cardassiangoodreads:

norussianroulette:

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.

Thank you. Almost everyone else in the notes is saying that families had so many children only because of the high mortality rate of infants. I’m pretty sure the institutions that forced women into unwanted marriages, pregnancies, childbirths, and motherhood had more to do with it.

Pregnancy is long and painful. Childbirth is indescribably excruciating, often lethal (especially two, three generations ago). And if you lose multiple children after going through it multiple times, that isn’t exactly a reason to keep doing it… unless you’re not the one who has to endure it and you have another person who can do it for you.

I’d wager that women who went through childbirth 12+ times didn’t decide to do that of their own accord. They were legally understood to be the property of their husbands. They were socially understood to be incubators and domestic servants. They were barred from the public sphere – jobs, education, politics, etc. –  most had to marry to survive.

It’s not hard to understand that, given the right to not have kids, a lot of women won’t have kids. A lot of us just want dogs, ffs.

100% — and I appreciate this post standing up for women who don’t want kids period — but also the number of women who WANT to have 12+ kids, where it doesn’t involve some kind of coercion (including the ideological kind pushed by religious cults like Quiverfull) — is minuscule to nonexistent. Acting like that’s the ideal to aspire to, either you are just really stupid, or you hate women having choices in how to run our lives and being able to use our full human potential the same as men. (Most often it’s the latter but managing to con some of the former.) And this is why reproductive rights including access to birth control but ALSO abortion is essential to women’s full citizenship

ferndaphnia:

Ed + hair

justaleapoffaith:

Our Flag Means Death + Character Archetypes