Bad Feminist

Or, How Not to Divide Yourself In Two

I had a legendary Shakespeare professor in college, Edward Tayler, and I will never forget him tearing up while teaching Lear, or saying he felt he could almost not bring himself to read Othello anymore for the anguish of it, or this quote he liked to reference repeatedly: “There are two types of people in the world: those who divide things into two, and those who do not.”

Lol, and, also, yes, how true. Our culture loves a binary, and in particular loves to saddle women with their restrictive zero sum logic. We all remember America Ferrera’s (also Greta Gerwig’s) mesmerizing monologue in Barbie. We all know women who’ve famously suffered from the successful/cold binary, or the pretty/dumb.

As a woman obsessed with home, and home-making, and even housekeeping, and also, dare I write it, motherhood, I have wrestled with the feeling that loving those things must, by some mean equation, make me a bad feminist.

Motherhood is the thorniest thorn-bush of binary death matches women get tossed into—SAHM vs working mom; free-range vs attachment; tiger vs gentle.

In launching Closer to Home, I’ve had to contend with my embarrassment putting into words my unbridled enthusiasm on such topics. So let me just go for it here: I love being a mom. Not just that I am one, but the actual day in, day out acts of mothering. I mean, not every moment, of course. One has moods, after all. But mostly, and more often than not.

What does it mean to enjoy domesticity in 2026? Does it mean you’re a fool? A pawn in the hands of men who wish to strip you of your voting rights? It’s a weird time to feel thus, what with so many creepy guys with megaphones fetishizing Trad Wifery and, on the other side, literary liberal elites making books and films about the lobotomizing hellscape that is modern motherhood, and domestic life more broadly. It feels, among the crowd I might otherwise identify with, like the wrong thing to enjoy.