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The Meaning of Life

Can a Life of Child-rearing Be Meaningful?

Sarah Conly on devoting one’s life to another.

For hundreds of years the focus of women’s lives has been child-rearing. Since the identification of women as (mere) mothers has been linked to their second-class social status, earlier feminists like Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan decried homemaking and child-rearing as a life focus, and encouraged the entry of women into the world of paid, professional work. More contemporary authors, however, have argued that this dismissal in fact reflected a male bias; that while women should not be forced into a life of domesticity, the choice of child-rearing over work outside the home was a perfectly respectable one. Child-rearing, they believe, can make for just as meaningful a life as any other activity. If a meaningful life has, as has been popularly argued, a narrative structure, with a well-defined progression in stages through beginning, middle, end; with a clearly understandable goal, a telos, integral to the activity; with virtues of character defined by their role in reaching this telos, child-rearing has them.

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