The Sexual Revolution promised equality for women, lifting up contraception and abortion as essential tools to even the playing field. A generation later, is that what we’ve inherited?
Samantha sits down with author Leah Jacobson to discuss the rotten fruits of the feminist tree to uncover what women really need for full flourishing as women in society, and why that means embracing our bodies rather than muting some of our greatest capabilities.
You can purchase Leah’s book Wholistic Feminism: Healing the Identity Crisis Caused by the Women’s Movement, connect on Instagram, or visit her website at http://www.leahajacobson.com/.
Episode Transcript
Samantha:
Let me tell you a story. A young writer sits at her desk, fingers poised above her typewriter, ready to type, but still the weight of pressure from her editor hangs heavy around her shoulders. Invent the story. Is this what reporters do? She sighs, deflated. All the thrill of finally landing the job she's been pursuing for years has escaped. And then the clocking starts. Decision made, she begins to type. Each strike of her keyboard hardening the exterior of the new person she's becoming. If her soft, idealistic self is not welcome in this office, she will reinvent herself, become a new person like the imaginary woman whose promiscuity she glamorizes. She will conjure this new self out of thin air clack clack. This is a true story. It's 1971, and the young writer is Sue Ellen Browder. Years later, she would gather the courage to tell her story in the book Subverted: How I Helped the Sexual Revolution Hijack the Women's Movement.
It's the story of her career as, what she describes as, a propaganda writer for Cosmopolitan Magazine, selling ideas, ideas about the modern woman and her delight in sexual freedom, her gratitude for the liberating powers of contraception and abortion. Stories are powerful. Women of our present generation have been told a story about themselves, about their bodies and their fertility. They have been lied to about their life giving power, taught to fear what is arguably the greatest physical capability our species has. Browder was just one of those storytellers. Author Leah Jacobson is telling a new story. She writes: “We've allowed our culture to blame our bodies for all the inequalities we experience as women in every woman's magazine, there are multiple articles that communicate our worth in terms of our sexual appeal, our careers and our freedom from long term commitments, such as marriage and children. The single sexually available woman is portrayed as the height of happiness and success. The only mention of our feminine abilities is in ads for ovulation suppressing drugs, information on delaying pregnancy and virtually nothing about our breasts lactating, except a million tips on maximizing breast cleavage with the wonder bra and makeup tricks.” Jacobson reflects, “Rather than elevating culture to appreciate and support women's bodies, we settled for a culture that says our bodies are for sexual pleasure only. Making the right to alter, suppress, and destroy our fertile, life-giving female bodies the supreme women's right.”
These are the words of Leah Jacobson, refusing to accept the self-fulfilling propaganda we've inherited from Browder’s generation. Leah also has a story to tell women, one that views our bodies, not with suspicion and fear, but with awe for our nearly superhuman abilities. It's not the story we've internalized, if our spending on cosmetics and plastic surgery are any indication. In a world of filters and Photoshop, women appear to be readily dismissive of these incredible capabilities. We're too preoccupied with fixing our physical flaws. In fact, we might be so preoccupied that we're left wondering, what are these feminine abilities? What is so special about women's bodies? What are we missing? I'm Samantha Stephenson, and this is Brave New Us.
Leah:
I was seeing in the women's healthcare literature and in just higher education, a real need to remind women that their bodies are not the problem.
Samantha:
This is author Leah Jacobson explaining the genesis of her book, Holistic Feminism: Healing the Identity Crisis Caused by the Women's Movement. She's commenting on how her work as a lactation consultant revealed deep pain women were experiencing.
Leah:
It's a very vulnerable moment, those days after giving birth, where all of your fears and insecurities just come rushing forward, and anything that you've ever thought negatively about your body or its abilities, it is verbalized. And in that postpartum period, if breastfeeding is not going well, you know, women say things all the time like, “well, my body has never worked. My body, I'm sure I'm not gonna be able to do it.” And just this very pervasive, negative feeling about what our bodies are naturally created to do and a distrust and a misunderstanding really of the power and the beauty, just because they've never had the support or the education to truly become acquainted with their own strength. And so this really began as I was first becoming a lactation consultant, And first having these conversations with women about the need to really correct our medical system.
