I am turning 35 in July and you articulated the low key discomfort I'm feeling. I also just ended a 6 year relationship because I no longer want to raise a peer. Whew! Checking allllll those boxes.
Good for you — truly. The “raising a peer” thing is is something I hadn’t heard someone articulate that way before and had to give credit where it’s due lmao
Love this Katie—a lot to chew on. I think the question that has plagued my own dual income high-earning household here in San Francisco is, when we have kids, how the hell do we solve this "who runs the private sphere" question? We're a (thankfully) balanced couple in terms of housework right now, but once a baby enters the equation, there is just no elegant solution to who handles that third full-time job of childcare/housework. We're discussing the setup many in our situation have turned to: outsourcing to other people. This sort of makes me uneasy because does that just create another vicious circle of reinstating British aristocracy-era class hierarchies? (I'm thinking of Downtown Abbey and the manor of servants.) To your point, there HAS to be another solution, I'm just struggling to think of what that is right now. I, too, lack the imagination to reimagine our current system because it'd require such a sea change I have no idea what bowling pins would have to fall to make way for it.
I can only speak from my experience, I have a 5 and 7yo and have been with my husband 19 years; married 13. We were the same as you pre kids. The first couple years as parents were transitionary, so yes, a little hard. But today, and for many years, it is equal again. I am pretty much the only one I know who doesn’t harvest at least some resentment toward their (cis het male) partner. I want to tell you it’s possible but I also want to emphasize there is no secret sauce. Yes I chose a “good one” but women everywhere do that all the time only to get the bait and switch when kids arrive. Still, I want you to know it’s possible. I hate that women are told to accept platitudes like “marriage is hard work.” That is not the necessary state of marriage - even after kids. It bodes well for lazy, shitty male partners for women to think that though.
Love your pod, Katie - but I think I’m going to love your writing even more! Nodded along enthusiastically to all of this. To be fair, my commute to the office is a 30 minute walk through Edinburgh, so of course I love going in most days. I do appreciate my employer’s hybrid work policy though, which is very generous to colleagues with childcare commitments etc. So we have options. But I’m 35, single with no dependents, and spent the majority of my career in the office surrounded by my peers, so I tend to still thrive in that kind of environment.
Idk it’s kind of funny, I just wonder what life would be like if service jobs like grocery store clerk, barista, or bookstore lady paid enough to cover basic living expenses, and if you worked a bit of overtime, and saved up, could cover the cost of having kids.
I think America would be a lot different. (I’m projecting bc my dream job is to be a gardener or run a ceramics shop, but it’s currently at odds with MY GOAL of having a child around 35, so here I am grinding away at underpaid science gigs begging for the levy to break so I can someday make it into the 6 figure club and actually MAYBE afford that child!)
Older woman here (still married, daughter) and only managed to get to the top to then be knocked down from the pandemic/health issue... I feel we've gotten wrong what equality means. It doesn't mean we're going to "do it like a man" that's what men want but on the cheap. The whole thing needs to change to if women actually own/are in charge of 51% of EVERYTHING. We are not even close and the majority of men are fighting all of it. Not because they are evil (although they do evil things) but because EVERYTHING would change. It's not going to happen in my lifetime and probably not my daughters. As much as Gloria and all the rest pushed the boundaries of woman's rights I always hear Firestone "Most women give up in despair: if that's how deep it goes they don't want to know." https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/1964-death-of-a-revolutionary-shulamith-firestone
I'm a 30yo mom of two who is stalling her career a bit to work from home and stay at a company that I know offers okay maternity leave benefits and a flexible work schedule. We don't know if we're doing having kids, and the unknowns of what a workplace would be like to take maternity leave with or have to pump at work. We are asking for basic things from men who bend over backwards informally for each other. It's wild. My husband is an absolute equal partner but it's still not enough.
I turned 50 this year. From corporate, small co., start up, stay at home, now self employed, I’ve limped through this cycle of what the world says and what I now know about work. Nancy Pearcey dedicated a chapter in Total Truth to women/family work. I do wonder how romanticized pre-industrial revolution work was for women. From an agriculture background, my parents did not gee and haw often when working together. My husband and I have attempted, unsuccessfully, to work together. Not sure what the right answer is but my daughter is heading to college this fall, I suggested that she get experience post college and asap start her own business to gain control over her time and energy.
