2) Motherhood is meaningful.
Feminists acknowledge the value of motherhood, which has long been underappreciated by society. A man I dated once boasted of his father's impressive career. When I asked him what his mother did, he nonchalantly responded, "She stays at home. She does nothing." (We never went past the first date.) Although housewives are negatively stereotyped, when a mother does choose to work, the question of whether women "can really have it all" has been debated in earnest for decades, and is still a common thing to ask actresses on the red carpet. On the other hand, if a woman chooses not to have children, she is selfish. The subtext is that a woman must know her place, that place is motherhood, and therefore motherhood is undervalued because women are the "weaker" sex.
But is there a bond stronger than motherhood? Cows feel the same separation as human mothers when they are separated from their calves within days so that they can produce more milk on commercial dairy farms. Healthy cows live over twenty years, but dairy cows live until around the age of four, at which point they are sold to become beef. It's a brutal process that the meat industry works hard to keep out of the public eye.
Author Melanie Joy purports that exploitative systems are kept invisible for a reason, from the Nazi Holocaust to American slavery. These systems require the cooperation of all levels of society. During the Holocaust, bureaucrats drew up decrees, churches provided evidence of Aryan descent, railroad operators drove victims to concentration camps. But once finally exposed, entrenched ideologies formerly seen as common sense are revealed as ludicrous.