I think the seeds were planted years ago. I was a campus minister a long time ago at the University of Minnesota Duluth and having conversations with young women who were preparing for marriage, and in those kind of transitions from young woman, potentially into wife and mother, I saw it there as well that this, this sense of, “well, I could never figure out my fertility. I could never use natural fertility, my cycles are too irregular, like my body doesn't work.” So I was hearing it then, and it was troubling and it was a constant conversation and saying to young women, “your body's not the problem, your body's not the problem.” And then I saw it again in the childbirth community as well. You know, I could never give birth naturally. And my hips aren't wide enough. Nobody in my family can give birth.
Like well, I have to have, you know, a C-section, I have to do this thing, without even really taking the time to lean into it and trust. And so holistic feminism is kind of a manifesto written and addressed to all women. Just a challenge of, maybe you are not the problem. You know, maybe the medical system, maybe culture, maybe expectations, maybe the corporate world, maybe all these other places that make you think you need to change yourself. Maybe they're the problem. And that's really what my heart, my heart feels. I feel women just need to know that you're good. You're good. The way you were created.
Samantha:
Of course, if our bodies are so good, where did so many of us get this message that we're broken and flawed? Where is this coming from?
Leah:
The voice of authority, figures and experts in our culture, they have a lot of weight and a lot of power and a lot of influence. And the medical community for, for a long time has, you know, kind of been, I don't wanna say bought out, but it kind of has been heavily influenced by, you know, political parties and movements and ideologies that aren't necessarily coming from scientific research or basis in our natural biology as women. And so there's a real question that has to be posed. There are voices of experts that are saying something else, you know, are there, are there doctors and physicians and people out there that are seeing something else that's healthier and happier for women. And you know, why aren't their voices being elevated? And I think that's a real question that we need to ask because there has been a lot of research and a lot of evidence to show that there are alternative natural, healthy means to support women's bodies and that they're just not getting the air time that they deserve. There's almost a suppression.
Samantha:
I think that Leah is on to something. There seems to be a real suspicion surrounding natural solutions. Now, maybe that's just because there aren't a lot of studies in this area, there's not a lot of money to fund that kind of research when pharmaceutical companies, comparatively, stand to profit billions. Still, it seems that we will readily accept relatively new solutions that science offers us for things we've been handling for centuries.
Leah:
I think that we as humans, you know, we've, we've accomplished tremendous things in the last century in terms of our technological advancements and just our mastery and our understanding of the world and of nature. And in some ways I think that we have kind of, kind of convinced ourselves that we're capable of being in charge of everything. And, and I attribute, I think that's a little bit more of a masculine trait. I think women do have a better tendency to just kind of surrender and recognize and, and work with nature and ebb and flow with it. I think that's more of a feminine trait, but I think there has been this very masculine tendency to say, well, we know best, you know, nature is wrong, we're gonna fix it. And we try to kind of overcome things. You know, we try to change weather patterns and change, you know, everything to kind of meet our needs and be in control.
And I think that it's this idea that we're controlling everything and improving it that has really, really messed with women's healthcare in the past, you know, century for sure we've really tightly controlled every aspect of what women's bodies do. And, part of me sees this as a little bit of misogyny, a fear, a distrust, even a hatred towards women's bodies for what they do when they're truly healthy and unsuppressed and strong. They're very powerful. And in some ways they're, they're frightening, cuz they can't be perfectly controlled. They can be understood and supported, but they can't be perfectly controlled. And there's something I think in the masculine nature that fears that.
Samantha:
That's not the only difference between men and women. Much of Leah's work centers around what she terms, the “feminine abilities.”