Want to flesh out my previous comment as I realized that it may come across as supportive of a return to “traditional values” (whatever that actually means!?).. what I mean when I say that we might get the shifts we want towards a more just and equitable world when we actually value care work is: if we can make a good living, sustain ourselves and our families from providing care, whether that is for other humans, animals, land, ecosystems etc… and when that work is valued and engaging (not just cleaning messes all day long but working together to innovate, provide the best possible care, in the funest, most regenerative ways), when we also have rest and fun and hobbies and connection, then I think life will feel a whole lot better.
This is so relateable. I too, just entered the sphere of having been a fully remote worker longer than I ever was an in office contributor. I feel a constant pull in both directions, as I am the only fully remote employee on my team, having moved away from our corporate office.. and I often wonder if this decision has severely limited my career growth. Yet I absolutely love the flexibility and comfort of working from home, and my overall mental health has actually increased since moving back home and having been kept on as a remote employee.
Thank you for your reflection Katie. I don’t have the answers either and my sense is that we may find some solutions in a society that actually truly recognizes and values care work. Something that no feminist movement has yet to achieve. Free care work is the ultimate corporate subsidy. I’m curious about how our lives dramatically shift in this case.
None of you really seem to understand what a trad wife actually is- that many of them do indeed work and head successful entrepreneurial endeavors.
Aside from that, true stay at home moms (of which I am one) are also misunderstood. The modern feminist imagination recoils at the image of the stay-at-home mother. She’s portrayed as a relic, a submissive ghost of the 1950s—trapped, dependent, and worst of all, unambitious. But this is a caricature, not a critique. And it reveals more about the disembodied fantasies of our post-industrial culture than it does about women themselves.
To choose to stay home, to raise children, to manage the rhythms of a household—this is not regression. It is a reclamation. In fact, it’s one of the few remaining ways a woman can assert the primacy of embodied reality over the delusions of the digital age.
The idea that caregiving is somehow inferior to paid labor is a value judgment born of a capitalist paradigm that has colonized feminism. Under this model, your worth is measured by your productivity—your salary, your LinkedIn profile, your output. Motherhood, being unpaid and immeasurable, is dismissed as drudgery. But that’s a shallow lens. It fails to see that nurturing the next generation is not only work—it is foundational work. Without it, no economy, no state, no society can stand.
This misunderstanding originates in a fundamental misreading of liberation. The second-wave feminist project sought to free women from domestic constraint, which was, in many cases, necessary and good. But in doing so, it collapsed freedom into sameness. To be equal to men meant to be like men: to join the workforce, to outsource care, to devalue the home. It was a liberation that required a denial of difference.
But women are not—and should not have to be—disembodied economic units. The maternal body is not a burden; it is a reality. And the choice to stay home is not about going backwards—it’s about opting out of a system that refuses to see caregiving as real work and womanhood as more than wage labor.
Far from regressive, the stay-at-home mother is resisting the reduction of all human value to market logic. She is rejecting the narrative that outsourced, industrialized child-rearing is inherently better. She is reclaiming a space that modernity has tried to erase—a space where love, dependence, and mutual obligation are not signs of weakness but of strength.
This is not to say every woman should stay home. But every woman should be free to do so without being branded a traitor to her sex. Because sometimes the most radical act in a world obsessed with progress is to protect the things that make life meaningful.
Quitting my job and staying home with my children has been one of the most liberating acts I have ever executed. It’s like I found a secret portal few know exist and I am living a secret dream life that wasn’t on the checklist. I am brought to tears on an almost daily basis at how incredibly lucky I am to be doing this work. Come to the dark side!
I don't know if it's because I'm in Australia, but here and certainly in my workplace, it's less "work fully from home or the office, pick one", but a recognition that people like the flexibility of doing both. Most people I know, including myself like going into the office at least a few days a week to see colleagues, have a chat, print off my knitting patterns on works dollar, and do all the other work stuff we did in the before times. I've never heard anyone dismiss office work as completely pointless just because we have the ability to work from home now. Ironically, this kind of serves your second point about modern feminism because having this flexibility for both genders means I now see a lot more dad's ducking out to take their kid to the dentist or do school pick ups.
I am turning 35 in July and you articulated the low key discomfort I'm feeling. I also just ended a 6 year relationship because I no longer want to raise a peer. Whew! Checking allllll those boxes.
