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I think there has to be a way to talk about how social & professional & public life is designed *for* childless people -- because it& #39;s designed for cishet dudes with or without kids, who are presumed to have wives that do all the childrearing work.
The nuclear family is incompatible with full-time work and/or leisure time. The only way to meet 100% of your professional duties and 100% of your parenting duties, and still have a life, is to split it so one person is driven out of public life & the other person never parents.
The assumption that you, the subject, either (a) don& #39;t have kids or (b) have someone taking care of your kids for you is just built into every part of public life, social life, work life. It& #39;s such a basic part of the world that it& #39;s hard to see until you have a kid yourself.
That means that women without children -- or, granted, women with a bottomless childcare budget -- may have an easier time navigating certain structures, but they also pay a social price and are stigmatized, because being able to maneuver that way is a man& #39;s prerogative.
I don& #39;t see women with children as being in any way LESS stigmatized. In fact, I think we really hate moms, as a culture. We blame them for everything and caricature them as useless idiots and if something is described as "mom" it& #39;s usually an insult: "____ jeans, wine ____."
It& #39;s hard to have the conversation because childless people, in my experience, tend to shut down or be angry around the idea that they have it "easy," and I think parents are very frustrated trying to convey how hard it is to people who haven& #39;t had to navigate these difficulties.
But I do think it& #39;s just misogyny all the way down, and women get falsely pitted against each other, because the default subject, the person every structure is built to privilege is, again, a cishet guy who has someone or several someones to do his domestic and parenting work.
