Undead sexist cliche: women must become breeders!

The desire to end feminism and shove women back into being stay-at-home moms has been around since the Reagan years. That’s when right-wingers began invoking the 1950s (or more precisely, a distorted fantasy of that decade) as the point of America’s perfection, before the fall from Eden of the 1960s. Men go out and work, women devote themselves to family and housekeeping, what could be more ideal?

That lots of women worked even in that decade, and that lots of women chose to ditch the 1950s sitcom-wife lifestyle (when job discrimination became illegal and no-fault divorce an option) — well, that was just some feminists using Jedi mind tricks! Patriarchy knows what women want! Allowing women to choose motherhood or not, based on personal preference, is just crazy talk.

Unsurprisingly the right wing is still obsessed with making women breed (I discussed WaPo’s profile of two of the “pronatalists” a while back). And this, in turn, justifies all there are other undead sexist cliches: women shouldn’t have careers because then they’d be at home, raising (white, conservative, Christian) babies. It should be perfectly acceptable for men to discriminate against women and advance other men at work! Etc., etc. And of course, they think birth control is bad and only sluts use it. And if a woman disagrees, discredit her by calling her ugly.

One of the reasons women are less enthused about having kids than men is they know they’ll do most of the child care. Men don’t have to see it as a major disruption in their careers; women do. Republicans want to maintain that dynamic because they’ve no interest in making life easier for women. So we have ideas such as giving medals for motherhood, $5,000 cash bonuses for kids and sex ed that teaches girls to track their menstrual cycle and make it easier to conceive (meanwhile, Indiana’s legislature removed any requirements to teach about consent in sex ed). Oh, and the Heritage Foundation, rather than worrying about teen pregnancy, is only worrying about unmarried teenage pregnancy. Which fits with the 1950s fetish: teens marrying and having babies was quite common back then. Did I mention Texas wants to ban birth control for teens? See also this.

The whole concept of undead sexist cliches is that misogyny and sexism’s view of women’s role never changes, only the rationales and the justifications for keeping women in a narrow, confining box.

For more on forced-birthers, check out Undead Sexist Cliches, available in ebook, in paperback, or you can order the paperback direct from me.