shannonamonsworld:

omnivore-odyssey:

officialweatherwax:

Great grandma only had 12 kids because she died giving birth to the 13th because after a certain point and a certain age childbirth becomes much riskier. But your great-grandfather certainly didn’t let a little thing like her health stop him from fucking her.

Grandma, as the oldest girl, took on the maternal role when her mother died because that’s what girls and women are for and that’s how these giant families work: with the older girls providing childcare for the younger children until the younger girls become old enough to contribute as well. Then when she had a husband and kids of her own she was drugged out of her mind because being dissatisfied with being a wife and mother and doing nothing else meant you had some kind of mental problem. She was either sedated so she wouldn’t feel the crushing depression, or she was hyped on amphetamines to get her through the long pointless days.

Your mother never caught on that her own mother was unhappy, because the drugs smoothed her out and kept her from talking about her pain. Your mom used her newfound rights to go to college and get a job, because she was told that a liberated woman could have a family and a career and a husband who treated her as an equal. When her husband left it to her to handle the home and the child care, just like generations before him, your mother convinced herself it was her choice. When she was exhausted trying to balance her paid full-time work and her domestic tasks, and still wasn’t happy, she figured she just wasn’t liberated enough. She blamed herself for not being able to ~have it all~ like she was promised.

I just can’t deal with these people. Anyone who’s ever read anything from prior generations of women knows that they were miserable, but these guys want us to believe it was somehow a happier time.

The whole mindset that “less choice for women is better” is stupid for so many reasons but on top of what everyone else said, if a woman wants to have many kids now, she can, and she can space them out so she and her partner can handle the work it takes. My grandparents had three kids (moms side), two kids (dads side), but my parents wanted a big family and had four kids. We are all two years apart and my mom was able to work (to help support all of us) without being disrupted too much in her career by each pregnancy. Nobody is stopping you from having a big family; it’s just that most women (and men) don’t want to have all those kids. If you want women to choose to have many kids, make parenting more affordable, easier, and make support accessible to all.

Plus just may be we want adopt kids instead? What is that not treated as an option anymore??