Leah:
The “feminine abilities”, we call them the, the female superpowers and they’re ovulation, gestation, and lactation. And so when you look at a male body just anatomically, let's just put a male body and a female body side by side. For the most part, all of the systems are the same. You know, you're gonna have their respiratory and digestive and, and they're all gonna have the same pieces. They're gonna be a little bit different based on the size and the frame of a man and a woman and you know, blood volume and heart rate and different things in muscular sort of patterns are gonna be a little different, you know, based on the hormones, but these hormones and these things, the reproductive systems, that's where we really see, aha! something is different. Like, that should be a clue to us that the male body and the female body are not the same.
They're not interchangeable. They're not gonna respond the same way to medications or treatments. There's definitely a difference. And this has been an error in medicine for a long time. Women's bodies have been treated in many ways like little men's bodies. We've assumed in medical research, we've assumed, um, in many areas that a woman's body will receive a treatment or a medication in the same way that a man's body will, and that's just categorically wrong. That's just poor, poor medicine. That's uh, that's just a grievance honestly, towards women. And so when we talk about the feminine abilities or the feminine superpowers, ovulation, gestation, and lactation, we're looking at what are the unique things that only a woman's body can do, and a man's body could not do. There's differences in the systems that you can note elsewhere, but ultimately, same form, you know, we both have lungs, we breathe. We don't both have ovaries.
We don't both ovulate. We both don't menstruate, uh, men don't gestate. They don't have uteruses. They don't have breast tissue in the same way that we do. They don't go through lactogenesis. They do not create breast milk unless there is something really wrong with their system. That's a problem, if man is lactating, that's, that's a sign that a pituitary issue or whatever, there's something really wrong, if that happens in a man's body. In a woman's body, that's a sign of health and that's a really beautiful thing. And so it's just a very simple observation that our bodies are different, which indicates that we should not be assuming that these are diseased states, that we have additional organs. We have additional functions, they are not the sign of disease. They're a sign of health when they're optimized.
Samantha:
It strikes me as simultaneously empowering yet ironic that we can describe these feminine abilities as superpowers. After all, they are merely functions that every healthy female body is capable of. If we call them superpowers, aren't we falling into that same trap of defining the norm for all of humanity, using a male standard? Still, that pervasive trap seems infinitely preferable to the messaging feminism has given us about women's bodies.
Leah:
It's been set up in such a way that we see women's bodies and abilities as liabilities, instead of strengths. We don't see them as abilities. We see them as liabilities. And that has been because of how we define success, and how we define a meaningful, purposeful life. And in many ways it's been set up absolutely to, it's been normed, in many ways to what men are easily capable of doing things such as work in ways that is very productive, making things, manufacturing, things overseeing work outside the home in many ways has been set up as a standard for success. And so a woman's body is not set up in many ways to do that easily. Her body is always in relationship with another. A healthy woman that is, you know, accepting, and her fertility and accepting motherhood and children. She needs a different system.
She needs a different place in order for her to be successful. She can still produce and do a lot of things. I mean, I have seven children and I think I had five of them after the point where I went back to college and got a master's degree. No, actually it was number five I think. I think I've had two since then, but I think I had five children when I went back to, to school and, and you know, I achieved a level of success, you know, that the outside world would say, but I needed a very different system and I needed a very different accommodation and praise God for online work, you know, praise God for online universities and the ability to work from home because I could not have done that in a male normed you know, expectation for productivity and work that wasn't gonna work with the life that I have as a woman, as a healthy woman, who's fertile in accepting children.
It doesn't seem like we're actually reimagining the system, we've just become so preoccupied with fighting for the right to suppress and alter our bodies so that we can fit into the existing system, which I think is a major failure of the women's movement of, and of feminism. I think a true feminism, a true women's movement is going to say, we're not the problem. The system's the problem, let's change it. And so there's a couple of shining examples that I, I like to point to. And I like to say, this makes sense. This is possible. And one of 'em is actually Patagonia, Patagonia, outdoor, where Patagonia began an onsite childcare program, which I think is just the most brilliant and beautiful thing. So they began to allow their employees to bring their children to work. And they set it up in such a way where it was this beautiful, like outdoor kind of play area courtyard in the center of the building where parents' offices overlooked, the playground and the children playing.
