Feminism Betrayed Me in Pregnancy

A personal essay by Editor-in-Chief, Gabrielle Scout.

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I was sitting in bed this morning – a Sunday morning – reading the Vogue issue with a pregnant Rihanna gracing the cover with, as they described, the bump seen around the world. This issue felt eerily in time with my life as, four days into my second trimester, I have been searching for the motherhood answers in between spurts of nausea. 

The two first articles ironically mirrored narratives my mind were untangling. First, an article about Florence & The Machine and the inner conflict that consumes her mind – to be a mother or not to be a mother? – all contrasted and debated through the lens of her career. 

Second, a memoir-style article of a bestselling author whose father famously identified more with being a writer than being a father, husband, and friend. He thought sometimes about those he loved but all the time about his work. Questions of the legitimacy of an artist if they give their life to anything other than their work – including their children – plagued the pages.

Then, we have Rihanna.

I saw myself in Florence. I saw myself in this father. I saw myself in Rihanna. 

Two weeks after I found out that I was pregnant and the physical symptoms hit me like a tidal wave I didn’t read the forecast for, my husband said to me: 

“I am so sorry you have to go through this and I can’t do some of this for you.” 

I looked up at him, sitting on our couch, snuggled up together with one hand on my stomach that had yet to swell and said: 

“No, I am sorry you cannot experience this. I am sorry that you cannot feel what I feel right now. It’s the most insane, magical, challenging, and meaningful feeling in the world.” 

I went from the power lens of the feminine role of pregnancy and birth to, just four weeks later, disdaining the male sex for not moving through what women are meant to move through if they decide to have children and biologically carry their children. 

I went into the archaic lens of feminism that men and women are the same; that their biological experiences should not deter or change or differ in the reality of how their life takes form. It does not matter that I am a woman because I am a human and therefore, can do anything a man can. 

But in the full body stop of pregnancy, the truth was so far from the intense leveling that feminism was trying to author. There is truth in my experience that no matter how equal I am to a man, he does not have to change his lifestyle to accommodate the physical presence of a pregnancy. My husband has not had to take time off work, postpone projects, scale back from his passions, and balance the all too consuming physical symptoms of pregnancy against his mental health. It is I who have had to make all of those changes against, admittedly, my greater desires as an entrepreneur. 

And yes, I have a right to be angry about that or find that unfair. Casting shame aside, I have been listening to each of my musings, thoughts, and analytic concerns that come to the surface. I know better than to cast away unpretty thoughts for the sake of making others feel better. And yet, the unpretty thoughts have been haunting the reputation I want others to hold of me. The classic dance of your truth against the judgment of others. 

When I DM women on Instagram who announce their pregnancy around the same time I did, I ask them how they are feeling, looking for similarities amongst our experiences, looking for validation that I am not crazy for suffering through this part of the process. It has been a desperate attempt at community, pulling on one of our most basic survival instincts which is to be social and belong. 

Their responses usually follow the same formula: They list out their challenging symptoms, mainly physical, and follow up with the main disclaimer: But I am soooo grateful.

I never followed up with that main disclaimer. I mostly left it out of the conversation. When one asks me how I am feeling, I answer. And in those moments, I was not grateful. I was sick. 

In those exchanges, I wonder why we cannot simply express our current state of experience without shedding light on the obvious truth that beyond all of this, beyond all of the nausea and the fatigue, beyond all of the inner frustration that I cannot work, beyond all of the challenging moments of wondering how the fuck women do this, that I am grateful and blissfully excited to meet my baby girl? 

But it is when we do not give a voice to the shadow and to the discomfort that the shadow and the discomfort persist. It is when we pepper our darkness with light, applying blush over our sunken cheeks that our sunken cheeks are robbed of their natural ability to plump themselves up again. 

I watched people’s faces get uncomfortable when I openly admitted that I was having a difficult time in pregnancy without following it up with the cheery mother blanket statement of, “But it’s all worth it!” 

Was I bypassing the point of being a mother to anguish within my pain? 

Was I thinking too critically about the overwhelming responsibility and toll women take on to bring life into this existence? Was I being too hard on men for escaping the day-to-day, hour-by-hour, minute-by-minute experience of being pregnant? Was I misunderstanding the challenge as the most meaningful initiation of my life? Was I unwilling to blanket my true alignment because I felt as if I needed to go on a crusade that if reflected on a poster board at a march would say, “WOMEN IT IS OKAY TO ADMIT THIS SHIT IS TOUGH AND THAT MEN WILL NEVER UNDERSTAND AND IT IS IN THAT TRUTH THAT OUR INDIVIDUAL POWER AND UNIQUE PATH HERE ON EARTH IS ILLUMINATED IN THE MOST SACRED AND DIVINE OF WAYS.”

A bit long for a poster, but you understand the main mission here. 

And yet, that is where the energy has been misplaced. That is where the perspective has been skewed. That is where we have lost touch with what it means to hold the sacred responsibility of being a woman. 

I thought I could have it all – but I misinterpreted what having it all means. I was raised on the flavor of feminism that boldly proclaimed that I could make it in a man’s world while also bearing children and holding my union of marriage. Yet, that feminism demanded us to be in our masculine. It shamed and hid our feminine. It placed responsibility that was ten times greater than what the men were carrying around upon our shoulders and demanded our face be painted with beautiful layers of foundation and eye shadow to show our daily gratitude within our pursuit for perfection. 

It so perfectly hid the patriarchy’s agenda which was to create an army of women that were in submission to the masculine way of life, never allowing their feminine divinity to come to the surface and therefore never allowing the feminine way of life to even remotely attack or threaten the male-dominated fabric of our society. 

Our society swallowed us whole into the workplace, placed suits on us, had us run the 9-5, told us we could do anything a man could (if we worked ten times harder), and then made us take the second shift when it came to family life.

As I sit carrying my baby girl, I see that I had been lied to. I never had to be like a man to make it in this world. I never had to conceal my feminine – a side of me that is so deeply buried that uncovering her feels like being an archaeologist at a bone site. I never had to do it all. 

I could have it all but I didn’t have to do it all alone. 

So, as I grow a biological female within my own body, each and every day, little by little, with extreme physical and emotional energy on my behalf, I ask myself: Can I allow myself to be fully powerful within the role of a woman? Can I be in my feminine while breaking down the barriers of what feminism once meant to me? Can I be in sacred rage, sacred creation, and sacred femininity to reach my full potential? 

Will my baby girl know a mother who is fully embodied or one who is terrified of the true responsibility of being a woman, one who is terrified of the feminine?

As I ponder that question, I know the former is the assignment I have been called to because as I realized I had been told time and time again that I can do anything a man can do, they were never told the truth on their side of the coin: that a biological man cannot do anything a biological woman can do. 

And I will take pride in the crevices of that difference, in the womb that is growing and creating life, in the monthly hormonal cycle that allows me to be seasonal like the nature we inhabit, in the fact that I am so deeply, sacredly, and divinely a woman carrying a baby girl. 

Gabrielle Scout, Editor-in-Chief of REVUE

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