I remember the first time I heard a girl on campus say she was keeping her baby. It was just last year. The reaction was immediate and unanimous: “This is a disaster.” People spoke in lowered voices about how she’d “never be able to do what she wanted again,” about how she’d “messed up.”
She’s graduating this year and getting married. Last time I saw her, she looked happy. It was rather jarring. We all had been so certain that we knew how her life would go.
Antimotherhood attitudes certainly don’t come from nowhere. These ideas have come to inform the common understanding of what makes a woman’s life fulfilling. As a society, we’ve moved so far away from traditionalism that motherhood is now assumed to be incompatible with ambition and autonomy. This attitude is bolstered by the false claims that mothers are less happy than childless women and that earning a college degree only to prioritize family is somehow a wasted investment. A woman’s choice to pursue motherhood on her own terms should be recognized as a legitimate expression of empowerment, not a retreat from it.
Germaine Greer, one of the most influential feminist writers of the 20th century, wrote: “Housework, childcare, and shopping are not the activities that fulfill a human life.” Shulamith Shulamith Firestone was even more blunt in her book, “The Dialectic of Sex,” writing that “Pregnancy is barbaric … Childbirth is like shitting a pumpkin.”
This is not subtle messaging. These writers have framed motherhood as degrading, and this belief has become pervasive in the decades since these statements were written. Even when the language about motherhood is less shocking, the underlying claim persists: In the modern era, having children will make a woman worse off.
But this is where the popular narrative breaks down. Across large datasets, mothers are not less happy than non-mothers. In many cases, they are happier. A 2025 cross-national analysis found that parents report higher life satisfaction than non-parents in the majority of countries included in the study, and other research has found that parents report significantly higher levels of overall life meaning.
Not only is parenthood associated with greater life satisfaction, but research also shows that individuals often experience regret over forgoing motherhood. Surveys of older adults consistently find that regret over not having children is both common and persistent, while regret over having children is rare and typically temporary. In comparing two studies, researchers found that roughly 4 in 10 childless older adults reported wishing they had children, whereas less than 7 percent expressed the opposite. If motherhood were truly the life-destroying choice it is often portrayed to be, these numbers would look very different.
The second piece of conventional wisdom is quieter, but just as powerful. Women are told that if they go to college, they must have a career. Otherwise, the degree is wasted. Another feminist icon, Linda Hirshman, put it starkly in “Get to Work”: “Women of privilege who choose not to work are undermining women’s equality.” Famous businesswoman Sheryl Sandberg wrote in her bestselling book “Lean In”: “When a woman leaves her job, it’s not just her loss — it’s a loss for all women.” Again, the implication is clear: Education must be cashed out in the labor market, or it doesn’t count. The problem with this assumption is that it reduces education to a purely economic translation, rather than recognizing it as a form of intellectual, personal and relational development that shapes a person in and outside of a career.
The point of obtaining a college education is not simply to maximize your income. It is a holistic experience that shapes many aspects of a person’s life. Going to college allows one to build social connections and expand one’s opportunities after graduation. College offers mobility and growth far beyond career building and academia. Attending college allows one to develop critical thinking skills and make more informed life decisions, which in turn compound within a family.
Economists have been documenting this for decades. Children of more educated mothers complete more schooling, have better health outcomes and earn more as adults. One estimate finds that one additional year of maternal education is associated with a 0.2 standard deviation increase in child test scores. Another estimate finds that each additional year of maternal education increases a child’s eventual earnings by up to 2 percent. A maternal college education would therefore increase a child’s scores by 0.8 standard deviations and earnings by 8 percent. Moreover, studies that track families over time show that children raised by highly educated parents, including stay-at-home mothers, go on to earn, on average, tens of thousands of dollars more per year than their peers. A woman’s return on the investment into her degree is transferred, amplified and realized through her children. Her success isn’t measured by her W-2 but instead through the trajectories of the next generation.
Furthermore, a college degree does not just give you a job — it gives you autonomy. It means that if your relationship fails, if your spouse loses their job, if something goes wrong, you are not trapped. You can re-enter the workforce. You can support yourself. College changes the entire structure of the choice to stay home.
This assurance of security brings me back to that girl from last year, and to myself and to a lot of my friends who whisper versions of the same fear: What if I want this?
We are told constantly to delay. Finish school, build a career, establish yourself and then maybe think about children. But biology does not wait for perfect timing, and neither, it turns out, does happiness. The data does not say that motherhood ruins women’s lives. If anything, it suggests the opposite. Education offers an opportunity for growth for the woman who prepares to raise her children and take care of the home. Her degree becomes a kind of insurance, a foundation she can fall back on if needed.
The real mistake is not the young woman who gets pregnant in college. The mistake is the certainty with which we all assume we know what will make her unhappy.
Grace Rutherford PO ’28 wants to be a stay-at-home mom and homeschool her children.