Generation X was playing Chess not Checkers when they raised millenial women. I finally finished reading Birth Strike: The Hidden Fight Over Women’s Work and sheesh! There’s a lot to unpack there. Towards the middle it got dry and then it picked up when it started talking about Black Women and their fight for bodily autonomy and intersectional feminism. It was published before Roe VS Wade was overturned. The feminism fight has been evolving for decades but women have been fighting for the same things for decades. Just some decades ago women couldn’t get a credit card without their husband’s consent. Sure, we made some strides but it seems Gen X was just getting started. They taught young girls the heteronormative stereotypical things but they also empowered them to be whatever it is that they wanted to be. According to Pew women now outnumber men in the US college-educated workforce and they’ve created an educational gap by obtaining more post-secondary education than their counterparts.

What happened? While Gen X was empowering young girls and teaching them how to play the stereotypical cook and clean game, what were they teaching the young men? According to an NPR article “The highest percentage of Black people that say they’re going to vote for Trump is among the 18- to 29-year-old cohort, with about 22% saying they’ll vote for Trump, They’re also the least supportive of the Democratic Party.”

It seems that the more educated a young woman is the more liberal leaning she is. That paired with young men leaning more conservative has created a political gap among a young generation. Young men weren’t raised to know how to socialize or relate to the modern-day empowered woman. It’s almost as if the more empowered women get the more discriminated men feel. No wonder that men want children more than women want children. A US study surveyed more than one thousand 18 to 34-year-olds this year and found that “57 percent of men hope to become a father someday, while 45 percent of women said the same [about motherhood]. At the same time, just 15 per cent of men said they were not in favor of parenthood at all, while 21 per cent of women were found to have the same stance.” The study was done in the US but found similar trends in Canada. In the wake of the childless cat lady being used as an insult, it seems that young women are embracing this choice of motherhood.

That’s why we’re seeing this parallel panic. Roe VS Wade being overturned, women fighting for bodily autonomy, and governments all over the world crying about the population decline. Hungary offered giant tax breaks for people to have children. Some countries shortened the work week encouraging couples to court one another. Some even offer longer maternity leave. The answer is still no in a lot of these countries. Women don’t want to birth children until the socioeconomic, environmental, political, societal, and educational climates around them change. According to Salary.com the work of a stay-at-home mom is worth a six-figure salary as stay-at-home moms work around the clock. Today’s economy also makes it almost impossible for folks who want to be stay-at-home moms, to stay at home.

So most of the time when a woman does have a child she has to go into the workforce to help the household finances but that doesn’t pause the job of motherhood either. The modern-day mother is expected to work, mother, cook, and clean. Birth Strike talks about the value of all of that work with little to no pay for said work and the exhaustion that it leads to. It’s an eye-opening look at how women have been fighting the same fight for generations and are finally standing firm on their bodily autonomy armed with their post-secondary education. It’s almost as if Gen X told their children to be the rich man they one day aspired to be and an entire generation had an opportunity to give them a pedestal and helped bridge the gender wage gap but instead weaponized their incompetence and decided to vote against the modern-day empowered women’s interests. Some men get why women are frustrated and shouldn’t all be seen as a monolith but there’s some hope since the majority of young men and women under 30 are liberal-leaning it’s also a red flag and worrisome at the number of young men that are voting conservative to avoid dealing with the inner work on themselves to understand the modern day woman.

“Parents, particularly mothers, become poorer because they are not properly compensated for the contribution they’re making to the continuation of society by bearing and raising children. And they are certainly not being compensated for the contribution they make to the wealth of the employing class by supplying them with a steady stream of young workers.” – Birth Strike