Domestic, Not Domesticated

Thriving in post-industrial motherhood

The philosopher Edith Stein said: “The world doesn’t need what women have, the world needs what women are.”

For most women, motherhood represents a deep-seated, biological desire. While we are beings with souls, ambitions, and egos, we are also, and fundamentally, mammals. Harmoniously reconciling our human consciousness with our instinct for a family is our mission.

This is not to devalue women who don’t have children for personal or circumstantial reasons. It seeks to help women who become mothers navigate that role with strength.

We empower ourselves when we acknowledge and respect the natural limits that form us. These limits are not restrictive; they are a structure that enables us to expand wisely. When we respect our boundaries, our growth becomes a solid foundation for our complete expression. Ignoring them, on the other hand, hinders our potential.

As mothers, our inner landscape is composed of love for our children, the urge to sympathize with their needs, and, in equal measure, the broader desire to create in the world as a means of expression. Many mothers' outer lives fail to reflect this inner reality because our post-industrial society feels dehumanizing, yet we are simultaneously gaslit into believing the fault is ours.

We tend to those needs by nourishing our bodies with organic foods, spending time in nature, warmth, connection, and laughter with other women, and, at the same time, creating something that we feel brings value to the world around us. The modern family set-up often means many of these pillars fall by the wayside. Women should be cautious regarding obligations set by others that deprive us of our needs. There is wisdom in what our bodies are telling us. This takes a proper understanding of who and what we are.

As women, we should live in a way that vindicates our bodies. The way modernity often expects us to live—as if we do not bleed, do not birth life, do not drip milk, and are not responsible for life itself—is why we must defend this vindication at all costs. To flourish as mothers, we should reject ways of living that require us to survive in low-grade physiological denial. We are the vehicles through which life weaves its story, but modern structures want us to forget this reality. We must instead viciously defend it, as to be feminine doesn’t only involve softness and beauty; it is, in fact, ferocity and fervency in equal measure.

We should reckon with the reality that many women feel the need to be at home with their children at an early age. The place where reckoning begins is with women—not policy or the government. Not men. We must stop allowing ourselves to primarily be used during our childbearing years as production units for an economy that defines its success based on the quantity of output. This doesn’t entail that women need not work. Instead, it consists in embracing the synthesis that life can offer us if we choose to work in a way that can be reconciled with our need to be mothers. And if we choose work that values quality.

We can work from home, running an online, profitable business we are passionate about that guarantees our economic independence. We can undertake freelance work. We can trade with neighbors, and help a friend by watching her child when she needs to attend a meeting. We can create communities where we empower each other as women.

The cottage economy—a community in which labor consists of family or individual units working with their available resources, can offer us an alternative. A cottage economy produces goods through handmade work, creating a sense of fulfillment and autonomy. Life becomes localized. It allows us to use riches in nature with others where we can feel simultaneously connected and empowered.

Remembering self-evident truths as mothers allows us to become “undomesticated,” not in the sense that we have no domestic skills or do not inhabit the domestic domain, but in the sense that we are opting out of culture’s default conception of what motherhood should look like today. This is not a call to go back in time or to devalue our higher-order desires, but to take the lessons of the past and use them in a modern context: fulfilling our maternal instincts with larger aspirations.

So often, we are expected to forgo those needs in favor of keeping up with corporate obligations, and in doing so, women can easily lose touch with themselves. This is why conditions like postpartum depression become normalized. We deny our nature, and when we fail to cope as required by our overlords, we are rendered voiceless through a mental health diagnosis. It represents a modern tool of invalidation that causes maladaptive behaviors to become mainstream.

There is dignity in both raising children and keeping a home while preserving the feral aspect of our female nature. Feral means retaining a state untamed by domestication. Paradoxically, the pinnacle of human domestication is the framework offered to us as the standard today. Women often work alienated in a small office, in constant contact with the virtual world, with minimal to no contact with the natural world, relying on remote experts for their health, and unable to feel connected to a purpose that makes them feel valuable.

A feral life means a life dedicated to a refusal to be tamed by these post-industrial forces of domestication. It also means rejecting the traditional, purely performative view of motherhood offered to many women today as a reactionary response.

The excitement that comes with creating is life-giving for our spirit. The creative process is how we take the nebulous and forge it in the material. This means that caring for our domestic context can bring us a sense of fulfillment when combined with our desire to contribute to the world. Using our physical selves to make and curate the spaces around us and transform them to create a sense of wonder, beauty, and comfort is what Stein meant by “what women are.” Women are makers of the vast infinite turned material.

As mothers, we hold the power to create homes that are a living microcosm of both tenderness and fearlessness. When our hearts ache at the events unfolding in the world, we may think that our homes are a mere product of it, but we should upend this paradigm. Homes are a refuge that shape our society. The family is a microcosm through which our reality grows. We should subvert the modern image of a society where the family is a mere product of an economic super-structure. Family should become the foundation in all its complexity and, at times, challenge. It can come to life in a variety of forms. But it remains the essential tassel.

We do not have to be mirrors of the world. We can define it. We have choices and options, history to learn from, nature to inform us, and our present reality that we can learn to harness. By rejecting the dominant, office-obsessed culture, we can move the needle to a life encompassed by capability and curiosity, independence and community, softness and courage, all in equal measure.

Emily Hancock is a mother of three and the author of The Work of Women.

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