In the middle of the film, my friend asked, “Does she know that Cruella is her daughter?” I said yes. She paused for a moment and said, “Still she wanted to kill her? That kind of mother should be killed.”
The movie moved on, but that sentence didn’t.
Not the words “should be killed,” but “that kind of mother.”
That single phrase revealed how deeply we’ve chained a woman’s worth to one role — motherhood.
The conditioning starts long before a woman ever becomes a mother.
From childhood, girls are told stories where a “good woman” is the one who nurtures, gives, and sacrifices. Even in modern media, motherhood isn’t shown as a choice but as the ultimate fulfillment of womanhood.
So when a woman doesn’t want children, delays pregnancy, or doesn’t act “maternal,” society quietly brands her cold, selfish, or incomplete.
And the trap is perfect — because it doesn’t need men to enforce it anymore.
Women themselves have been trained to guard the same cage that once held them.
They don’t see it as control; they see it as virtue.
Generations of conditioning have made “motherhood” sound sacred — but that holiness is the disguise that protects the hierarchy beneath.
A man can abandon his family and still be called ambitious or flawed.
But a woman who does the same becomes unnatural — because her identity was never allowed to exist outside motherhood.
That’s how the system sustains itself: through glorification, not punishment.
When a woman is unable to give birth, the consequences are even harsher.
In most cases, society, her family, and even she herself treat this inability as a failure.
She is often made to feel useless, not just as a mother but as a wife and even as a woman.
The shame and self-doubt are internalized; it’s not just external judgment — she begins policing her own worth according to the same narrow standard she has been taught to glorify.
Religion, culture, and stories all played their part. They didn’t suppress women by force; they taught them to worship their own suppression.
They built the pedestal, called it divine, and convinced women to climb it willingly.
So even when she suffers, she calls it duty.
Even when she breaks, she calls it love.
So when someone says, “that kind of mother,” it’s not just judgment — it’s revelation.
It shows how morality still circles one idea: that a woman must earn her worth through motherhood.
And perhaps the cruelest part?
Most of them still believe that’s freedom.
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