Real Feminist

Over the summer, a peculiar thing started to happen. I’d be mindlessly chatting with someone about our respective futures and they’d bring up their excitement to start a family, how they’d already chosen a few names for their dreamt-about sons. Or I’d see one of my friends bring his months-old baby girl to work with him, and the way he never stopped adoring her from across the room, even in his preoccupation. And in these scenarios and others like them, I’d listen with curiosity and watch with awe, and I’d catch myself thinking: maybe I do want kids.

Since I was mature enough to start thinking really critically about what it meant to raise a child and, more concerning to me, what such a commitment meant for my personal life, I decided that I didn’t want to have my own kids. I’d be an aunt to my sister’s children and the go-to babysitter for all of my best friends’ kids, but I had no desire to have any of my own. I had an arsenal of reasons for this—the financial investment, the extensive time commitment, the loss of complete and uninhibited independence, the looming threat of overpopulation, and of course, the thought of all the ways you could possibly mess up a human life. And I always kind of inwardly patted myself on the back for being so thoroughly rational and countercultural in my decision to not have kids, as if the fact that I desired something still frequently stigmatized in our culture made me some kind of a Real Badass Feminist.

Lately, though, I’ve been pondering the possibility of having my own kids more and more seriously, and I have to admit it’s growing on me. Maybe I am capable of nurturing a small clump of cells into full, beautiful, imperfect personhood; maybe I’d actually have fun doing it. And as I grow deeper into this idea of motherhood, I’m realizing that choosing to have kids, and really, really wanting them, can be just as badass and feminist as choosing not to.

I feel like mainstream Western feminism often has this connotation to it that you have to go against societal norms and expectations in order to be seen as a legitimate feminist—and in some ways that’s true. You must go against social norms that treat women as less deserving of respect and dignity than men. You must go against labor market standards that unequally reward the achievements and qualifications of women. You must go against harmful categorizations that limit the ambition and potential of young girls. But it’s also valid for you to want to fulfill roles that are “traditional” or stereotypical for women, to desire things that actually do align with what society says women should desire. Being a feminist does not necessitate a complete rejection of the spaces that social norms and constructions have historically put women in, because we have the power to reclaim those spaces. I firmly believe that each of us has the agency to reshape the boxes we are put in and redefine them for ourselves, so that they become empowering rather than oppressing. Yes, structural barriers are still real and need to be confronted—and that is another necessary and important conversation to be had—but in the everyday, personal sense of things,each of us at least has the power to assert what our desires and our roles mean to ourselves.

I have realized that a critical part of being feminist means recognizing the truth that we are the deciders of our own subjectivity. This is true not only for women but for all kinds of oppressed people, and indeed many historically oppressed groups have long been using this act of reclamation as a form of irrefutable retaliation. It was only in the context of thinking about my potential to be a mother if I so chose it that I realized I could do this for myself, too. If being a mother is beautiful and empowering to me, if I choose to reclaim it as that, then that is as badass and feminist as the next woman who does not want kids for a plethora of her own self-determined reasons.

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Leilani Ly is a Sociology major and Psychology minor. Loves: drinking tea with milk, singing in the shower, and late nights filled with talking.