In the summer of 2024, I spent a lot of time thinking about what it would be like to have a baby.
I was living in my parents’ house in Spring, Texas. I was back home because I had struggled to secure a summer internship in media or journalism, the industries I’d hoped to work in after graduating. Almost daily, my mother and I fought about my choice to pursue writing. I countered all her arguments, but I was just as concerned as she was. I worried that I had wasted my time at Harvard by pouring all my energy into something I no longer felt I was particularly good at.
I would wake from these dreams in my childhood bedroom, in a state where abortion had effectively been banned since 2022.
I tried to blunt the edge of my anxiety, and I ended up running again and again into motherhood. I turned on the television and watched politicians rant about childless cat ladies. I flipped through Instagram Reels and watched glamorous stay-at-home mothers bake sourdough bread from scratch. I listened to “Juno,” Sabrina Carpenter’s horny pop song about getting knocked up. I watched Juno, the 2007 movie referenced in Carpenter’s song, and cried hysterically when the title character delivered her baby. I bopped to Charli XCX’s Brat, the defining album of that summer, and I found myself stuck on the penultimate track, where Charli wonders: Should I stop my birth control? / ’Cause my career feels so small / In the existential scheme of it all. I had recurring dreams about being pregnant with a baby girl. I would wake from these dreams in my childhood bedroom, in a state where abortion had effectively been banned since 2022, and I would think: “Maybe I am a bad writer. But maybe I could make a good mother.”
Earlier that year, in a women, gender, and sexuality studies course, I was introduced to a New York Times article by reporter Louise Story about Ivy League women and motherhood. In October 2005, Story reported that many women in the Ivy League aspired to be stay-at-home mothers. Then a recent Yale graduate, Story spoke to 138 women at her alma mater and found that 60 percent planned to cut back on work or stop working entirely when they had children. Underlying the article was an age-old question: Can women really balance their careers with motherhood? Or, as it’s still often phrased: Can women have it all?
Some of Story’s sources framed the young women’s desire to stay at home as a flippant response to the efforts of second-wave feminists. Second-wave feminism, which began in the 1960s and ended in the early 1980s, had created a place for women in the public sphere. Mass movements against rape and domestic violence had provided women a way out of abusive relationships. The contraceptive pill appeared in 1960; Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973. Federal legislation prohibited sex-based wage discrimination and gave women the right to apply for credit cards and mortgages in their name. In 2005, the fact that women could choose domesticity—rather than be coerced into it—was a comparatively recent development. Still, Story’s sources took that choice for granted.
In recent years, the accomplishments of second-wave feminism have come under fire. Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022. In his concurring opinion in that decision, Justice Clarence Thomas called on the Supreme Court to “reconsider” its past rulings codifying access to contraception. The right-wing attack on reproductive rights has been accompanied by a proliferation of pronatalism: think pieces on declining birth rates, influencers warning about the dangers of birth control, Elon Musk and his bevy of baby-fevered tech bros. Of course, wanting to have children doesn’t make someone a pronatalist. What makes the ideology distinct is the way it presents having children as a moral imperative.
When I was living at home in 2024, I spent a lot of time with my mother, who stopped working when I was born. She had dedicated a large part of her life to raising me and my younger sister, who graduated from high school a few months ago. Now that we’ve grown up, my mom has had to figure out a new routine, after 20 years of structuring her schedule around ours. She doesn’t regret her decision—but, in recent years, she’s mentioned that she would have liked to work part-time if remote work had been an option when I was born.
My upbringing shaped my views on work and motherhood, and I wanted to know how my classmates’ backgrounds had influenced theirs. This summer, I sent out a call for interviews on house mailing lists for Eliot, Winthrop, and Quincy. Although my sample size was nowhere near as large as Story’s, the classmates I spoke with surprised me with their confidence in their ability to balance motherhood and careers.
