Being a mother and a feminist

When I got pregnant with my first child, I wondered if I'd failed as a feminist.

I was 28 and leading a life I wanted. I was married, and my body wanted to get pregnant, so I got pregnant. It was that simple. I didn’t think as much about parenting as I thought about answering my body’s need to nurture a baby.

I thought of myself as a progressive, intelligent, independent city woman, fairly well read in feminist theory. I worked hard and cared about my career. I enjoyed the free time I had for creative pursuits. Motherhood was, I suddenly feared, the death knell of these identities to some extent.

What can any self-respecting feminist get done, I asked myself even while enjoying my pregnancy, when she’s spending all her time changing nappies?

“Good” motherhood, according to the ads, movies, and examples around me, entailed automatic selflessness – letting your own ambitions take a back seat, devoting every hour of every day, instead, to the ambitions of your husband and kids.

Even as my mother raised me, saying constantly that "there's nothing in the world you can't do," I watched her be my mother first and foremost. (I know now from raising two myself: Children learn more from how you live than what you tell them is true.)

When I heard my fetus’s heartbeat for the first time, the terror of losing one identity went to war with the joys of creating another.

Is this it, I wondered? The venerable “ma ka pyaar”? The revered, sacred maternal instinct that would sanctify me as a good mother? And if so, would it also relegate me to being a "bad feminist"?

In other words: I was confused. Now that I was having kids, did I have to regretfully hang up my “feminist” tag and resign myself to… Well, what exactly?


“Feminism is just an overused term,” model and actress Lisa Haydon said in an interview last week. “Women have been given these bodies to produce children... I don’t want to be a man. One day I look forward to making dinner for my husband and children. I don’t want to be a career feminist.”


Though none of us should still be surprised by Bollywood stars butchering the definition of feminism, I went into a deep spiral of sighing surrender. Feminism deniers wound me deeply. What is a career feminist? Does it pay well? Where do I sign up?

After Haydon’s comments drew the internet’s ire, she doubled-down in a now-deleted Instagram caption yesterday:
It’s important not forget that we are women made for the greatest role ever – bringing life into this world. And that is something to be proud of! Our true power lies in a gift we’ve been given that men will never have. Our bodies create life. If feminists have a problem with this, feminism is not their real issue… Nature is!

Lisa Haydon, I get it. You’re wrong. But I get it.

What Haydon is doing wrong now, and what I did at 28, is mistaking cultural messaging about maternity for “nature”.