Good for you — truly. The “raising a peer” thing is is something I hadn’t heard someone articulate that way before and had to give credit where it’s due lmao
Love this Katie—a lot to chew on. I think the question that has plagued my own dual income high-earning household here in San Francisco is, when we have kids, how the hell do we solve this "who runs the private sphere" question? We're a (thankfully) balanced couple in terms of housework right now, but once a baby enters the equation, there is just no elegant solution to who handles that third full-time job of childcare/housework. We're discussing the setup many in our situation have turned to: outsourcing to other people. This sort of makes me uneasy because does that just create another vicious circle of reinstating British aristocracy-era class hierarchies? (I'm thinking of Downtown Abbey and the manor of servants.) To your point, there HAS to be another solution, I'm just struggling to think of what that is right now. I, too, lack the imagination to reimagine our current system because it'd require such a sea change I have no idea what bowling pins would have to fall to make way for it.
I can only speak from my experience, I have a 5 and 7yo and have been with my husband 19 years; married 13. We were the same as you pre kids. The first couple years as parents were transitionary, so yes, a little hard. But today, and for many years, it is equal again. I am pretty much the only one I know who doesn’t harvest at least some resentment toward their (cis het male) partner. I want to tell you it’s possible but I also want to emphasize there is no secret sauce. Yes I chose a “good one” but women everywhere do that all the time only to get the bait and switch when kids arrive. Still, I want you to know it’s possible. I hate that women are told to accept platitudes like “marriage is hard work.” That is not the necessary state of marriage - even after kids. It bodes well for lazy, shitty male partners for women to think that though.
None of my jobs ever came with any fuck-around time, so maybe that is why I do not miss working in offices.
Just high pressure and low pay.
I prefer working at home for myself. I still have low pay but I’m not being shit on.
Love your pod, Katie - but I think I’m going to love your writing even more! Nodded along enthusiastically to all of this. To be fair, my commute to the office is a 30 minute walk through Edinburgh, so of course I love going in most days. I do appreciate my employer’s hybrid work policy though, which is very generous to colleagues with childcare commitments etc. So we have options. But I’m 35, single with no dependents, and spent the majority of my career in the office surrounded by my peers, so I tend to still thrive in that kind of environment.
Ah, this is such a kind compliment. Thanks for saying that. Writing about not-money still feels a little foreign to me so I appreciate you being here!
Idk it’s kind of funny, I just wonder what life would be like if service jobs like grocery store clerk, barista, or bookstore lady paid enough to cover basic living expenses, and if you worked a bit of overtime, and saved up, could cover the cost of having kids.
I think America would be a lot different. (I’m projecting bc my dream job is to be a gardener or run a ceramics shop, but it’s currently at odds with MY GOAL of having a child around 35, so here I am grinding away at underpaid science gigs begging for the levy to break so I can someday make it into the 6 figure club and actually MAYBE afford that child!)
Older woman here (still married, daughter) and only managed to get to the top to then be knocked down from the pandemic/health issue... I feel we've gotten wrong what equality means. It doesn't mean we're going to "do it like a man" that's what men want but on the cheap. The whole thing needs to change to if women actually own/are in charge of 51% of EVERYTHING. We are not even close and the majority of men are fighting all of it. Not because they are evil (although they do evil things) but because EVERYTHING would change. It's not going to happen in my lifetime and probably not my daughters. As much as Gloria and all the rest pushed the boundaries of woman's rights I always hear Firestone "Most women give up in despair: if that's how deep it goes they don't want to know." https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/1964-death-of-a-revolutionary-shulamith-firestone
I'm a 30yo mom of two who is stalling her career a bit to work from home and stay at a company that I know offers okay maternity leave benefits and a flexible work schedule. We don't know if we're doing having kids, and the unknowns of what a workplace would be like to take maternity leave with or have to pump at work. We are asking for basic things from men who bend over backwards informally for each other. It's wild. My husband is an absolute equal partner but it's still not enough.
I turned 50 this year. From corporate, small co., start up, stay at home, now self employed, I’ve limped through this cycle of what the world says and what I now know about work. Nancy Pearcey dedicated a chapter in Total Truth to women/family work. I do wonder how romanticized pre-industrial revolution work was for women. From an agriculture background, my parents did not gee and haw often when working together. My husband and I have attempted, unsuccessfully, to work together. Not sure what the right answer is but my daughter is heading to college this fall, I suggested that she get experience post college and asap start her own business to gain control over her time and energy.
