There is a particular kind of criticism reserved for women who refuse to explain themselves through their children.
As women rise in their careers and receive higher visibility (in any career), suddenly the most urgent question she is asked is not how she built what she built, but can she display an apology for being a career-woman-mother. This happens in interviews, at dinner parties, in relationships. It is the same demand: center your children, acknowledge the sacrifice, make your ambition legitimate through the lens of motherhood — otherwise, you are not a good woman.
The recent discourse around Emma Grede, a British business woman, author, co-founder of Good American and SKIMS, and by now in every third scroll on your feed is a great example of this. Grede has been building for years, doing the tedious, unglamorous work of actually running companies. She is currently doing a lot of press, and her wave of visibility has arrived with a backlash. The critique is not about her business decisions, but about the fact that she speaks about ambition without making motherhood the center of her businesses. She has four children. She mentions them but she doesn’t organize her personal identity narrative around them.
And people, especially women, are mad about it.
Scrolling on Tiktok this morning, I was very surprised to see all the criticism she was getting. Why do we still expect women to make their ambition acceptable by shaping it in maternal devotion? And what does it cost us, all of us, when we enforce that expectation on each other?
Scrolling away in bed, instead of starting the day, I couldn’t help but wonder: is a woman’s ambition only trustworthy if she seems conflicted about it?
A few weeks ago I was invited to speak at a women’s leadership panel for young women who were graduating or were in the early career years. The panel began with the question: what are you most proud of in your career?
The most senior, and by all accounts, the one with the most pedigree kicked off the answer: “I am most proud of being able to pick up my daughter from the bus stop everyday”. My heart sank just a little. Not because her experience or value of motherhood wasn’t important, but because she had distilled her entire, illustrious career to one part of her life (albeit, a large one). I wondered what the young women in the audience would hear; would they hear “organize your ambition around bus schedules”, would they hear “none of your titles matter as much as mom”, would they hear “think about your biological imperative first”? I wasn’t sure but I left the panel holding a vague sense of disappointment.
Motherhood has always functioned as the organizing principle of a woman’s life, not just practically, but morally. For centuries, across cultures, the “good woman” was defined almost entirely through her relationship to children: as nurturer, as the person whose needs were always secondary to those of her family.
Adrienne Rich makes the incredibly important distinction in Of Woman Born between motherhood as experience: intimate, embodied, particular; and motherhood as institution: a set of rules and expectations designed to manage and constrain women’s lives. The experience could be profound; the institution was often a trap. So many years later, while we’ve sent humans the farthest away from Earth successfully, we are still living inside that same tension Rich spoke of in 1976.
Here is what I think we are actually resisting when we criticize a woman for not centering motherhood: the idea that there is more than one legitimate way to be a woman with children, and without. What if there was the mother who worked from home, and shaped her career around her primary identity of motherhood? And, what if there was the mother whose primary identity was her career, and her life was built to fit around that — children included. And what if both of those women were good?
There is the mother who works from home and shapes her professional life around school pickups and sick days, whose children are her first priority. She is real, and she is good. There is also the mother who is up early, running companies, limiting her “on-duty mom” weekend hours, not because she doesn’t love her children but because she knows herself, knows her work, and has made peace with both. She is also real, and she is also good.
Joe Rogan has children. He has never, to my knowledge, been asked to justify his ambition through them. He is the most listened-to podcaster on the planet, and his fatherhood is biographical detail, not the emotional framework through which his entire career must be understood. This courtesy extends to nearly every ambitious man in history, and no woman ever.
We have made enormous collective progress in insisting that women deserve careers, ambitions, and identities beyond the domestic arena. But we haven’t fully extended that generosity to mothers who actually live that way. The mothers who work without apology, without the softening themselves with “but my children always come first”.
“Everybody says, ‘How do you do it all? How do you wake up at 5 and run the companies?’ And, I’m like, let’s give a list of all the things that I don’t do, because you know what’s helpful? That’s what’s helpful to women.” — Emma Gerde.
Women, including women who work full-time, continue to carry a disproportionate share of unpaid domestic and emotional labor. The idea of the woman is to always be accumulating: more tasks, more schedules, more responsibilities. That is what makes her good. I love that Gerde pointed out that perhaps we should audit what we say yes to and remove the things that truly do not matter. Because so much of what women, especially mothers, do is a fabrication of an idealized version of womanhood rooted in archaic patriarchal ideas.
There is real psychological weight to what happens when motherhood becomes a woman’s sole identity.
Psychologists use the term role engulfment to describe what occurs when one social role (parent, caregiver, partner) absorbs all the others, until a person can no longer access a sense of self that exists outside of it. It is different from loving a role deeply. It is what happens when the role becomes the only answer to the question: who are you?
The concept of matrescence, which is the developmental process of becoming a mother, first identified by anthropologist Dana Raphael and brought into wider discourse by reproductive psychiatrist Dr. Alexandra Sacks, describes the psychological shift that accompanies new motherhood. Like adolescence, it is a period of genuine identity reorganization. The risk occurs when matrescence collides with patriarchy, and is this reorganization becomes total: the self that existed before is not integrated but wholly replaced by an external entity.
Reflection point:
Where in your life are you enforcing an expectation on another woman that no one should be enforcing on you?
