Speaking at an event for the Turkish Women’s and Democracy Association on Sunday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had harsh words for women without children. “A woman who rejects motherhood, who refrains from being around the house, however successful her working life is, is deficient, is incomplete,” he told the audience. In his opinion, a woman should have three kids, and having a career should never get in the way of her spending plenty of time with them, the Guardian reports. Erdogan’s conclusion: “Rejecting motherhood means giving up on humanity.”
It would be easy to write this off as the unwoke sentiments of an anti-contraception religious conservative working toward the two-part goal of reinforcing gender difference and boosting his country’s population. Unfortunately, American women are sent what is essentially the same message all the time. While most of our elected officials know better than to voice such ideas openly, our failure to enact family-friendly policies in our government and workplaces reveals assumptions about women that are not so different from those Erdogan espoused. We don’t have universal affordable childcare or paid leave because of the stubborn, anachronistic belief that mom should be, and can be, home with her children, no matter the situation.
These beliefs persist in culture as much as in policy. American women who decide not to become mothers are regularly questioned as to why they don’t have kids and are often advised that such a decision is a mistake. Sarah Larson’s controversial 2014 essay on Thought Catalog titled “I Think People Without Kids Have Empty Lives and I’m Not Sorry About It” predictably inflamed social media. Larson believes that, “when it comes down to it, there are certain truths about life that you literally cannot know until you’ve become a parent. The list of those truths could go on forever (no, it really could), but the core truth behind all of it is about what human life is about … ” There’s a line to be drawn between this kind of thinking about the primacy of parenthood in the human experience and Erdogan’s views on the subject—and it’s not that long.
With these inflated, romanticized notions of motherhood as “the most important job in the world,” in circulation, it’s little wonder that moms are constantly being sent the message that they are not mom enough. It starts early, when the pressure to breast-feed outweighs a new moms’ need to rest following childbirth or take care of herself later on. Then, if these moms go back to their jobs after their too short or unpaid maternity leave, they are often seen as less valuable in the workplace while the fathers of their children are seen as more valuable. The underlying implication here is that once a woman becomes a mother, her focus will, and should, drift towards the domestic. Moms are also held responsible for whatever physical and emotional problems befall their children from age 0 to … well, it can depend on what kind of therapy their kids go into. Just last week, a mother who lost sight of her child for a few minutes at the Cincinnati Zoo was deemed as unfit to parent by many people.
Erdogan’s vision for women isn’t really a radical reimagining of how things should be; rather, it’s an endorsement of what remains the status quo in Turkey, the United States, and much of the world besides.
