Women’s Rights? More Like Women’s Wrongs: A Teen’s Hilarious Rebellion Against the Hustle

 

Let me set the scene for you: my 17-year-old daughter, a junior in high school, is drowning in a tsunami of AP classes, SAT prep, homework, classwork, clubs, research projects, volunteering, and probably some secret underground chess tournament I don’t even know about. She’s basically a one-woman circus, juggling flaming torches while riding a unicycle and reciting the periodic table backward. And last week, she hit her breaking point. Picture this: she slams her calculus textbook shut, glares at me with the fury of a thousand suns, and declares, “Why did women back then have to fight for rights? I’d be happier cooking, cleaning, shopping, and being a homemaker instead!”

I nearly choked on my tea while also driving. This kid—who’s never so much as boiled water without setting off the smoke alarm—wants to trade her graphing calculator for a whisk? I couldn’t tell if it was a cry for help or the funniest thing I’d heard all year. Naturally, I did what any good mother would do: I turned it into comedy gold.

Listen, I get it. The modern world sold us women a dream: You can have it all! Career! Family! Equality! A Peloton subscription you’ll use twice! But no one mentioned the fine print: having it all means doing it all, too. 

My daughter’s not wrong to fantasize about a simpler life. Picture her in a 1950s sitcom—apron on, hair perfectly coiffed, handing out Aloo-Paratha like it’s her calling. “Honey, I’m home!” her imaginary husband calls, and she replies, “Great, dinner’s ready, and I didn’t spend six hours crying over AP Bio!”

The irony? She’d last 20 minutes as a homemaker before staging a feminist uprising over who gets the better side of the bed. She’s not built for domestic bliss—she’s built for chaos. She once tried to “help” me cook dinner and turned my kitchen into a crime scene: spaghetti sauce on the ceiling, a burned potholder, and a smoke detector screaming like it was auditioning for a horror movie. 

Her Pinterest-worthy homemaker dreams? Dead on arrival.

But let’s unpack her rant. Women’s rights gave us the vote, the paycheck, the power suit—and also the privilege of running ourselves ragged. Back in the day, Betty Crocker didn’t have to ace a trig exam and organize a bake sale for the Key Club. She just had to smile and not poison anyone with her casserole. My daughter’s onto something: maybe the suffragettes overshot the mark. Give us equality, sure, but did it have to come with a side of existential burnout?

Here’s the kicker: she’s not alone. I see her friends—girls with planners thicker than a Tolstoy novel—racing from debate club to soup kitchens like they’re auditioning for sainthood. Meanwhile, my generation’s over here pretending we’ve got it together, sipping wine and googling “how to remove spaghetti sauce from ceiling.” We fought for the right to be stressed out of our minds, and now our daughters are paying the price in SAT practice tests.

So, I propose a truce. 

Let’s give these girls a break. One day a week, they ditch the hustle and live the homemaker fantasy—minus the misogyny. They can bake cookies (or burn them), binge I Love Lucy, and nap like it’s an Olympic sport. No grades, no deadlines, just vibes. Call it “Retro Day: The Great Escape.” My daughter might realize the grass isn’t greener—or she’ll discover she’s secretly Martha Stewart. Either way, I’ll be laughing too hard to care. Women’s rights? Worth it. Women’s rants? Priceless.