Want to flesh out my previous comment as I realized that it may come across as supportive of a return to “traditional values” (whatever that actually means!?).. what I mean when I say that we might get the shifts we want towards a more just and equitable world when we actually value care work is: if we can make a good living, sustain ourselves and our families from providing care, whether that is for other humans, animals, land, ecosystems etc… and when that work is valued and engaging (not just cleaning messes all day long but working together to innovate, provide the best possible care, in the funest, most regenerative ways), when we also have rest and fun and hobbies and connection, then I think life will feel a whole lot better.
This is so relateable. I too, just entered the sphere of having been a fully remote worker longer than I ever was an in office contributor. I feel a constant pull in both directions, as I am the only fully remote employee on my team, having moved away from our corporate office.. and I often wonder if this decision has severely limited my career growth. Yet I absolutely love the flexibility and comfort of working from home, and my overall mental health has actually increased since moving back home and having been kept on as a remote employee.
“Again, we run into this issue: Expressing discontent with any element of our progress risks welcoming regression”
Kachowwwww 🔥
You’re such a great writer it’s absurd, I can’t wait to read your book
Thank you for your reflection Katie. I don’t have the answers either and my sense is that we may find some solutions in a society that actually truly recognizes and values care work. Something that no feminist movement has yet to achieve. Free care work is the ultimate corporate subsidy. I’m curious about how our lives dramatically shift in this case.
You're an excellent writer, and I enjoyed this reflection on a third way!
None of you really seem to understand what a trad wife actually is- that many of them do indeed work and head successful entrepreneurial endeavors.
Aside from that, true stay at home moms (of which I am one) are also misunderstood. The modern feminist imagination recoils at the image of the stay-at-home mother. She’s portrayed as a relic, a submissive ghost of the 1950s—trapped, dependent, and worst of all, unambitious. But this is a caricature, not a critique. And it reveals more about the disembodied fantasies of our post-industrial culture than it does about women themselves.
To choose to stay home, to raise children, to manage the rhythms of a household—this is not regression. It is a reclamation. In fact, it’s one of the few remaining ways a woman can assert the primacy of embodied reality over the delusions of the digital age.
The idea that caregiving is somehow inferior to paid labor is a value judgment born of a capitalist paradigm that has colonized feminism. Under this model, your worth is measured by your productivity—your salary, your LinkedIn profile, your output. Motherhood, being unpaid and immeasurable, is dismissed as drudgery. But that’s a shallow lens. It fails to see that nurturing the next generation is not only work—it is foundational work. Without it, no economy, no state, no society can stand.
This misunderstanding originates in a fundamental misreading of liberation. The second-wave feminist project sought to free women from domestic constraint, which was, in many cases, necessary and good. But in doing so, it collapsed freedom into sameness. To be equal to men meant to be like men: to join the workforce, to outsource care, to devalue the home. It was a liberation that required a denial of difference.
But women are not—and should not have to be—disembodied economic units. The maternal body is not a burden; it is a reality. And the choice to stay home is not about going backwards—it’s about opting out of a system that refuses to see caregiving as real work and womanhood as more than wage labor.
Far from regressive, the stay-at-home mother is resisting the reduction of all human value to market logic. She is rejecting the narrative that outsourced, industrialized child-rearing is inherently better. She is reclaiming a space that modernity has tried to erase—a space where love, dependence, and mutual obligation are not signs of weakness but of strength.
This is not to say every woman should stay home. But every woman should be free to do so without being branded a traitor to her sex. Because sometimes the most radical act in a world obsessed with progress is to protect the things that make life meaningful.
Quitting my job and staying home with my children has been one of the most liberating acts I have ever executed. It’s like I found a secret portal few know exist and I am living a secret dream life that wasn’t on the checklist. I am brought to tears on an almost daily basis at how incredibly lucky I am to be doing this work. Come to the dark side!
I don't know if it's because I'm in Australia, but here and certainly in my workplace, it's less "work fully from home or the office, pick one", but a recognition that people like the flexibility of doing both. Most people I know, including myself like going into the office at least a few days a week to see colleagues, have a chat, print off my knitting patterns on works dollar, and do all the other work stuff we did in the before times. I've never heard anyone dismiss office work as completely pointless just because we have the ability to work from home now. Ironically, this kind of serves your second point about modern feminism because having this flexibility for both genders means I now see a lot more dad's ducking out to take their kid to the dentist or do school pick ups.