Greta Gerwig’s Barbie opens with a homage to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Instead of a troop of apes curiously investigating the appearance of an alien monolith, a group of young girls see Barbie (Margot Robbie) towering above them. While the apes of Space Odyssey learn how to use bones as weapons, the young girls of Barbie become radicalised by Barbie’s appearance and invention, and set about destroying their old-fashioned baby dolls. Barbie gave them a new way of seeing their lives as girls and women: rather than a future where being a wife and mother was one’s only option, Barbie showed young girls that they could be more than that. They could be doctors, chefs, scientists, presidents, and more – but motherhood was never on the agenda.

Barbie was launched in 1959, just four years before the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. Friedan famously challenged the widely held belief that “fulfilment as a woman had only one definition: the housewife-mother”. The doll came to fruition during a time when women were being encouraged to find fulfilment, not as mothers or wives but as human beings in their own right. While this type of consciousness-raising was primarily directed towards women of a certain race and class (white and affluent), anti-child sentiments have continued to hold weight in the West in the intervening decades. Just last month, CBS News Miami reported that a growing number of millennials and Gen Z are childless by choice. “We as women are able to live fuller lives in general, and I think that’s why the childfree movement is happening,” one woman explained to CBS. In 2021, a Pew Research Center study found that 44 per cent of non-parents aged 18 to 49 were “not too likely” or “not likely at all” to have children someday. In the UK, another study found that one in ten childless 18 to 23-year-olds are considering not having children, citing plans to retire early as a key driver of their decisions.

Additionally, our worsening political landscape has a significant part to play in young people’s desire to be childless. In an essay for her newsletter Maybe Baby, titled “Who’s allowed to want kids?” Haley Nahman explains that “it’s not particularly popular (or easy) to frame parenthood as aspirational”, especially when you hold the political concerns of the left. Today, conversations around parenthood are primarily focused on: “the right to abortion, the problem of climate change, the dubious ethics of adoption, the terrifying scourge of school shootings, the destructive influence of the nuclear family, the damage motherhood does to women’s careers and mental health… and the alarming lack of support for parents in the west”. While all of these are important conversations about parenthood, Nahman remarks that these discussions do not help encourage people to become parents.

When my feminist consciousness first started to develop as a teenager, I quickly came to the conclusion that I didn’t want children. As a child, I was constantly told that I needed to learn how to cook, clean and look after my family home so that I would be a good wife and mother. There was never a conversation about whether I wanted those things; instead, the choice was made for me before I fully understood what I was being trained for. Feminism showed me that I could have a different type of future – one that I believed to be more liberatory. That was until I came across an interview between novelist Toni Morrison and Bill Moyers from 1989. “[Motherhood is] the most liberating thing that ever happened to me,” Morrison tells Moyers. “Liberating because the demands children make are not the demands of a normal ‘other’. They [her children] were not interested in all the things that other people were interested in, like what I was wearing or if I were sensual. Somehow all the baggage that I had accumulated as a person about what was valuable just fell away. I could not only be me – whatever that was – but somebody actually needed me to be just that.” Morrison describes being a mother and a parent in a way I had never encountered before, as an experience that is freeing and generative rather than wholly oppressive. Is there a way in our current society for parenthood to be reframed as a site of power, liberation and self-actualisation – especially for the new generation of first-time parents?

In a letter to her daughter for Womanclan Journal, PhD candidate Helen Yeung described envisioning mothering “as a verb, one less as a gendered identity but a radical and revolutionary role”. Helen had her daughter at 25 and describes themselves as a “zillennial.” Unlike most Gen Z pregnancies, Helen’s was planned. “I live in Guam, an unincorporated territory of the United States that is impacted by the overturning of Roe v Wade, an issue that is deeply intertwined with issues around militarisation, imperialism and environmental degradation,” she explains. “While all the discussions around motherhood and parenthood are particularly negative in progressive spaces, these factors were considered when I found out I was pregnant. As someone who has been involved in feminist activism for over a decade, I didn’t feel like this deterred me from wanting to experience parenthood as a queer migrant woman; rather, it served as a reminder of how vast and expansive the fight for reproductive justice is.”

Contrastingly, Stephaine, a recent university graduate, had an unplanned pregnancy last year at 24 but saw her pregnancy as nothing more than a gift. “My pregnancy was completely unexpected. When my test came back positive, the first thing I thought was, ‘Oh my God. My dad is going to kill me,’ but surprisingly enough, that wasn’t his response at all.” When Stephaine was 18, her mum died, and then her grandmother and uncle soon followed. “When I found out I was pregnant with Astrid, I thought, ‘a new family member is just what we need.’ I know it sounds crazy, but I could smell my mum’s scent throughout my pregnancy. My dad still grieves for my mum, but Astrid brings him so much joy. I really do believe she sent Astrid to us.”

Although becoming a parent has radically changed both Stephaine and Helen, deepening their understanding of themselves and others, parenthood still poses problems for them. While it’s easy to assert that the issues with parenthood can fundamentally change through the individual thoughts and actions of young people, parenthood is, as psychotherapist Esther Perel says in her book Mating in Captivity, “a fundamental project” that our society notably lacks the public support necessary to complete.

“As a queer Asian migrant woman and someone that doesn’t align with binary definitions of gender, pregnancy was traumatic for me in many ways,” Helen confesses. “I felt that I had to perform or align to a sense of womanhood to receive adequate care, which probably made my postpartum depression and anxiety much worse than it was. I wish there was more access to gender-affirming care for QTIPOC.” Race also adds another layer to Helen’s difficulties with parenthood: “After I gave birth, I felt so much pressure to become a stay-at-home mom, and at the core of it, I think this is deeply rooted in the association of Asian migrant women with care work, passivity and conventional forms of femininity.” When billing advisor Charlie fell pregnant at 20, she could not obtain secure housing for herself and her baby for almost three years. “I went into temporary accommodation in a shared house with two other pregnant mums who had children, and the woman who ran the scheme was horrible. She unlawfully evicted me, and I was homeless with my baby. I love being a mum, but the world makes it very tough.”

While conservatives fearmonger about Gen Z’s lack of interest in children and argue that feminism is at fault, the truth is that Gen Z are starting to make up a majority of first-time parents in this country and around the world, and parenthood is radicalising them. Since its conception, feminism has provided us with the tools to recognise how the institution of motherhood is making women unwell. But it has also given us the tools to imagine how things can be better and should be better for parents. In their “Gen Z Parents Global Report,” Vice asserts that “Generation Z is reimagining every part of culture they touch, and the world of parenting is next.” While this may be true, they can not change the world of parenting alone.

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