Motherhood Quote by Barbara Ehrenreich

Ehrenreich punctures the sanctimony around motherhood with a scalpel: if we praise it as sacred, we can stop treating it as labor. The line works because it turns what sounds like reverence into a kind of evidence tampering. “Moral pedestal” isn’t admiration here; it’s a storage shelf for unpaid work, safely removed from the realm where people negotiate wages, hours, and dignity. By framing the shift as something that happens only “until” feminists get “brash” enough to name the material facts, she spotlights a familiar cultural reflex: when exploitation is exposed, the system answers with ideology.

The subtext is that motherhood’s modern halo is less ancient tradition than strategic varnish. Ehrenreich’s phrasing does two things at once. It mocks the condescension embedded in “brash feminists,” borrowing the dismissive tone used against women who insist on counting. And it drags motherhood into the vocabulary of employment: “pay,” “career ladder,” “nonexistent.” That corporate lexicon is intentionally jarring. It forces the reader to hear how absurd it is that a job with round-the-clock demands comes with neither compensation nor mobility, then asks why we ever accepted that absurdity as virtue.

Context matters: Ehrenreich wrote amid late-20th-century debates about “choice” feminism, the romanticization of domesticity, and the political uses of family values. Her larger project was to expose how American culture laundered inequality through sentimentality. This quote is a reminder that calling something holy can be the most practical way to keep it cheap.