Mother’s Day seems as American as apple pie. It used to be the biggest day of the year for telephone companies, with many calling their mom only to hear: “All circuits are busy. Try your call later.” Of late, however, it has become controversial to even talk about Mother’s Day. The cancel culture has come to call.
The difficulty with Mother’s Day isn’t new, as Catherine Newman wrote in Salon back in 2015: “Like a lot of you, I have friends who have tried desperately and unsuccessfully to become moms and carry a great deal of pain and shame associated with that, so for them this holiday silently burns.”
A new retailing trend, considering the struggle of women like Newman, allows women to opt out of marketing emails about Mother’s Day. Perhaps it is a generous way to help women, but maybe it also speaks of a larger culture-wide problem. Not unrelatedly, for example, the CDC just reported that the U.S. birthrate is at a historic low. Motherhood is in serious peril on several fronts.
How, then, did we get to this place where fewer women are having children, and the mere mention that other women have children is triggering? As I explore in detail in my book, The End of Woman, Americans adopted five basic second-wave feminist pillars, marketed to appeal to the independent spirit of the American woman. What is generally not known is that these ideas were perpetuated largely by the Communist Party, which was trying to use the angst of women to achieve