And it was totally acceptable. And kind of the expectation that you're bringing your kids with you to work, you are, you know, and on your breaks, you're checking in on them. You're having lunch with them. You're nursing your baby. You're, you're remaining a family throughout the whole day that your children and your work, that you are a whole human being in this place. We don't just see you as a cog in the wheel. We don't just see you as somebody who's producing something. We see you as a human, and we understand your needs as a parent. And this program is continuing and still going. And now, um, they've begun to see that they're starting to see second generation children that grew up in the childcare, on site, working for the company, putting their children into the childcare. So now you're seeing generations of families that are loyal to a company that have a deep, you know, love for this, for this corporation that has loved their family in return.
And to me, that just makes sense. That's brilliant. That's the type of setting that you should have if you want to have, uh, worker retention and employees that are healthy and happy and doing well. If a parent is stressed out, worried about their child at childcare or wherever they're at, they are not going to give you everything that they have in the workplace. So it makes sense for corporations to take care of their employees in this way, they've got generous maternity leaves, paternity leaves. Those should become not the exception, but really the standard. That just makes sense.
Samantha:
Of course, even as workplaces have become more family friendly, women are still opting out entirely. As rates of stay at home, motherhood are increasing for millennials as opposed to the mothers who raise them. Still, the overall number of women choosing motherhood is decreasing. It doesn't appear that the workplace is growing more attractive to those women who choose motherhood. If the goal is more options for women, why aren't we seeing more flexibility geared towards accommodating mothers in the workplace? Why are women's supposed supporters? So myopically focused on the choices that keep them childless.
Leah:
And we've really just had this very controlling attitude towards people that, you know, this is when you have to be here at this moment. And for men that might be helpful. I don't know, but as a woman, and especially as a mother, I can get a whole lot done in a 24 hour or a 12 hour period as long as I have the flexibility to do the most important things first, you know, if I have to run off to school and pick up my sick child, that is the first priority that I have at that exact moment. But knowing that my child is now home safe with me tucked into bed, then I'm gonna focus my attention to the work that I was doing, and I'm gonna get it done, because I've solved the problem that was biggest. If I'm at work and my child is sick at school and I don't have childcare for them, that becomes my entire day's obsession. I lose hours trying to solve that problem. Having this flexibility is important for moms.
Samantha:
Right? That well, I think that's, maybe that's part of the problem is that that's one of the things that we know is different about women's brains and the way that they work, then studies have been done that women can move between these things more flexibly than men can. Um, just neurologically we're better at taking care of these different areas. And so maybe that's something that women can imagine in the workplace that men cannot.
Leah:
No, and I absolutely agree. And it's, and honestly, it's, it comes down to the very observable parts of our, our nature and our biology as women, like our bodies throughout our lifetime are constantly cycling. Like our home hormonal levels are shifting, they're going up and down. And then, you know, eventually then we even stop cycling and our hormonal levels like totally fall off with menopause. And so we have this sort of surrender built into us. Men don't have that understanding. Men have a much more steady, a stable rigidity almost to how their brain works. I think that we're starting to see some research and some studies like you alluded to there, that women and men just think differently. We are different. And our corporate world and, um, just even, you know, educationally and societally, we have to start to understand that different is not bad.
Samantha:
As much as the workplace may have evolved to accommodate women over the last few decades, there is still so much more work to be done, but raising these questions, having these conversations, that's part of the process. From here, our conversation switched gears. We talked less about the fruits of the feminine abilities and more about the experience of those abilities themselves. Childbirth in particular. Now, Leah and I have a bit of experience in this area between the two of us, we have given birth nearly 11 times. We've experienced labor, medicated and unmedicated at home and in the hospital vaginally and by C-section. As I prepare to give birth for the fourth time, it's not my first rodeo, as my OB keeps reminding me. Because of the research on childbirth, the CAS of potential interventions, the ideal of what outcomes might be for mom and baby, I am hoping again, to experience an unmedicated vaginal delivery. Leah is aware of these benefits, and as she reminds women in her book, our bodies are made to do this, but she also has a very balanced perspective on the gifts of modern medicine and what these interventions can mean when women really need them. Here's Leah.
