Feminism called marriage a trap, and families paid the bill

BRO TAKE: This is commentary.

In 1975, Simone de Beauvoir sat down with Betty Friedan for Saturday Review. Beauvoir wrote The Second Sex, the book that did more than any other to launch modern feminism. Friedan floated the idea that women should have a real choice to stay home and raise their kids.

Beauvoir said no.

"No woman should be authorized to stay at home to bring up her children," she told Friedan. "Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one."

Read that twice. The movement's intellectual godmother wasn't worried that women were being forced into motherhood. She was worried they'd want it.

Half a century later, her side mostly won the argument. The results are in.

Where things stand

You don't need a theory to see the shape of it. The numbers are public.

• Births. The CDC puts the U.S. total fertility rate at around 1.6 children per woman, a record low and well under the 2.1 a country needs to replace itself.
• Marriage. Pew Research reported in 2023 that a quarter of 40-year-old Americans had never been married. That's a record, and it was about 6 percent in 1980.
• Priorities. A 2023 Pew survey asked what makes a fulfilling life. A large majority called an enjoyable career extremely or very important. Only about one in five said the same of being married, or of having children.

That last one is the tell. A culture tells you what it values by what it teaches its young people to chase. We taught ours to chase the job and treat the family as an optional extra, something to fit in later if the schedule allows.

If you're the type who wants to check a statistic before you trust it, good. Do it. We've written about what real research looks like, and these figures hold up.

The idea that did the damage

Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique came out in 1963. In it she described the suburban home as "a comfortable concentration camp."

That line sums up the whole project. The home was recast as a prison. Motherhood became an interruption. Marriage turned into dependency, and a husband was a risk to be managed. The woman who poured her best years into raising children wasn't doing the most important work in the country. She was a victim who hadn't figured it out yet.

And that message didn't stay in faculty lounges. It became the default script handed to girls. Get the degree. Build the career. Travel. "Find yourself." Marriage was something you'd get around to, maybe, once you'd lived. Kids came after that, if at all. Plenty of young women heard that script from guidance counselors, from magazines, and from their own well-meaning mothers, who'd been told the same thing.

Nobody printed the fine print. Fertility declines with age, and it drops noticeably through the mid-thirties and beyond. A career can start at 35. For most women, a family of four or five kids can't.

Where fair is fair

Being conservative doesn't mean pretending everything before 1963 was perfect. It wasn't.

Women won the vote in 1920. Until the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974, a woman could be turned down for a credit card or a loan because she was single or married. Nobody sensible wants any of that back. Equal pay for the same work is plain fairness. Plenty of mothers work because they want to or because they have to, and they're not the enemy here.

Feminism isn't the only thing that shrank the American family, either. Housing costs are brutal. Childcare costs as much as a mortgage in a lot of cities. And men carry real blame. Too many checked out, stayed boys into their thirties, and gave women little reason to trust them with a future.

But none of that lets the ideology off the hook. Economics shapes what people can do. Ideas shape what they aim at. For fifty years, the loudest voices in the culture told women that marriage and motherhood were beneath their potential. People listened. You don't get to be surprised when fewer of them showed up at the altar or the maternity ward.

The promise, and the bill

The pitch was simple. Throw off the old expectations and women would be happier.

They aren't. In 2009, economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers published "The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness." They found that women's reported well-being had fallen since the 1970s, both on its own terms and compared with men's. That happened through the same decades when women made enormous gains in education, pay, and freedom. Sociologist Brad Wilcox, in his 2024 book Get Married, drew on decades of survey data to argue that married women, and married mothers in particular, report being happier than their single peers.

Now picture a woman you probably know. She's 41. She did everything the script said. Top of her class, great firm, a title that impresses people at parties. She's also the one who goes quiet at baby showers. She didn't make a mistake out of foolishness. She made it because she trusted the people who were supposed to tell her the truth.

She deserves compassion, not a lecture. The ideology that sold her that bill of goods deserves none.

The kids pay too. A generation of children grew up without a father in the home. The research on what that costs them is about as settled as social science gets. Economist Melissa Kearney laid it out in The Two-Parent Privilege, and we've covered why the two-parent home is a finding before it's an argument.

What you can actually do about it

You won't reverse a fifty-year cultural current on your own. But you control your own house, and more than you'd think beyond it.

Tell your daughters the whole truth. Tell them they can do anything, and mean it. Then tell them the part the brochures leave out. Time matters. A marriage and children are worth planning a life around, not squeezing in at the end. For the medical specifics on fertility and age, she should talk to an OB-GYN, not a career coach.

Say it out loud at home. Kids pick up what you celebrate. If your house only cheers promotions and never mentions marriage as a goal, they'll notice. Raising kids with convictions takes saying the unfashionable thing on purpose.

Honor the mother. Whether she's home full time, working, or somewhere in between, treat raising children as serious work. Because it is. Never let "just a stay-at-home mom" pass unchallenged at your dinner table.

Men, be worth marrying. Hold a job. Keep your word. Show up early and stay to stack the chairs. The best answer to an ideology that calls husbands dead weight is a man who obviously isn't.

Help the young families near you. Babysit for free. Drop off a meal and leave the kitchen cleaner than you found it. Make having kids look possible, because for a lot of young couples right now, it doesn't.

Beauvoir feared that if women got a real choice, too many would choose home and children. Fifty years of cultural pressure later, a lot of them still want exactly that.

Our job is to stop making them feel foolish for it.