Thread by @turnedwife

Women didn’t just abandon the home.
They were drafted out.

What was offered looked easier than duty, shinier than sacrifice.

This is how the world convinced mothers to leave their children behind,
and how women helped make it happen.🧵

The home wasn’t just where women were.
It was where society was built.
Economies, cultures, and values all flowed from stable households.

Women weren’t “confined” there.
They were the center of it all.

But when industrialization and war demanded more labor, something had to give.

And the most underutilized labor pool?
Mothers.
Wives.
Homemakers.

It wasn’t about “equality.”
It was about production.
Machines needed workers.
Governments needed taxes.
Corporations needed consumers.

The home was in the way.

But no woman naturally wants to hand her baby to a stranger and sit under fluorescent lights all day.

So the propaganda machine was born.

Motherhood was rebranded as oppression.
Homemaking as drudgery.
Feminine duty as weakness.
And “freedom” was recast as careerism, sexual liberation, and total independence.

They sold it through media.
Hollywood gave us the bored housewife.
Ads gave us the career woman in heels.
Magazines gave us the sexual “liberation.”

The message was loud:
You’re wasting your life at home.

And they had to be loud, because the instinct to nurture, protect, and remain with one’s children is so deeply embedded in a woman’s soul,
it takes years of noise to silence it.

So they raised girls on a steady diet of ambition, individualism, and fear of missing out.
By the time they became mothers, the guilt of wanting to stay home felt like regression.

Now we have an entire generation of women
who’ve been made available to the workforce, but unavailable to their children, husbands, and communities.

And we call this progress.

The truth is:
Women weren’t “freed” from the home.
They were extracted from it.

Because powerful systems knew:
If you remove the woman from the hearth, the whole house collapses.

And that’s exactly what they wanted.