Mai Hoang ’25 will begin her first job this fall investing in the global energy transition. She hopes to have a family later, while continuing to work. She’s inspired, in part, by her own mother, who worked throughout her childhood. Hoang grew up in Ho Chi Minh City, in Vietnam, and she says it was common for urban, middle-class families to rely on relatives and professional caregivers to help raise their children. She also recalls a more porous cultural boundary between family and the workplace. If Hoang’s mother needed to work late, she would bring her daughter to the office. “I really loved hanging out at my mom’s office, because it was fun seeing her dressed up nice and in a different role than she was at home,” Hoang recalls.
Abigail Curtis’s role models come from the Orthodox Jewish community, where she says raising children is seen as an honor. “Many Jewish families that I know have a wonderful balance with mothers having very full careers,” says Curtis ’26. “For me, that was a sign that I didn’t have to give up my aspirations professionally in order to have a family.”
Like Hoang, Curtis spoke about the importance of community support in raising children. “In religious Jewish communities, you’re very supported when you have a child. People really do rally around you,” she says.
To be clear, I am not suggesting that my classmates’ role models are better than my own mother. She’s one of the hardest-working people I know, and I look up to her every day. I mention my mother’s comments about remote work—and the reality of working motherhood during the pandemic—because I think they expose some of the many ways American society has long been structured to make motherhood and a career incompatible. Curtis’s and Hoang’s experiences demonstrate how alternative community structures and cultural values can help mothers maintain a fulfilling career. Story’s article, like many additions to the discourse surrounding work and motherhood, frames women leaving the workforce as a personal choice. I am not saying that it’s impossible for a woman to choose domesticity. But those choices are often made in an environment designed to funnel women back into the home.
Can women have it all? The perennial question makes women sound gluttonous and silly—like toddlers who have just learned the word more. In Story’s 2005 article, Yale Professor Cynthia E. Russett said that by giving up on their hopes of balancing career and family, Ivy League women were “turning realistic.” Some of Story’s student sources echoed Russett’s sentiment. Cynthia Liu, then a 19-year-old sophomore, was quoted as saying matter-of-factly: “My mother has always told me you can’t be the best career woman and the best mother at the same time. You always have to choose one over the other.”
Pronatalists present motherhood as a marker of maturity. Elon Musk, one of America’s prominent pronatalists, has obsessed for years over declining birth rates—in April, he dramatically tweeted that low birth rates would “end civilization.” U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance has also suggested that falling birth rates represent a “civilizational crisis” and has proposed that people with children should be given more voting rights than those without. Birth rate anxiety frames having children as a responsibility to humanity. Musk’s neglect of his own children and Vance’s infamous disdain for childless cat ladies suggest that this responsibility falls primarily on women.
This conflation of motherhood and maturity also coincides with the tendency to characterize feminist demands for women’s dignity as childish. Joan Didion exemplified the sentiment in 1972, when she accused second-wave feminists of wishing to “stay forever children.” A girl becomes a woman when she gives up on fighting for the world she wants and comes to accept the world as it is—in other words, when she turns realistic.
Many women harbor wild and expansive ambitions. At Harvard, to my delight, I see those ambitions on full display. Here, I’ve met a woman who aspires to become a U.S. attorney general. I’ve spoken to others who want to shape national public health strategy or to solve humanitarian crises as human rights attorneys. Their aspirations are not realistic in the statistical sense. Neither are mine: I want to write, I want to be read, I want to shape culture. Sure, I constantly question my ability to actually accomplish these things—but what 20-something-year-old doesn’t? Pronatalism preys upon women’s doubt by presenting motherhood as the safer option. This not only obscures the intensity of pregnancy and parenting—it pushes women away from their own potential.
I don’t know if I want to have children. If I did, I know now that I would want to keep working. The most valuable thing I learned about myself as a teenager was that I could write. It materially changed my life and gave me a stable sense of identity. I can’t imagine a future without it. I don’t know if I or any of my peers will make it. But I couldn’t forgive myself if I didn’t try.
Asking whether women can “have it all” frames women as irrationally greedy for wanting what men have always had: the opportunity to have children without sacrificing their careers. If that’s greed, then I’m guilty of it. I will always be a woman who wants it all.
