EP 149 The Question We’re Still Asking (and why it matters)
Are you trying to figure out how to grow, make a difference, and still be fully present as a mom?
For decades, women have been told fulfillment is either in the home or outside the home. But what if we’ve been asking the wrong question?
In this episode, we explore what actually creates fulfillment, and why the most powerful investment you can make isn’t in a career path, but in the education of the mother.
This is about reclaiming your influence, discovering your gifts, and learning how to lead your family with clarity, purpose, and truth.
In this episode, we talk about:
- The real impact of the feminist movement on modern motherhood
- Why women still feel stuck and unfulfilled
- The difference between career training and true education
- How personal growth transforms your family culture
- What it really means to become a mission-driven mom
This conversation will help you see that motherhood is not small, it’s strategic, powerful, and transformational.
AI Generated Transcript
Introduction
Welcome back to the podcast. I'm Audrey Reba, author of The Mission-Driven Life and founder of the Mission-Driven Mom.
In the 1950s, women and mothers were told that fulfillment only took place in the home, and after the feminist movement and beyond, they were told that fulfillment could only happen outside the home.
But what about influence? Today we're going to talk about what happens when the focus is on the education of the mother and making the biggest investment so she can be the best she can be.
The Feminine Mystique and the Feminist Movement
Now, this book, The Feminine Mystique, by Betty Friedan, was the catalyst for the feminist movement in the sixties. And if you want to know more about the history of feminism, you can go listen to my whole series on that, which I did a few years ago. We talk about it much more in depth there.
But for today, I want to read you how this book begins. The very first words that she says. Now, it's also important to note — if you don't know this or haven't heard one of my other podcasts about it — that not only did this book take off, but book clubs were formed all over North America and hundreds of thousands, eventually millions, of women came together in their living rooms. They read this book, they talked about it, and that was the catalyst of the feminist movement.
And here's how it begins:
"The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone as she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night. She was afraid to even ask herself the silent question — 'Is this all?'"
And the name of that chapter is "The Problem That Has No Name."
Now, what Betty Friedan said in this long, thick book — through a lot of pages, and she did do some research and she did talk to some people — was predominantly this: the answer is outside the home. The way that women can feel great and have a happy life is if they go have a super fulfilling career.
And one author, her name is Carrie Gress, said this about the proposed solution that the feminist movement gave us:
"Feminism proposes to fix women's problems without having the right solution. Feminism started with the wrong question and it led to the wrong solution. Feminism has had to rely on power, manipulation, and control to enforce and extend its influence. Feminism offered us women's studies and women's health and women's rights, but they didn't tell anyone — even once solid data was in — that their goals leave women miserable, unhealthy, and wondering what we did wrong. They didn't tell us that the life they want us to live serves those in power and not us."
Women Before the Fifties: A Broader Picture
So — the pre-fifties. And this wasn't always the case for every single place in the whole history of the world, which is what people will tell you. And you can listen to my feminism series to know that that's the case. But predominantly, women were told: marry and have children, don't do anything else, and life will be wonderful.
And traditionally, women were responsible for the private sector, and they found fulfillment in things beyond the home — like service in the community. But that was something that had tapered off. Many of the things that women used to do in society got taken over by governmental programs or structured nonprofit organizations.
So the public bazaars and other outreach — helping women have their babies, helping people with their funerals, taking care of the poor and needy in the community, and the orphans and the young children — all those types of things that women used to contribute in society, they would marry and have children predominantly, yes, but they would also make these contributions by using their gifts and talents in the service of the community. And that had petered out.
And so, yes, by the time we got to the forties and the fifties, there was the big surge with World War II when women were out doing things, and they felt the power and the excitement that came from doing things both in their home and outside their home. They were struggling to find that balance. But then as we really settled into the fifties, and so many of these programs were starting to pop up and take control of the needs of the less privileged in society, women found themselves less able to engage in self-expression.
We could talk all about the educational components of this and the other reasons why this has been happening to us. But one of the most important things that was a result of this feminist movement — of telling women that they needed to go out into the workspace in order to feel fulfilled — is that we still feel like we want to be wives and mothers. Most women, if you poll them, still want that. But there's a stigma around it. And a lot of women feel ashamed to admit it, like it's weak or lame or old school.
And we've had some generations of women grow up now and try to live that out — getting married later, trying to have children later. You know, the current spin on this is all these women freezing their eggs so that they can have career first and then have children later when they're older.
One of my favorite quotes of all time is from Phyllis Schlafly, who said: women can have it all, just not at the same time. Because we want to have a season of bearing children, we need to live seasonally, and we need to find this balance.
