Below is an edited version of remarks that were originally delivered in Rochester on September 17th at the opening of the 2026 Women’s Convention. Miriam Cates’s comments were delivered as part of a panel discussion with Louise Perry and Angela Franks. We published Louise’s comments here, and will publish Angela’s tomorrow.
Why will there always be a need for women’s advocacy?
Is it because our interests are systematically overlooked in society? Is it because we are the “weaker sex”? Or is it because we’re too agreeable—or too afraid of the consequences—to stick up for ourselves as individuals? The answer, perhaps, is: “all of the above.” Yet the fundamental cause, the underlying reason for the perennial need for women’s advocacy has to do with our bodies. It’s biological.
One of the most underappreciated facts about human beings is how astonishingly underdeveloped our babies are born in comparison to other mammalian species. A kitten can walk just days after birth; calves and lambs within hours. Baby elephants can gather food independently at just eight weeks old.
Now let’s consider human infancy. It takes a baby around a year to learn to walk. Human children are incapable of gathering food and feeding themselves until at least seven years old. And as for being fully independent, even before the complications of modern life, a child would be unlikely to be able to survive without adult support before the age of fourteen or fifteen.
Human children need care and supervision for an extraordinarily long period of time. In comparison to other mammals, human babies are significantly underdeveloped and take years—not weeks or months—to become self-sufficient.
Human babies are born too early.
For a human child to be born at a similar developmental stage to a kitten, for example, pregnancy would have to last around three years. But—as those of us who have given birth will be all too keenly aware—a three-year-old’s head is rather large. In fact, the diameter of the average child’s head increases by fifty percent between birth and three years old. A baby’s skull simply could not get out of the birth canal if pregnancy lasted any longer.
Human babies have to be born at such an underdeveloped point because our brains are so large. If the pelvic canal—the gap through which the baby passes—were any wider, the female pelvis would be so unstable that we would be unable to walk. So the human infant is born too early, and in effect, in comparison to other mammals, the majority of the gestation period takes place outside the womb.
This “external gestation” requires a lot more maternal care than when the fetus is inside the womb. Consider a sow who has given birth to ten or more piglets and suckles them all simultaneously while lying on her side. Now, those of us who have breastfed babies far longer than we ought to might wince at such an image. But in reality, mummy pig has a pretty easy job; she merely has to lie still and try not to roll onto her piglets. She doesn’t need assistance to give birth. She can still feed herself, care for herself, and raise her piglets without breaking a sweat.
Compare this to the requirements of a human mother.
The newborn human infant needs the same level of care and protection as it did inside the womb.
Yet after birth—unlike during pregnancy—a mother’s hands are occupied with holding her child. It is much harder for her to sleep and feed and care for herself, because her physical activity is devoted to caring for—and carrying—the child. How many mothers have eaten dry toast for lunch because it was the only thing that could be prepared and consumed with one hand? Of course, with the advent of baby formula, a baby can survive physical separation from his mother for long periods of time, but this was certainly not the case in the past.
Human infancy is not only unique in terms of the length of time for which babies need care; the intensity of the care required for survival is also very great, because our babies are born so helpless. And for human beings, unlike for many animals, it is not only a child’s physical needs that must be met. Behavior must be taught as well.
My family adopted two rescue kittens, a brother and a sister from the same litter. We’re not quite sure about the circumstances of their birth, but we know they were taken away from their mother very early and bottle-fed by volunteers. The only cats they have known are each other. And yet they behave exactly like cats. They hunt, they jump, they groom themselves, they sleep all day. They “miaow” at us when we forget to feed them. No other cat—and certainly not their mother—has taught them how to be cats. Their behavior is almost entirely instinctive, and genetically programmed.
The vast majority of human social behavior, by contrast, is not instinctive. It is taught. Children must be taught language, delayed gratification, fine motor skills, and how to regulate their emotions. When this does not happen effectively, children face lifelong disadvantages, and society suffers the consequences. Unlike for animal parents, raising human babies is a full-time, permanent role.
Now, I am not suggesting that the responsibility for raising children falls only or even mainly on the mother. But common sense and evidence suggest that the mother is usually best placed to be the primary carer in the early years, and that this is also best for her child. Therefore, unlike other mammals, both human mother and human child are dependent for years. They may be dependent on the father, or a wider community, or the state. A mother may choose to leave her child in the care of others to go out to work and to feed herself, but then she is dependent on others for the child’s care.
During this period, and frankly for years afterwards, women just do not have the time or the energy to stand up for their own individual interests, let alone their collective ones. They are focused on the needs of their children, and it is that focus that enables human children to survive and thrive.
This is why women need organized advocacy. The nature of human motherhood withdraws women from the public space so that their interests are neither widely understood nor promoted. There is a reason why mothers of young children are not well represented in politics or government—a good reason—but their temporary absence requires others to step into the breach.
Because of our inherent vulnerabilities, and the natural tendency of men to dominate women, which does not exist in reverse, women depend more than men on the safety net of law, regulations, and social security—things that can only be achieved in the political sphere through advocacy.
Early women’s advocacy—first-wave feminism—was highly effective in collective action. Campaigning resulted in real improvements in conditions for women, such as property rights, custody, and suffrage.
Yet some of the more recent advocacy for women and by women has not necessarily had the effect of improving women’s lot. Developments such as no-fault divorce, abortion on demand, the promotion of career as the primary source of identity, and greater access to reproductive technology have all been sold as progress for the female sex. In theory, women have more individual autonomy than ever before. But we are also more likely to end up as single mothers, or childless altogether, or without the support and protection and love of a husband, which is something that many women—though of course not all—want very much.
