In a speech that was turned into a Washington Post op-ed, the journalist Elsa Walsh speaks about how she’s “come to question many of the truths I once held dear.” In Walsh’s words, “The woman I wanted to be at 22 is not the woman I wanted to be at 38—not even close—and she is certainly not who I am now at 55.”
The issues at hand are feminism, parenthood, and family, with Ms. Walsh once having held three truths she took to be self-evident: “I would never marry. I would never have a child. And I would have an interesting job, as a writer or a lawyer. I wanted to be independent and self-supporting. I wanted love, but I wanted to be free.” She believed “Marriage was a patriarchal system, and I wanted none of it.” But she later came to discover she did want a part of it—and “Instead of feeling trapped, I felt liberated and secure and protected—not by patriarchy but by love.”
After seven years of marriage, Walsh and her husband had a child—and that, too, changed her. According to Walsh:
