Feminists Don't Get It: Motherhood's a Drug

For Katie Roiphe, the connection with her newborn child is like an “addiction," she writes on DoubleX. "There is an opium-den quality to maternity leave. The high of a love that obliterates everything.” Why, then, can’t feminists accept that motherhood is more than a “vocation?” Sure, “the act of caring for a baby is demanding, and arduous, of course, but it is wilder and more narcotic than any kind of work I have ever done.”

Roiphe thinks the rationale for this “minor dishonesty” of the movement is an effort “to analogize childcare to the work of men.” That’s all well and good for a “rational, politically expedient assessment,” but it’s plain wrong. “Part of the allure of maternity leave is precisely this: You give up everything you are and care about,” Roiphe writes. “You are transported in a way you will never be transported again; this is the vacation to end all vacations.” (More parenting stories.)