how we see the ways in which women are made unequal in this society?  How does it change what a feminist left should be fighting for?

… But Has Anything Really Changed?

It is possible to argue that nothing much has really changed.  The Sixties Generation 'second wave' women's movement argued that 'the personal is political'.  Males were treated as superior to females outside the family and household in no small measure because they were superior inside the family and household.  Society was patriarchal (father role dominated) because families were patriarchal.   

At the risk of being reductionist, it could be said that males controlled, and even in some sense owned, women's bodies -- the Producers had to own and control women in order to make sure females played their natural Reproducer role first and foremost.

The primary responsibility of all females was to be the biological reproducer (hence the imperative to be heterosexual and sexually available to at least one man).  This was the basis of women's natural superiority at being nurturers.  They had a 'maternal instinct'.  The corresponding nature of males was to be Providers for and Protectors of women and children, especially in 'their' family (hence the heterosexual imperative for males also).

The Choice Agenda of Liberal Feminists Has Won Out

The moderate (liberal feminist) wing of the second wave women's movement sought to reform the patriarchy by giving women more choice.  More choice to be an equal breadwinner (Producer).  More choice (ultimately the only one to exert the choice) to decide whether to have children and when and with whom. 

Both radical and socialist feminists took seriously the possibility and necessity of 'abolishing the patriarchal family'.  Radical feminists stressed the need to end male overbearing, and sometimes violent, control of women's bodies.  Socialist feminists entertained ideas for the massive expansion of public services that could supplement, and sometimes even replace, the wife and mother role in the family.  Most feminists of whatever persuasion agreed that women should not be limited by assumptions about the supposed 'nature' of females and males. 

Many if not all feminist ideas are more widely accepted today.  Patriarchy (predominance of the father role) in the family and in the wider society is less seen as 'natural' and unchangeable.  The liberal feminist idea that women should be more free to choose within both the Producer and Reproducer roles has won out.

Women Have More Choice, But Patriarchy Rules

But patriarchy is far from abolished, or reformed in so many of its aspects that it is on its way to being replaced with some kind of 'free and equal' status for males and females.  The freedom to choose within a set of institutions that are still father role dominated is at best a partial freedom.  It is a freedom that varies considerably based on the resources that  a woman has because of her other statuses. 

If McAteer is right, mothers are increasingly judged by how well they do in nurturing and educating their children to be a "success".   They are less judged by how much they help their husbands to be a success. 

I take this to mean that husband and wife are more autonomous in their producer roles, that each is judged individually responsible for their own success or failure economically, and each should be free to make their own choices in this domain.  Wives and mothers are still stuck with primary responsibility for childcare and housework.  But it is also understood that that a woman's place is not necessarily in the home, that she does not have to give up on her equal right to an economic career. 

So it is already implicitly recognized that mothers have both the right and the need to be fully away from their children, and from being the one responsible for nurturing them, for long periods.  But all too often it is assumed that mothers must actually remain responsible regardless of where they are and what they are doing. 

The Maternal Instinct Is a Myth

McAteer zeroes in on a key basis for this, the idea that the desire and capacity to nurture children is inborn for all females, and not for males (or other genders).  She counters that the "maternal instinct is a myth".  The desire and capacity to nurture may be partly learned and partly inborn as part of our biological natures, but if this is so, the instinctual 'desire to nurture' and the learned 'capacity to nurture' are not gendered.  

"When fathers stay home from the beginning and assume a caretaker role, they don't just bond with their newborns.  They learn the rhythms of caregiving and feel confident that they can -- and should -- be an equal partner, establishing a partnership that research suggests endures long after the leave ends…  Caregiving…  isn't inherently maternal; it's human".

But parental leave, even if extensive, is only the beginning. 

Mothers Are More Free to Leave the Family. What About Freedom to Be In the Family?

The Liberal Feminist choice agenda has established the right and need of mothers to leave the family. But what about the right and need to be in the family, and to be so in a good way? How do we achieve this?

The radical feminist agenda of ending male control of the psyche and bodies of females, and the encroachment and (threat of) violence that often goes with, is as important as ever. The argument usually made to ground this is the liberal one that all individuals have the right of private ownership of their own self. Fair enough, but I think a better argument is to say that everyone’s psyche and body is ‘sacred’ and inviolable.

Part of a full-scale solution here will be the socialist feminist one of "It takes a village".   And that it takes major changes to the village, to the people and institutions and policies outside the family.

But I think that most people can agree that above all "It takes both (all) parents" as the psychological foundation and the center of nurturing, especially in the early years, but really always.  I think that most of us agree that we want to ultimately abolish patriarchy in family and society.  We do not want to "abolish the family", certainly not the love and care between parents and children within a personal sphere of family.

Pro Children, Pro Parenting, Pro Family

So it is important for today's feminist left to develop, and highlight to the public, its goal of making families a place of freedom and equality for adult members (the personal is political).  But we also need to highlight that our goal is to make the family a place where adults parent freely and equally, where love and care between family members, but especially between parents and children, is fostered and strengthened by both public policies and interpersonal norms. 

The feminist left needs a more detailed, and more publicly emphasized, pro-family agenda.