The Thankless Work of Motherhood
But it is easy to get lost in motherhood. It is easy to have mommy brain. And it is easy to feel discouraged when you give everything and there's not a lot of people giving back.
One of the biggest reasons for this is because it's a pretty thankless job. I mean, most of you probably have pretty good husbands and they see you and they care and they thank you. But for the most part, you're just doing your thing and you don't get paid for it, and you don't get public recognition for it, and you don't get to move up in the company, and you don't get to be on stage and be applauded. You don't get all the accolades and rewards that can be gained in worldly pursuits.
And so what's fascinating to me about this whole problem is that we are still asking the same question that women were asking in the fifties and the sixties. We're still trying to answer the same question that Betty Friedan was trying to answer. Ironically, she herself was upper middle class. She lived in a big, really comfortable home. She had several children and nannies and all sorts of help. She had a thriving career as a writer. So she didn't really need it. And maybe she was trying to help other women — and good on her if she had those good intentions.
The Same Question, Still Unanswered
So women still have the same problem that they had then. And I'm not anti-feminist. I'm not saying it wasn't a good thing to let women have different kinds of jobs, or to have more options, or to be paid more comparably to men, or things like that. It's just that there was a mindset at the time. And if you go listen to the feminism series, I think you'll better understand what it is I'm trying to say here. Because it's not like it was all bad. It's just that the whole approach in the feminist movement was aggressive. It was a victim mindset. The problem is all out there.
And again, I'm not saying the feminist movement was all bad — I'll say more about that in just a minute. But what I want to make the point is that because the feminist movement didn't have all the right answers, even though some progress was made in some ways, the fundamental issue for women is still there. And in some ways — and I've got some really good books if you want to look into this further — there's an argument to be made that maybe in some ways we're actually worse off. No one is allowed to say that the feminist movement left us worse off. But the fact that we are sometimes ashamed or a little embarrassed if we're not pursuing careers, or we feel like something's wrong with us if we can't find balance as a stay-at-home mom who wants to do something outside the home — finding that balance is so difficult. And it was difficult then, and it's difficult now.
So the question that we're all asking — still asking — goes something like this: How can I be all I could be, make a difference, and be a great mom?
I was definitely there. I was definitely that young mom with three kids and mommy brain, asking myself those questions, struggling to find the balance, wanting to — I didn't want to leave my babies and go pursue a career. But I was pretty brain-dead five, six, seven, eight years in.
And so when I found the opportunity to begin to develop myself — after I had tried all these things, after I had tried individual therapy, marriage therapy, coaching, books, self-help, retreats, and mom programs — after I had tried all those things, I finally found a new opportunity that was going to educate me to think differently. And I said no. I said no for quite a while, because it felt to me like it was wrong.
Our income was limited. My time was very limited. Blaine was working really hard to provide for us, but he was gone a lot because he wanted to keep me home — that was a priority for us. And so I was really grateful to him, but that meant that it was pretty much all on me to be all the things at home, most of the time. And then our income was accordion-style and commission-based, and so that was difficult. I just felt like it would be wrong for me to spend this money.
I mean, I ended up over time spending — between books, programs, and all the other things I tried, including my bachelor's and master's degrees — over a hundred thousand dollars eventually. But even those first classes for a couple thousand dollars were really hard for me to say yes to, because I just felt like that was the wrong thing to do.
The Best Investment a Family Can Make
And then I read this quote. This beautiful quote that said: the best investment a family can make is in the education of the mother.
And I knew exactly what that meant. That meant that I needed to be the best I could be so I could build the best family culture we could possibly have. That I could only lift my children to where I had traveled. And that in order to be what they needed me to be, I needed to be more. And that meant I needed to be working on me.
And it's so interesting, because we did this training recently, and when the training was all over, one of the women asked some more questions about how she could get her husband to support her. Because he thinks that if they're going to spend money on education, it should be for her to get a degree — accredited, something that would allow her to earn more money. The underlying message was: if I'm going to get an education, if I'm going to go to school, it should make me a better breadwinner.
And I don't think that's a bad thing. That's a very good thing, especially if the family could use more money. But the problem is that education — true education — is about helping you and I become more principled and more virtuous, to become supremely human. It's meant to build our relationship with ourselves, with God, with the world, with others. It's meant to make us the most of who we could be. It's meant to train our thinking skills. Historically, it was meant to come before the training. Now we have come to equate the word education with career training. If the classes we take don't bring in more money, then they weren't worth the expense.
