Kate Marland: Are modern women waking up to the perils of Progress Propaganda?
Destructionist efforts have sought to deny reality and liberate women from their biology. Restoring the social fabric requires elevating motherhood back to its rightful, honoured place.
At the recent Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) conference (recapped so eloquently by Managing Editor Alexander Brown here), our learning was organised around what was dubbed the ‘Five Foundational Pillars of Flourishing’. The five pillars were as follows: ‘Our Civilisational Stories’, ‘Social Fabric and the Family’, ‘Free Enterprise and Good Governance’, ‘Energy, Resources and the Environment’, and ‘Technology and Human Flourishing’.
Our days were structured around explorations of these five pillars, each day in the same order, meaning that ‘Social Fabric’ occupied a premium position as the session before lunch, and before temperatures reached Death Valley extremes at Kensington Olympia, during what was said to be a historic European heatwave. Speakers in this section of the conference included Freya India, author of GIRLS: Gen Z and the Commodification of Everything, Carl Trueman, author of The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, and Arthur Brooks, author of The Meaning of Your Life.
Partially inspired by ARC’s passionate defence of family, I wrote a column in the National Post titled ‘Anti-family propaganda has devastated a generation of women’. My thesis was that popular culture has done an incredibly good job at painting motherhood as an obstacle to fulfilment and self-actualisation. I was grateful to receive a very warm response, with many reaching out in support and the article gaining a wide degree of traction online. Most particularly, the article elicited a heartfelt response on X from Raquel Dancho, Member of Parliament for Kildonan-St. Paul. Her response also ran in the Post yesterday under the title ‘Motherhood deserves an equal place of honour’.
Before I dive in, I want to offer two caveats.
The first: that I am ultimately grateful that this conversation is being had and that my intention with any of my interjections on the matter should not be construed as condemnation of the choices individual women make, faced with societal and/or financial pressures, when it comes to their family situations.
The second: to head off any disgruntled commenters who may seek to use this information against me, the rumours are true that I am a single, childless, 31-year-old woman with three degrees. While being in this position might make me ill-informed to comment with experience on the familial obligations and impact of child-rearing on women, I will argue that I am the perfect poster child of the anti-family propaganda machine, which positions me well to sharply criticise the state of affairs.
I first dipped my toes in this topic with my piece for W.D., ‘The free market cannot solve the gender wars it helped create’. In it, I wrote about how our right-wing ecosystem has been a willing bystander and often champion of the ‘decay of our ancient moral, sexual, and social norms’. My point was that a culture centred around market worship is the main culprit for our crashing marriage and fertility rates. Pro-natalist policies will not be sufficient to get us back on track, and what is needed is serious reflection on our addiction to instant gratification and focus solely on short-term vision.
Kate Marland: The free market cannot fix the gender wars it helped create
It’s justifiable to search for a scapegoat in the gender wars. In times of conflict, it can be tempting to veer towards total war in our quest for an identifiable and solvable cause of our fertility and marriage r…
In it, I included, ‘In a society where “the world is your oyster” and anything and everything is available at the tip of your fingers, course-correcting is going to be more than a matter of policy. So much of our conservative movement in Canada revolves around the relentless pursuit of progress and GDP-maximising as the ultimate good, so it is no wonder that we have structured our personal lives in similar fashion.’
In my National Post article, I made similar points, saying that ‘prizing achievement over fulfilment teaches us to view other people as competitors in the marketplace of human experience, actively incentivising us to shred our bonds of human connection’. I argued that ‘goods will never be a sufficient replacement for human connection or a sufficient antidote to loneliness’.
It’s easy to confuse the point I was trying to make with something that can easily slot into our Canadian political milieu where radical thinking is eschewed for Overton window-friendly discourse.
With respect to Ms Dancho and her proposition that motherhood must be reframed as equally valid to pursuing a professional career, I want to be clear that my understanding of this problem does not have a solution in positioning motherhood as an ‘equal choice’ to becoming a lawyer, doctor, or astronaut. Doing so is merely further contributing to the all-encompassing impression that motherhood is simply a career path to be weighed on equal footing as these other choices, or somehow an achievement on par with these career efforts. To do so is to slap a band-aid on the bullet hole which tore through centuries of motherly instincts in the name of post-industrial market worship culture.