The problem is that the more recent feminist movements have advocated for women not as women, but as fungible human beings. These advocates have campaigned for women to have what we perceive men to have—a lower-maintenance reproductive system, a different need for status, a different role in society—and not for what women need as women: as mothers and potential mothers.
A likely cause of this misguided approach is that in Western societies there are now two distinct classes of women: mothers and non-mothers.
There have always been women who do not want to, can’t, or simply don’t have children. Women without children can and do play an important role in society. But now, in the West, the ratios have shifted substantially. Larger and larger numbers of women are not mothers, or don’t become mothers until much later in life. In Britain, in the 1970s, just five to ten percent of women ended their childbearing years childless. For the Gen Z cohort, some studies predict that thirty percent of women will never become mothers. And for the first time ever in the UK, the majority of women are not mothers by the age of thirty.
These two groups, mothers and non-mothers, can have very different interests.
For practical reasons, non-mothers are able to self-advocate in a way that mothers aren’t, but they are hampered or perhaps blinkered by the fact that they sometimes do not (yet) understand the needs of mothers and children. This is especially true today, when young women do not have as many mothers in their acquaintance as they would have had in the past, due both to growing childlessness and the trend to move away from extended family and community to attend university.
Many of these childless young women, who are highly effective campaigners, have been brought up to think that motherhood is a route to lower status, drudgery, and oppression. Thus, these women’s campaigns are often focused around how not to become mothers, or how to release themselves from the ties of motherhood, or in changing the very nature of motherhood.
To understand how mothers and non-mothers advocate differently, let us briefly consider three different campaigns where mothers and non-mothers take contrasting approaches.
The first is the campaign for more state-funded institutional childcare provision, in which, of course, women are vocal advocates. And why wouldn’t they be, when most women have no choice but to work outside the home in order to meet today’s high cost of living? For many women, the choice is to find affordable childcare or not to become a mother at all. Yet the voices so often absent from the debate—because they are focused on mothering—are those of mothers of young children. When asked, these women overwhelmingly would prefer to spend more time with their children if they could afford to do so, and would prefer public funds and regulations to be directed toward better maternity pay and support for mothers rather than third-party childcare.
Women are at the forefront of debate—especially women with elite jobs, where there is indeed a high cost to pay for taking time away from the workplace—yet the voices of mothers, and those whose interests are most at stake, are barely to be heard. So the expansion of institutional childcare continues unabated, even though it is not what most mothers—or their children—really desire.
Another example of the difference between maternal and non-maternal advocacy is over the issue of illegal immigration. In the UK, over 200,000 illegal migrants have arrived on our shores on dinghies, sailing across the English Channel from France. The overwhelming majority of these migrants are fighting-age young men, originating from countries like Afghanistan, Eritrea, Somalia, and Iran, where women are often treated very poorly indeed. Unsurprisingly, there have been countless brutal rapes and sexual assaults committed on British women and girls by these men, whom the British government allow to roam freely in towns and cities, once they have been processed and given free accommodation at significant cost to the taxpayer.
British men on the political right have long campaigned against “small boat” immigration. Women on the left have championed it, claiming that compassion for those travelling from war-torn countries should trump any risk to the native population.
Mothers—as a group—have been largely silent on the issue. That is, until recently, when the Pink Ladies, a grassroots group of mothers and grandmothers from across England, organized to protest against migrant camps in their neighborhoods. Their compassion is for their daughters, not for the young men from foreign lands.
Another example of the advocacy gap between non-mothers and mothers is in the campaign to protect children from inappropriate sex education. In the UK, much of the material used in schools is frankly obscene, teaching children about anal sex, threesomes, and how to change your gender. Many of those campaigning for extreme sex education are young women, who believe that their freedom and perhaps even their safety are enhanced by these lessons. The campaign against it has been led by mothers, who are all too well aware of the damage of early sexualization, because they see the issue through the eyes of their children.
Women are wired for individual care and compassion. Before women become mothers, that care is often focused on animals, or the environment, or refugees, or themselves. And that is not wrong. An ethical society needs people—often women—to stand up for the vulnerable. But, of course, the most vulnerable people in society are children. Often, it is not until women become mothers that we fully understand what is needed to keep children safe.
Some of the policies that women have advocated for—open borders, more institutional childcare, more sexual freedom, easy divorce—are not in the interests of mothers and their children. On the one hand, in a society where there are many women who are not yet mothers, there are more women who are available to be advocates for our sex. But on the other hand, when motherhood is not the norm, there is a tension between what women are advocating for and what may be in our long-term best interests.
Motherhood has undoubtedly become harder as a result. More expensive, more lonely, more guilt-ridden, and less safe.
So what’s next for women’s advocacy?
Well, we should not pit mothers against non-mothers. Instead, we should focus our advocacy on making it easier for those women who want to do so to become mothers. Whether it is the family, the community, or the state that supports mothers as they do the important work of caring for infants, the point is that, because of the very great biological demands of human parenthood, human mothers cannot do it alone.
In our drive to empower women, we have forgotten that it is normal, natural, and in fact essential for mothers as well as children to be dependent in the early years. The result has been a huge increase in maternal loneliness and isolation, as women have to return to the workplace as soon as possible. Or, if they choose not to return to the workplace, many women now find that there are no other mothers and grandmothers in their neighborhood with whom to share the burden of raising children.
Motherhood has become boring, stressful, and extremely lonely. That’s why our advocacy should focus on rebuilding support for mothers in the early years, so that motherhood is more attractive, more fulfilling, and more visible.
