Stop saying feminism is about “choice”

It has always been, and still is, about equality between the sexes

I was a human biology major at Stanford and had the good fortune of working with Robert Sapolsky while I was there. His most recent book, Determined, is about the science of free will. More specifically, it’s about the fact that we don’t have it. Not one ounce. Every so-called choice you think you made is just the result of a cascade of little chemical poofs of synaptic activity in your incredibly complex brain. If you remove free will from the equation, then the only possible explanation for any individual action is some combination of environment and genetics, neither of which we have any control over. That’s important, because it means that moral character is essentially nonexistent. We can’t exalt Mother Teresa any more than we can decry Ted Bundy (although we should certainly lock up serial killers to keep them from doing further harm). 

But wait, don’t stop reading! I am not here to sell you on a hardcore deterministic theory of the world. People do not like this theory. I get it. The only thing people hate more than feeling out of control is the idea that we can’t blame someone for everything that goes wrong with our lives. As I put it in a recent email to Robert, “when it comes to my past (poor) life choices, I absolutely agree with your theory, but it does not apply to all of the great future decisions I am about to make.” And it doesn’t change the fact that my ex was a shithead.

Without wholeheartedly embracing determinism, if we agree to the fact that the interaction of environment and genetics play a huge role in human decision-making (far more than we like to admit) what are the implications for feminism? I see a lot of content out there these days saying feminism should be about “choice.” A lot of this rhetoric comes from homemakers and stay-at-home-moms and who feel the need to defend this decision as a legitimate one. They’re not wrong to do so. There’s a general backlash against the brand of girl-boss feminism that’s dominated the discussion ever since Sheryl Sandberg published Lean In. Women are dissatisfied with the shiny promise of power, money and career and burned out trying to manage it all on top of childcare and domestic labor. Not everyone has an army of domestic servants like Sandberg and most corporations have not done much to adjust for the fact that their employees can no longer rely on the full-time homemaker wife to support their bustling professional lives. Many women want to stay home and they are tired of being labeled as “trad wives” or bad feminists for doing so. 

In one of the best articles I have seen written to date on the Ballerina Farm phenomenon, Sara Peterson writes, “we’re torn between defending Hannah Neeleman’s right to live out her bucolic dream and critiquing how the glorification of that dream impacts cultural demands and expectations of mothers and women.” For those of you who have not followed, Hannah Neeleman is the popular social media influencer behind the account @ballerinafarm, whose account recently became a lightning rod for feminist controversy after a viral article was published about the dark side of her glossy social media presence (namely, the burnout of trying to raise eight children and manage a farm with little help). In the comments section of the article, supporters of Neeleman’s account rush to her defense with apt comments to the nature of: “Seems like a lot of people claim they’re feminists until a woman chooses a life that doesn’t fit their narrative,” and “I think the point of feminism is the choice. If this is your dream, no one should be shaming you for it just like no one should shame the woman who chooses career over family.”

Hannah Neeleman and her family

But how much of Hannah Neeleman’s lifestyle is really a choice? We see many clues about how little choice she may really have had scattered throughout the original Times article. She gave birth to most of her children without pain medication, except one (and called the epidural “great,” but in a low voice so her husband would not hear). She gets so burnt out from caring for the kids that she sometimes can’t get out of bed for a week, but there are no nannies allowed in the house (her husband’s rule), the children are not allowed to watch TV, and all meals must be made from scratch. Even her marriage is questionable. Her husband pulled strings with the airlines to be put in a seat next to her on a six-hour flight, since she wouldn’t go on a date with him at first. She gave up a promising career as a ballerina (she graduated from Julliard) to move to Utah with him. She originally wanted to live in New York. 