What's ironic is that on the other hand, we've lost our ability to become better — to think more clearly, to creatively problem solve, to develop our talents. First of all, we have to figure those things out entirely on our own, or we go do things like therapy. And therapy is really expensive — often more expensive than even going back to school, because it adds up every single month. A hundred fifty, a hundred seventy-five dollars is a very typical price to pay. So you're spending five, six hundred dollars a month just to go talk to someone. And sometimes that's helpful and sometimes that's needed. But sometimes what you really actually need is to know how to think in principles, and how to creatively solve your own problems, and how to become the expert in your own life. And that education has been ripped away from us. It's not available anymore.
And so it's not surprising that we are losing the education that gave us the foundation to be more principled, at the same time that we have a societal stranglehold on sex roles so stilted that women feel stuck at home — and then we decide that the answer is to just send them into the workforce and leave home and family behind. And none of those things are the right answer.
I gave this woman some ideas and some suggestions. I told her to watch the training with her husband and to help him understand why living according to principles and thinking in new ways was going to be so important for their whole family — and why it was going to lift and really enrich their relationship as a couple. Her husband really didn't see how the whole family was going to be incredibly enriched and lifted through the program, through what we do at the Mission-Driven Mom.
But ultimately, she's in the same boat I was in. They're asking the same questions. They're saying the same things I was saying: if I'm going to spend money, shouldn't it be so that I can make money for the family? But actually, what's more important for the family is the character of the people in that family. What's more important is their virtue. And what's most important is their ability to problem-solve with truth — to have the ability to discern truth wherever they see it, and to have the truth make them free.
I mean, I don't really care if my children are really well off. Certainly I want them to have skills to be self-reliant financially. But it doesn't take a ton of advanced education and skill sets to be comfortable. What I definitely want is for them to be fulfilled. I want them to do work that's meaningful to them. And that means some good self-discovery and self-knowledge. That means developing their talents and gifts. And that means doing things in society that are meaningful for them and for other people — lifting the people around them, serving them with their gifts.
And our education just doesn't give us the tools and the skills to be able to do that anymore. And so of course, her husband has a paradigm that they should only spend money on her if she's going to bring money back into the family. But that's not the fundamental problem that's going on for these women.
For most of us, the fundamental problem is: we're not sure what gifts and talents need developing. Sometimes we don't even know who we really are. Our relationship with ourselves is really pretty messed up. We don't understand our real needs. We're not really meeting those needs. We don't know how to lead ourselves better so that we can better lead our families. And certainly, for most of us, we don't know how to recognize a true principle and harness its power to solve significant problems in our lives.
And so this question — how can I be all I could be, make a difference, and be a great mom — it's still on the table. It still lives out there. We're still grappling with it.
What Happens When the Mother Is Properly Educated
And what we need to realize is that when the mother is properly educated to recognize truth, everything transforms. Then there's this clear target. If she is going to go out and earn some money, well, that's going to streamline that whole process. She's going to know herself so much better. She's going to have clarity about where she should head.
She could also do service work in the community that would be so much more meaningful — and bring her children with her — and it would enrich their relationships and bring so much joy and fulfillment. She'll also know how to creatively problem-solve. She'll also lift the quality of all the relationships throughout the whole family. Her children will watch her leadership skills and her example and want to follow and be like her. The decision-making will be so much clearer, and it's never anymore about who's right and who's wrong — it's let's find the truth. All the relationships will be lifted.
One of the things that was so amazing to me as I was going back through some of these testimonials — I mentioned this last time — was how much relationships were improved when thinking skills were improved. And it's a multiplier effect. When one mom is transformed, it influences the whole family. And then that family influences the neighborhood and the community, and enough of those communities influence our whole culture.
And what you really need to know is that you have so much more power than you think you have. I know sometimes we feel so stuck and we're just not sure how to move forward. But when you know how to harness that power — and here's what a lot of it boils down to — the feminist movement had some right ideas. They were asking some good questions. The problem was the way that they moved forward was from a victim-and-drama perspective. What they did was they said: the enemy is out there. It's the culture, it's the patriarchy, it's the men. When we fix all the stuff out there, we'll feel happy and fulfilled.
And actually, statistically, the self-declared personal happiness and life fulfillment of women has declined ever since the sixties, seventies, and eighties. It's been on the decline. And actually for men it's stabilized or gone up a little bit. So it didn't work, in the sense that women as a whole are not happier than they were. And that's because even though there may have been some things culturally — in marriages, in the way the sexes interacted — that could use upleveling and improving and becoming more principled and true, the problem had to start from within. The women had to tap into their own personal power. They had to work on themselves first. Because you can't go change the world until you change yourself, and you really can't expect to lead well in your home until you lead yourself well. And that requires certain skills, certain principles, certain tools and levels of understanding.
