A Birth Story Born of Women’s Rights

With all that has been said about the mommy wars recently, I wanted to highlight what Elizabeth Cady Stanton, women’s rights pioneer and philosopher, shared about one of her births:

“I never felt such sacredness in carrying a child as I have in the case of this one.  She is the largest and most vigorous baby I ever had, weighing twelve pounds. And yet my labor was short and easy.  I laid down about fifteen minutes, and lone with my nurse and one female friend brought forth this big girl. I sat up immediately, changed my clothes, put on a wet bandage, and, after a few hours’ repose, sat up again.  Am I not almost savage? For what refined, delicate, genteel, civilized woman would get well in so indecently short a time?” (quoted by Gaskin, Birth Matters: A Midwife’s Manifesta, 70)

Sadly, many modern-day feminists have forgotten how childbirth and child-rearing was meant to be so valued by the pioneers of its own movement.  Ina May Gaskin points out, “even the writing of modern-day feminists have contained echoes of the recurrent theme of revulsion of the body – especially of the life-giving female body” (Birth Matters: A Midwife’s Manifesta, 69). In my opinion, true feminism includes a reverence for the power of the gift of giving life and the nurturing  of it thereafter.  This war between stay at home mothers or working mothers should not exist.  Really it is Satan’s deceptive plan to undermine womanhood and motherhood in any form (see Revelations 12).  He wants to take away its value in any way possible.  And as a woman who values feminine power, I am determined that the evil one will not win.