Motherhood Quote by Ann Oakley

“Clearly” is doing a lot of dirty work here: it pretends the argument is self-evident while Oakley is actually exposing how manufactured that “common sense” is. The line reads like a calm sociological observation, but it’s a scalpel aimed at the economic and political machinery that turns motherhood into destiny. Oakley’s target isn’t mothers; it’s the insistence on “natural fitness” as a story society tells itself to make a particular labor arrangement feel inevitable.

The phrase “career of mother” is a deliberate provocation. By calling motherhood a career, Oakley drags domestic work out of the private, sentimental realm and into the terrain where we talk about training, pay, status, and replacement. The subtext: if it’s a career, why is it unpaid, uncredentialed, and treated as a biological reflex rather than skilled work? That reframing also reveals the con: society wants the benefits of women’s reproductive and caregiving labor without bearing the costs a real “career” would require.

Then comes the kicker: “the alternatives are all too expensive.” Oakley isn’t merely noting budget constraints; she’s indicting priorities. The “alternatives” are things like publicly funded childcare, robust welfare support, equitable workplaces, and men doing an equal share of care. Labeling those options “expensive” is how a society rationalizes keeping women in the home while calling it empowerment, morality, or nature.

Context matters: Oakley’s work emerges from second-wave feminist sociology, when the “natural” family model was being challenged as an ideological project. The quote works because it flips the script: motherhood isn’t inevitable; it’s subsidizing the system.