Leah:
To like medicalized, like pain medication and procedures and processes that, you know, are absolutely necessary in the childbirth process to save a child's life, to save a mother's life. Like those are absolutely gifts of modern medicine and technology, and they absolutely have a place in women's healthcare. I think that we have to be very clear to not demonize and to not judge the experiences of women in childbirth, because our bodies, you know, it's as simple as that one baby who was positioned incorrectly, whose head was cocked just a little to the side and you had a 37 hour labor because they were OP sunnyside up instead of sunnyside down. I had one of those. There's so many variations in the labor and delivery process. And I've had enough babies now to know and understand that there isn't a perfect childbirth scenario.
I can say that some birth experiences have left me far less traumatized than others. And some have left me far less injured than others. I've had quicker recoveries from certain birth experiences. And so I think when we talk about is one better than the other, especially given the context of our current medical system and especially given the current recommendations that are kind of coming down from major organizations, such as ACOG, it tends to push women down a medicalized path at a very vulnerable time. And so, you know, kind of the issue of culpability, almost like if there was something that was less good than something else in the birth experience, even if there was something that was just really not a great way to give birth a woman's culpability or like her, her ability to even navigate that pathway in labor is so different.
You know, oftentimes it's really not a choice, right, that she feels she's freely making. And so understanding that, and just always seeing women, as you know, they're a recipient of care in a system that has a history of kind of bullying them down certain pathways, right? And so for me, it's that a woman chooses her birth experience, that she is in control, and making decisions for herself in this situation, as it develops and evolves. You know, that a woman is able to truly own her birth story is incredibly important that if she ends up with a emergency C-section, that she is the one understanding and advocating for that to happen, that she is, you know, not a passive recipient of care, but that she is an active in whatever way that she can be, in her state.
And that's just the hard thing about birth is that it's a very altered state, we're really not, not ourselves, or maybe we're fully ourselves, I'm not sure. But it's, it's a difficult time to be having conversations with the provider for the first time about procedures and such. And that's where the education component in childbirth education just has to be so improved. You know, women should never be surprised by what's happening when they give birth, they should never, never be fearing for their life. You know, you should not be making decisions out of fear and in extreme pain, it should be something that you've been prepared for as best you can and have your plans and pathways kind of, kind of drawn out for you, what the care is that you desire and, and truly want you hear things like birth rate, and you hear things about the trauma inflicted on women at birth. And that's the result of, of that lack of autonomy, that lack of including her in the education and decision making process. And that's a shame. I mean, that's a sign of an incredibly broken system.
Samantha:
So what are some of the kinds of information that women need to have, maybe in advance of the actual childbirth in order to be equipped to make those decisions, do you think?
Leah:
Yeah, I think it's all the information that you get on the biology and the process and the dilation and the stages and the transition. And it's, it's all that stuff, but it's deeper than that. It's before that a deeper sense of my body was made to do this. My body will most likely do this just fine. That is where we have to start this from because so many women lack that understanding. And so as soon as something hurts or goes wrong, or seems a little bit difficult, we revert back to this thought pattern of I'm broken, I'm broken, save me, fix me. And we, and we don't trust. We don't lean into it. We don't relax. Um, so I think that's where the most work in the childbirth and in any part of women's health needs to be, is this basic knowledge of my body was made to do this. And it's good. And those instances of, you know, emergency situations, yes, they're real, but they're a small percentage. That's not normally what happens.
