Motherhood should not be relegated to the home—gender politics, Harrison Butker, and the public-private dichotomy
Public and professional life needs to recognize the value of motherhood encouraging the nurturing of human capital.
by Catalina “Mica” Udani
The rising tide of the so-called “tradwife” reached national attention this month during Harrison Butker’s controversial commencement address to the 2024 graduating class at Benedictine College. The Kansas City Chiefs placekicker called for traditional values, cultural conservatism, and urged young women in the graduating class to reject “the most diabolical lies” of seeking only career success. Instead, Butker lauded his wife for embracing “one of the most important titles of all: homemaker.” His wife may not have achieved her dreams of career success, but, Butker tells the audience, she says her motherhood has been vastly more fulfilling.
Butker’s speech touched upon many topics and generated many controversies, but this aspect of his speech perhaps garnered the most attention. This controversy reflects the dialogue around the recent cultural phenomenon of the tradwife —a growing movement popularized by social media promoting domesticity, homemaking, and women choosing the role of wife and mother over any professional life. Growing discontent with climbing the corporate ladder has led many women to aspire to an idealized stay-at-home motherhood, shielded from the whims of the job market and the dual burden of work and housework. Butker’s message to young women on the value of the vocation of homemaker no doubt resonated with women weary of shouldering both financial and domestic responsibility.
I do not challenge Mr. Butker on the notion that the role of motherhood is often devalued, or that the vocation of homemaker should be honored. Instead, I argue that the importance of motherhood—both biological motherhood and spiritual motherhood—is precisely why we cannot relegate mothers exclusively to the home. Motherhood has been traditionally relegated to the private sphere, sequestered in the home, but history has shown how the spirit of motherhood has been necessary for the nurturing of human capital. Our public institutions, professions, and politics would be more compassionate and effective if motherhood was integral to policy. Motherhood must be both public and private for society to flourish.
Philippine nuns led peaceful pro-democracy protests against the authoritarian government in the 1986 People Power Revolution as spiritual mothers standing before youth protestors.
This depiction of the American Revolution ideal of Republican Motherhood demonstrates how mothers engage public life by nurturing the civic virtue of the next generation.
Legal theory posits that there exists a dichotomy between the public sphere and the private sphere; a person’s public life, such as what she does in the office or the ballot box, may be legitimately governed and provided constitutional protection. The private sphere of home and family is largely untouchable, protecting personal privacy. But because historically women largely lived private lives as homemakers, issues that may particularly affect women are often understudied, undervalued, and may go constitutionally unprotected. “What is dubbed ‘private’ should not be shared. Instead, it should be kept ‘in the family.’ If there is something wrong there, it is the individual’s fault; individual problems should be hidden, repressed, and managed,” describes legal scholar Ruth Gavison. Providing financial capital in the labor market is a public act, but nurturing human capital in the home is a private act. Domestic work traditionally done by women, also called “care work,” is immensely undervalued in comparison to formal work, and because childrearing and parenthood generates human capital as opposed to financial capital, time and effort invested within the private sphere of the home has not been recognized as just as important as investments in the public sphere.
While women have become vastly more visible in public and political life in the past century, motherhood is still frequently relegated to private life in common social practice. Perhaps Harrison Butker and other proponents of traditional gender roles are simply observing that public life and professional careers are deeply unfriendly towards mothers, and mothers should abscond from the labor market to escape these biases. Mainstream gender politics demonstrates that there continues to be evidence of systemic maternal wall, discrimination against working mothers, in which the private life of mothers is devalued to the extent that working mothers experience far more barriers to promotion than working fathers. Mothers are perceived to be less productive, less present, and less ambitious.
That is why public life must become more friendly to mothers, not less. Butker’s speech, aimed at young adults at the beginning of their lives, was cast as a stark binary between public professions or private family life. I agree that in this status quo, mothers may feel forced to make this choice, but these should not be the only options. Instead, we must encourage public life to recognize the value of motherhood and families. If motherhood and the act of nurturing human capital was valued just as highly as generating financial capital, with mothers more present throughout all aspects of public life, from politics to professions, men and women would both benefit by an increased sense of the importance of human wellbeing above the bottom line. Public policy and corporate practices friendly to mothers and families can improve the lives of all family members.
And the importance of mothers and the traditionally maternal principle of nurturing human capital in public life is nothing new—revolutionary American thought championed the notion of “Republican Motherhood”, in which mothers were celebrated as cultivating civic virtue for future generations. “The notion that mothers perform a political function is not silly; it represents the recognition that political socialization takes place at an early age, and that the patterns of authority experienced in families are important factors in the general political culture,” writes American Historian Linda Kerber of Republican Motherhood.
The Mothers of Playa de Mayo have protested government atrocities in Argentina for four decades, holding photographs of their children, victims of systemic political violence.
Historically, motherhood has been a powerful tool in political movements. The protests of the Mothers of Playa de Mayo throughout the 1970s and 80s in Argentina won landmark victories in human rights as they protested the persecution, torture, and forced disappearance of 30,000 of their children by the military dictatorship of the time, transgressing the traditional private domain of motherhood through nonviolent resistance. Mothers worldwide gather in similar organizations, from the Saturday Mothers of Istanbul, Turkey, protesting forced disappearance since 1995 to the many organizations like Mothers Against Police Brutality and Mothers Against Drunk Driving in the United States. And one must not overlook the value of spiritual motherhood visible in uniquely women-led mentorship and leadership. The example of the spirit of activism visible in orders of female religious demonstrates how spiritual motherhood can encourage compassion in public life.
In response to Harrison Butker’s speech, the Benedictine Sisters of Mount St. Scholastica, who serve as spiritual mothers as the founding institution of Benedictine College, published a statement rejecting Butker’s comments and emphasizing that “women have made a tremendous difference in the world in their roles as wives and mothers and through their God-given gifts in leadership, scholarship, and their careers.” While Butker spoke to a very real lack of respect towards motherhood that exists in our social status quo, we cannot allow public policies and corporate practices that view motherhood as inconvenient to relegate mothers solely to private life—we would be reinforcing the very structures that devalue motherhood. The spirit of motherhood and the nurturing of human capital must be visible and present in all aspects of life, private and public.
Catalina Udani is a fellow at ACWPS and her profile can be found here.