Protecting the Home Front: Why We Need a “G.I. Bill” For Homemakers

Introducing Ivana Greco

It's "Featured Authors February," and we're thrilled to introduce our newest Featured Author: Ivana Greco.

Ivana is a homemaker, homeschooling mother of three, and a Harvard-law educated attorney. She was also the 2022-2023 Wollstonecraft Fellow with the Abigail Adams Institute. Her work focuses on the ways that politicians, employers, and other key institutions can better support caregiving families.

Here's what she has to say about Fairer Disputations:

"I am honored to contribute to the work of the larger community of talented scholars and writers at Fairer Disputations, and hope to add to the discussion concerning the challenges and rewards of motherhood, as well as modern society's failure to value the work of the home."

Today's FD Original is Ivana's debut essay, "Protecting the Home Front: Why We Need a 'G.I. Bill' for Homemakers."

Fairer Disputations
 

Protecting the Home Front: Why We Need a "G.I. Bill" for Homemakers

IVANA GRECO

Betty Friedan famously argued that suburban housewives—rather than playing important, needed roles—were harming themselves, their husbands, their children, and their communities. She argued that women with “an exclusive role of wife and mother” were the cause of numerous alleged social ills, including “latent or overt homosexuality,” “Battered-Child Syndrome,” and “schizophrenic children.” In a chapter entitled Progressive Dehumanization: The Comfortable Concentration Camp, Friedan wrote: “the women who ‘adjust’ as housewives, who grow up wanting to be ‘just a housewife,’ are in as much danger as the millions who walked to their own death in the concentration camps.”

Friedan would later walk back her concentration camp analogy, but the damage was done. With friends like Betty Friedan, what enemies did American housewives need? It is unsurprising that after the second-wave feminism of the 1960s and 1970s gained traction, efforts to support homemaker mothers essentially died.

It’s time to resurrect those efforts.

Around the Web

Perhaps you saw the New York Times piece last week on detransitioners, which has generated a lot of conversation. Featured Author Eliza Mondegreen breaks down the piece—and points out that even within this coverage, the Times is trying to contain the story of damage done by the transgender movement.

At her substack, Michelle Alleva reflects on her own experience of speaking out about her detransition. She argues that we must make room for detransitioners to be treated not just as victims, but as human persons seeking to live a full life.

UnHerd
 

New York Times Gets Braver With Gender Coverage

ELIZA MONDEGREEN

Doctors, activists, and reporters alike have treated the subject of gender as an utter exception. Gender clinicians are meant to jettison everything they know about child and adolescent development, about the ways distress finds expression in our bodies, about how dangerous ideas can spread like wildfire. Activists have insisted that the whole world observe their taboos and echo their mantras. And media outlets like the Times have too often abandoned their responsibility to inform themselves and their readers, to bring the facts to light without fear or favor. There has been far too much fear and far too many favours to activists, who never should have been allowed to control the narrative. 

At The Critic, Helen Gibson shines a light on the dangers of surrogacy. The messages sent by surrogacy agencies and society at large can lead some women to dissociate to the point that they become oblivious to the fact that they are handing away their own child to strangers—for a fee.

And over at Unherd, Kathleen Stock writes powerfully about surrogacy and other biotech "solutions" to women's bodies.

The Critic
 

Miriam Cates is Right About Surrogacy

HELEN GIBSON

One surrogate mother previously referred herself to me as “just the microwave”. Another in an interview with BBC’s World At One described her baby as “nothing to do with me”. The mother of one celebrity’s children said of herself “I’m basically an oven”. And it struck me to what extent surrogacy grooms women out of understanding they are the mothers of their own children. When you’re faced with hundreds of surrogacy agencies telling you you are merely a gestational carrier, or a host, doing something ‘wonderful’ for a couple or individual who longs for a baby, why wouldn’t you believe them?

Finally, Margaret Brady discusses the recent deepfake porn scandal involving AI-generated images of Taylor Swift. Even if AI porn isn't "real," it still comes at a significant cost.

Meanwhile, Laurel Duggan comments on a controversial NPR essay on online communities of men seeking support in their attempts to abstain from masturbation and porn usage.

Verily
 

Taylor Swift's AI Exploitation Highlights the Harm of Porn

MARGARET BRADY

Ultimately, what makes all forms of pornography so disquieting is that humans having sex—even “fake” ones—are depicted as consumables. Even if it’s not “me” on the porn site, even if it’s not even “my likeness,” it’s still “my gender” or “my human family” having our intimacy packaged as a product to be devoured by indifferent strangers. The huge leaps in artificial intelligence capability lately are creating a lot of anxiety. So many of us, including the experts, are fearing the loss of what makes us human in our art, relationships, and economy, with seemingly no guardrails to protect human dignity at the expense of so-called progress and profits. 

But maybe the visceral reaction to Taylor’s mistreatment will spark a re-examination of what we value about human beings.

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