Samantha:
Knowing that women's bodies are made to do something isn't always helpful, especially when it seems that your body isn't functioning that way. For many American women, one of these functions is breastfeeding. With the baby formula shortage of 2022, we are seeing just how desperate mothers become when they cannot feed their babies. But before the invention of formula, most women fed their babies, just fine. Women who struggled had access to close friends and family members who helped them out. The shortage is raising all kinds of questions. Some of them economic and political, but on a more fundamental level, why is it that so many women end up dependent on pricey and nutritionally substandard formula to feed their infants in our diet obsessed culture? Why are our babies the only ones for whom we insist that fed is best?
Leah:
I understand the sentiment of fed is best because it's, it's trying to destigmatize, you know, lactation failure in women with legitimate medical reasons. You know, we've got, there are conditions that absolutely make breastfeeding next to impossible for some women. Again, it's not the majority, it's a small percentage, but those women have been incredibly hurt by these slogans of breast is best. You know, they're, they're feeling very inadequate and shamed in the current kind of lactation culture. And so this has been, you know, an attempt, I think, to see their experience, normalize it in such a way where they're not hurt. However, I think that when you start pushing ideas of fed is best you're discounting, you're discounting the experience of the infant and what truly is in their best interest for health. We know, we know medically, you know, years of research looking at formula artificial, you know, milk replacement, formulas, alongside breast milk.
They are not equivalent. They're not the same. In situations where breast milk is not available is not possible. Absolutely formula will save their life, but to equate it and to say that there is no difference, that, you know, just feeding 'em whatever is the same as feeding 'em breast milk and just feeding 'em is best. I'd say that is medically inaccurate. Uh, and I think it's, I think it's unfair. I think it's unfair to babies to say that they're little human and, you know, they deserve what is best for them, for their growth and their health. And, we know medically that it is breast milk rhetoric and words are incredibly powerful. They launch movements, they grant permission, they change laws. And so when you create rhetoric, that's untruthful in some way, or that is, you know, omitting truth such as fed is best. And you know what it's omitting there is that there's a difference, you know, because even like equating that up to the adult level, fed is best. That's almost ridiculous, you know, to look at, for adults to say McDonald's versus, you know, whole foods, it's the same argument. So just fast forward at 30 years.
Samantha:
So how do we turn the tides? How do we help women see childbearing and breastfeeding as strengths when we've spent so many decades insisting on the need for liberation from them?
Leah:
We just have to be continually saying to our girls, “You are good. There is nothing wrong with your body.” In our churches and our schools in any place that we can, we need to remove this toxic messaging of, “oh yeah. Well, let's just change that. Well, let's just suppress that. Or you should somehow be ashamed of that.” It has to start very early. I mean, what we're doing right now is generational change. It's gonna take a long time, but if all of us consistently tell this generation of young girls that they're good, in 30 years, we're gonna see a whole different culture.
Samantha:
Well, let's hope so. Stories are powerful. This season on Brave New Us, we are exploring stories of new life, of the women who bear it, of the scientists who try to create it, and of the perilous journeys of embryos themselves trying to survive long enough to see this Brave New World we are creating. GK Chesterton is often quoted “Fairy tales do not tell children dragons exist. Children already know the dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children that dragons can be beaten.” The stories we're telling, they aren't fairy tales. They are all too real, but so is Chesterton's wisdom. They can be beaten here on the podcast. We are examining the dragons, getting to know them to find their tragic flaws, starting with contraceptives. What are the lies we've been told and the lines we've been fed? What are the effects on women's bodies truly? And why do so many of us not know about them? That's next time on Brave New Us.
This episode of brave us is sponsored by my book, Reclaiming Motherhood from a Culture Gone Mad available now for pre-order. If you enjoyed the podcast, don't forget to rate and leave a review. Special thanks to Ellie Osmer and Jessica Gearhart for her original track “All Will Be Well” for more on these topics and to support the podcast, visit faithandbioethics.com. You can sign up there for my newsletter for free, or consider subscribing. This podcast is supported by the indispensable help of listeners like you.