Does promoting marriage and motherhood inevitably make women easy targets for subordinate status, increased vulnerability, and a return to second-class status? One of the very first columns I wrote at UnHerd, back in 2019, described how, for me, becoming a mum meant giving up on a great deal of the liberal ideology I’d embraced when younger — because it was impossible to square with the embodied reality of caring for a baby. A relatively conventional home life turned out to be much more fulfilling than the radical one I’d adopted with my progressive politics.

My accounts of questioning this individualistic ideology, and embracing marriage and motherhood have resonated with social conservatives. Most of these, it goes without saying, feel (as I do) that family life and women’s distinctive sexed realities should be better understood and valued in the public conversation. Some, though, take more hardline positions: that women should never work, for example, that we should always be submissive – or even that women’s right to vote should be repealed.

But surely any stance which risks lending momentum to such extreme arguments cannot be in women’s interests? I explored this question recently with the Canadian Right-wing firebrand Lauren Southern, whose early video content regularly challenged liberal feminist orthodoxy, and promoted domesticity. Our stories are symmetrical in some respects: both of us embraced radical politics in our early twenties, me on the Left and Southern on the Right. Both of us embraced ideologies that felt inspiring in the free-floating world of the internet. And both of us, albeit in different ways, have course-corrected back toward reality in part via the fiercely practical experience of caring for a child.

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