Neeleman’s oppression is subtle and easily hidden, but even when oppression and violence against women is extreme, it often masquerades as choice. The summer of my freshman year in college, I traveled to Kenya for the summer to do primatology research. Turns out, I was (and still am) more interested in the people. I was particularly interested in the Maasai. We had a few opportunities to visit Maasai communities and, already a burgeoning feminist at the time, I remember being particularly interested in the question of female genital mutilation (FGM). FGM is standard practice in Maasai culture. It entails, to put it frankly, cutting off a girl’s clitoris when she comes of age. Not only is the procedure excruciating and risky, but it robs a woman of a lifetime of sexual pleasure. Unfortunately, the practice has migrated to the Hadza, a traditional hunter-gatherer community living in the same region. No other traditional hunter-gatherer societies that I know of practice FGM (the !Kung, for example, are very articulate and forthcoming about the importance of clitoral stimulation for a woman’s sexual pleasure). The point I want to make is: if you ask a young Maasai girl about FGM, she will tell you that she wants to be mutilated. It’s part of their tradition and their culture. It’s part of coming of age. And it’s what everyone does. At the time, this made me question everything I thought I knew about feminism. Who was I to impose my Western cultural paradigm on them? If it’s freely chosen, then it must be okay. 

Today, my position on FGM is much simpler: it’s bad. Whether “chosen” or not, cultural practices that inflict unnecessary harm and suffering on women, or deny women the same pleasures afforded to men, are wrong. This is an extreme example, but I think it illustrates the way in which culture paves the way for “choice.” Culture dictates what the appropriate choices are for women, and what we think we want is often simply a product of whatever is most socially acceptable. If Neeleman had not been born into a Mormon family of eight, raised a Mormon and then married a Mormon, her choices would undoubtedly have been different. Is she happy with her choices? It’s hard to say. There’s clearly a discrepancy between what she projects to the world via her Instagram account and her actual lived experience. But in my opinion, feminism should not concern itself with happiness any more than it should concern itself with choice. Many modern feminists will disagree with me. According to feminist writer Koa Beck, feminism should be about “all people having access to joyful, safe, and productive lives.” I agree with Koa that he;ping people to live joyful, safe, and productive lives should indeed be one of the primary goals of humanity, but it’s not the goal of feminism. 

If it’s not about choice or happiness, what is feminism about? It’s about equality between the sexes, folks, plain and simple. Under this lens, it’s hard to make an argument that the practice of female genital mutilation is acceptable, when there is no equivalent for men (please don’t say circumcision: it would be more like cutting off the whole penis). It’s hard to justify women wearing burkas, when men do not. It’s hard to look at Hannah Neeleman’s lifestyle without being concerned about how much more power her husband seems to have in decisions about their lives. Stay-at-home mothers have every right to feel empowered in their decision to focus on family and home, if that’s what’s right for them, but that’s not what the feminist fight is about. No one is saying it’s a man’s job to bake the sourdough bread and women had better stay out of it or else. If that sounds dismissive, it’s not meant to be. I think it’s a damn shame that we don’t value domestic work and childcare more as a society. I also think that the continued stagnation of wages and rising cost of living, which has forced many families to become dual-income households out of dire necessity, is something we need to combat as a nation. But it has nothing to do with equality between the sexes. 

To be clear, I do think the feminist movement has largely neglected the domestic sphere, to the detriment of women, but not in the way Hannah Neeleman’s supporters believe. Again, it’s about equality. Women do the lion’s share of domestic work even when they earn more than their husbands. As a popular social media meme puts it, “if we empower women to work outside the house without expecting men to work inside the house, then we aren't empowering women, we're exploiting them.” Similarly, feminism needs to do a better job of taking motherhood into account. As feminist scholar Andrea O’Reilly puts it, “motherhood is the unfinished business of feminism.” We cannot escape the fact that, biologically, women bear the brunt of the labor when it comes to growing, birthing, and feeding children. Men just don’t have the equipment. Second-wave feminism largely side-stepped the issue of motherhood, but it’s coming back to bite us in the butt. The male-female wage discrepancy is apparently all down to motherhood. As I wrote about in my last post, we need to make accommodations for mothers slowing down in their careers or temporarily stepping out during the most taxing years of child rearing, without penalizing them in the long-run. We also need more federal funding for high-quality childcare and institutional support for working parents. We need to normalize stay-at-home dads and dads who cook dinner and take the kids to see the doctor. If we don’t find new and better ways of accommodating and supporting mothers in the workforce (and of changing norms around who does what at home) we will never achieve true equality. 

So, feminism has work to do, especially when it comes to motherhood. But let’s stop saying it’s about choice, please. Feminism is, and always has been, about equality between the sexes.