Had those women in the feminist movement started with themselves — looked inside themselves and identified the ways that they were in self-deception or acting like victims, if they had started asking more empowering questions and telling themselves the truth and being creators in their lives — if they would have met their needs better, all of those types of things — then from a standpoint of strength and courage and confidence, they could have lovingly renegotiated relationships. They could have still stood on principle, but they would have done it from a place of love and kindness and generosity. And then everyone would have been enriched.
And personally, I don't think we would have seen this massive increase in divorces like we saw through the seventies and eighties. It was incredible how many people were divorcing. And I don't think all those divorces needed to happen, because I think those women could have looked inside themselves, tapped into their personal power, become more of who they could be, and then led their families better, and then together led their community.
Becoming a Mission-Driven Mom
So the answer here, at the Mission-Driven Mom, to this question — how can I be all I could be, make a real difference, and still be a great mom — is first to become a Mission-Driven Mom.
And I want to read to you what I wrote down about this, because it's important that you see the kind of woman that you can be.
She is a woman who works on herself so she can show up differently for herself and her family. A mom who seeks truth, identifies it, and stabilizes her life with it. A mom who learns to balance her own personal growth with that of her family. A mom who becomes intentional and begins leading her family to more principle-centered, meaningful, servant-leadership-focused living. She is powerful, confident, self-accepting, and purposeful.
That is who you and I can be. And when we are closer to that destination — when we are more Mission-Driven Moms — we will see the world so differently. Because when you learn to think differently, it changes the way that you behave. And then that changes everything. It especially changes the way that you respond.
Because one of the testimonials in the training is from a woman named Heidi Matthews, and she talks about how she realized that most of her people problems were actually problems that she was helping to create, or that she was reacting wrongly to. And that she had so much more power. And through learning to become a Mission-Driven Mom, she actually healed her marriage.
The Clapham Team
Now, the second phase of all of this — and I'm going to get into more detail about this next time and tell you more of what this means in our next podcast episode — I want to share it with you now, because when women go through our academy and they graduate, they're given the opportunity to step onto what we call our Clapham Team. And that has a certain meaning and message that I'm going to share with you next time.
But I want to read you what I wrote about what Clapham Team members are like:
In her role as a Clapham Team member, she sees herself as a member of a vast community of moms dedicated to lifting the culture — reinstating virtue and love of country. Women who know and speak truth with courage. Women who see real problems in their communities and work together to apply principled solutions. These are noble, courageous, virtuous women who elevate the people around them and invest in each other's worthy projects and goals. They know their mission will succeed because they are part of this nationwide, worldwide Clapham Team, which seeks to emulate the work done by the early Clapham Sect that literally changed the world. They are the hope for the future.
So if you're stuck in that place where you're frustrated and overwhelmed and stuck in mommy land, and you want to grow as a person and want to balance your personal growth with the needs and wants of your family — and you want to find that elusive balance — and if you could arrive there, if you could be a truly Mission-Driven Mom who can identify a principle, who can see truth in our culture, who can lead her family confidently — maybe just maybe, you could bring more of that truth and light to the people around you. In your neighborhood, in your school, in your church, wherever you associate.
Because remember that motherhood is not passive. It's not small. It's not peripheral. Motherhood is actually formative and strategic and transformational.
Just imagine moms who know how to think clearly, who know how to identify truth, and who know how to link arms in meaningful projects and purposes. This is what we want to help bring into the world. And I want to share more with you next time about what the Clapham Sect and Clapham Circle means and what that team means.
Closing: Your Personal Growth Matters
But for now, for today, I want you to remember that there is no better investment a family can make than in the education of the mother. Because everyone will rise to her level, because she sets the tone and creates the family culture.
And so your personal growth matters. It matters so much. I thought that working on myself would hurt my family, and all it did was help my family to blossom. And that wasn't because I went and got a certain degree to do a certain thing and we made more money and went to Disneyland more — which is not a bad thing. It just means that the way that I think, the way that I talk to my children, the words around truth and principle that infused our home, the goals we set together, the unity that we experience, the love that we have for each other continues on to today. And that was made possible by me starting with myself.
And so it is vitally important. It's just the opposite of what you might think. You should not put off your own personal growth and learning to find that balance and learning to think in a principle-centered way, because all it can do is enrich everyone in your family, bless all your relationships.
And so if you are feeling like that's something that you want more of — if you're feeling a little bit stuck, or you want to find that balance, or you want to know how to link arms with other women, discover your gifts, and start to make a difference in your community — then join me for the training. We're doing an encore presentation coming up in a few weeks, and I would love to see you there. The link is in the description, so go ahead and sign up.
Come to the training and you can learn more about how you can engage. I'm going to give you some practical tools and tips that you can start implementing right now to move in that direction. So join us for that training and I'll see you next time.