Is there a version of another woman’s choices that you’ve been feeling is a critique of your own?
Psychological research shows that when identity becomes entirely externally dependent on others’ perceptions of you and the relentless labor of being needed, it leads to anxiety, resentment, and a diminished sense of personal agency. Women who locate their sense of self almost entirely in their external roles are more vulnerable when those roles inevitably shift: when children grow up and need them less, when the structures that hold their identity in place are suddenly gone. It creates an identity crisis for which many women are completely unprepared, mainly because no one told them to invest in themselves while caring for everyone else.
None of this is an argument against loving your children or finding genuine meaning in the daily role of caring for them. It is an argument for keeping some of yourself for yourself.
Individual success is not collective freedom — bell hooks
The Girlboss era sold women a specific story: that equality was individual, aspirational, and available to anyone willing to work hard enough. It was feminism repackaged as personal achievement, which meant it had very little to say about the structural conditions that made achievement easier for some women than others. Some of the criticism Grede is receiving is based on truth. So, is Grede offering something new, or is she the same thing but packaged differently?
I think the honest answer is: she is both.
The classic Girlboss mystified her success, as if it was a natural result of vision and grit alone. Grede is doing something different: she talks about her support systems and the staff she employs. She is teaching other women about the infrastructure that individual ambition requires.
She does not extend that structural thinking outward. She does not ask what it means that the kind of life she describes requires significant economic capital, and what we owe the women for whom “outsourcing” is not possible.
But I think that is okay. Because Grede is not talking to all women, and definitely not to all mothers. She is not talking to the soft-life woman and she is not talking to the soft-ambition woman. She is talking to the woman who wants to build beyond the identity of daughter, mother, partner — and that woman exists. She is one of many voices that are sharing infrastructural ideas about finances, ambition, and personal growth for women. Choose your fighter, based on the life you want.
We need more conversations that show that women, in any group, are not a monolith with the same needs, ideas, and identities. The Girlboss era failed, and the answer to that failure is not to demand that ambitious women center their suffering, their children, or their guilt. It is to build a broader, more honest conversation about what it actually takes (structurally, financially, relationally) for any woman to build anything at all. Collapsing women into two archetypes — the one devoted to motherhood, the other devoted to careerhood — is suffocating all our potentials.
As a childfree woman, I have been on the receiving end of a particular kind of misogyny (not just from men, but from other women who are mothers as well). The comments follow a predictable format:
How do you live such an empty life?
You’ll regret it.
But, you’ll never feel such a powerful love.
The implication is that a woman without children is waiting to begin, is filling time rather than inhabiting it. I’ve thought a lot about where that comes from. When someone makes a choice that is significantly different from your own, especially a choice as foundational as whether and how to mother, two uncomfortable things happen simultaneously:
Their existence reminds you that your own path was a choice, not a requirement — that there was always another road. This is destabilizing in proportion to how much of your identity rests on having taken the road you did.
It compels a hierarchy. If her way is good, is mine better? Is mine enough? This is not a conscious thought. It is a feeling: a comparison that surfaces as criticism, as the sudden need to establish that your version of womanhood is the correct one.
This dynamic does not only play out between mothers and childfree women. It also happens between mothers who work and those who don’t, between those who acknowledge the weight of motherhood publicly and those who hide from it. The hierarchy, in every form, is the tool of patriarchal control — and keeps us all smaller than we need to be.
Reflection point:
What is the primary way you answer the question who are you? Is that answer one you chose, or one that arrived by default?
If you are a mother, can you name three things that are true about you that have nothing to do with your children?
This is not a judgement on how anyone should live, or a suggestion that ambition is superior to presence, or that building a company matters more than building a home. This is a calling in: to make room. It is a request to respect the mother who built a company, and the mother who built a home, and the woman who built neither alongside children, and the woman who built a life beyond motherhood, as equally intelligible and worthy of our solidarity.
There is a woman who is building something, a business, a body of work, a version of herself that has always existed alongside and beyond her role as mother, partner, and daughter. She is not asking permission and she is not asking you to do it her way. She is only asking not to be made the town’s fool for the attempt.
That’s all for now! May your tables, health, and happiness be always in abundance. Live well + be well xx,
Israa
My book, Toxic Productivity, is available everywhere books are sold. You can learn more about it here: www.israanasir.com/toxic-productivity
Of Woman Born, Adrienne Rich. The foundational text on the difference between motherhood as experience and motherhood as institution.
A Life’s Work, Rachel Cusk. A startlingly honest memoir about early motherhood and the self that gets lost in it.
Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. On raising children without the weight of gendered expectation and on the identities women are allowed to have alongside their roles as mothers.
The Matrescence Project, Dr. Alexandra Sacks’ ongoing work on the psychology of becoming a mother, and why we don’t talk honestly enough about what it does to a sense of self.
Women Without Kids, Ruby Warrington. A rigorous, unsentimental examination of what it means to move through the world as a woman who isn’t a mother by choice, by circumstance, or by something in between. Warrington dismantles the assumption that childlessness is either a tragedy or a feminist trophy, and asks the more honest question: what does a woman’s life mean when she is allowed to mean it on her own terms?
Cover image: https://ca.pinterest.com/pin/1477812374963255/
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