Mary Poppins Feminism
Last fall, my husband and I reintroduced our three-year-old daughter to the 1964 Disney film Mary Poppins. She had seen and loved the movie as an infant, but we hadn’t watched it in over a year, so she was experiencing it as if for the first time. We got more than we bargained for: she began insisting that we listen to the Mary Poppins soundtrack all day, every day. My husband responded by (in his words) “losing his mind.” I responded a bit differently, and as I revisited the familiar lyrics from my childhood, I noticed new themes and deeper meanings. To my surprise, I soon reached the unlikely conclusion that this classic family film has much to teach us about women, work, and feminism.
The Feminine Genius at Work
When I watched Mary Poppins as a child, I could not have imagined that I would one day be mining the movie for answers to real-life questions surrounding women and work. Growing up in the 1990s, I never questioned our culture’s solution to the work–motherhood equation. I assumed that, overall, modern women can and do successfully prioritize both work and motherhood without making sacrifices in either department. In my mind, questioning that dogma would mean questioning the equal rights and abilities of women.
In college, I made friends and encountered authors who challenged me to think more deeply about whether women can “have it all,” or what that even means. I also discovered what John Paul II called the “feminine genius”—women’s unique tendency to “make room” for others and, in the words of Edith Stein, “embrace that which is living, personal, and whole.” For Stein and her intellectual heirs, this feminine genius is rooted in women’s biological capacity to become mothers, but it belongs to all women, whether or not they have children; the capacity for biological motherhood allows all women to exercise a “spiritual” motherhood. As John F. Doherty put it in a recent essay, “To summarize Stein’s view, one might say women humanize: they provide the basic nurturing that people at every stage of life, children and adults, need to reach full development.”
These ideas reshaped my understanding of women, work, and feminism. I began to think of work as an opportunity to put one’s gifts at the service of others. Controversially for her time, Edith Stein taught that women could practice any profession, but she believed that women could, and should, bring their feminine attentiveness and maternal care to their work. Following this line of reasoning, I concluded that the presence of women, including mothers, in the public square was essential, not just for their own good, but for the good of the world.
Still, I hesitated to admit that when it comes to work and family, family comes first. I feared that acknowledging the priority of home and children would undermine my belief that women are needed in the public sphere. In hindsight, I had unconsciously absorbed our culture’s insistence that children and parenthood (particularly motherhood) are career obstacles to be overcome, rather than goods in themselves. Mainstream feminism is responsible for much of this messaging, but other forces are at work, too. For both mothers and fathers who wish to prioritize family life, the structure of the modern workplace and economic realities can make this nearly impossible; for some families, the best-case scenario is two parents working long hours outside the home just to provide for their children. Employers and the market send a clear message: work first, family later. At its most extreme, this cultural messaging tells women to avoid having more children at all costs. It is common to hear that birth control is the key to women’s success, and the stated reason for roughly 20 percent of abortions in the United States is mothers’ concerns that the “timing would interfere with their future opportunities and goals” and that “they could not continue their education or advance their careers while raising a baby.”
Only with time and experience have I become aware of this cultural messaging and grown comfortable stating what I knew, deep down, all along: that children are more important than any job. Drawing on the work of proto-feminist philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, Erika Bachiochi masterfully articulates this in her book The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision. One of her key insights is that the most important work in society takes place in the home, and so both men and women should prioritize home and family:
Wollstonecraft believed that domestic affections should take priority for both men and women, as therein lay the happiness of the couple, their children, and the world into which well-loved, self-possessed persons would go. . . . Children were not a burden or impediment to a woman’s “real” work; they were her real work. . . . But they might not be her only work. And they were not only her work.
I now say unreservedly that family comes first. If women sacrifice maternal excellence for the sake of professional excellence, we will have sacrificed not only our children, but our “humanizing” capacity that the public sphere so badly needs. Simply put, we can’t bring the feminine genius to work if we’ve already disowned it along the way. A feminism that encourages men and women to value public achievement and career over fatherhood and motherhood will ultimately fail families, society, and women themselves. The feminism we need is a family-first feminism. This is sometimes called “maternal feminism,” but recently I have (only half in jest) started thinking of it as “Mary Poppins feminism.”
Enter Mary Poppins
Listening to the Mary Poppins soundtrack on repeat for the past several months, it struck me that the film perfectly illustrates Bachiochi’s insight. If this seems a stretch or the figment of a sleep-deprived mother’s imagination, consider that the opening musical number practically begs us to consider the film’s feminist implications. We first meet Winifred Banks as she returns home from a “votes for women” rally singing “Sister Suffragette,” and I admit that the first-wave feminist in me thrills to the lyrics and delights in my three-year-old’s little voice coming from the back seat of the car: “dauntless crusaders for women’s votes!” It quickly becomes clear that we are meant to see Mrs. Banks as somewhat ridiculous, though. She is too busy belting out the chorus to notice that her children, Jane and Michael, are missing, and no sooner has she finished calling her sister suffragettes to “cast off the shackles of yesterday” than she is asking the housekeeper to hide the “votes for women” sashes, since “the cause infuriates Mr. Banks.” Outside her home, she leads protesters in song and throws eggs at the prime minister; at home, she is the epitome of the “meek and mild subservient” woman she disavows.
Watching the film as an adult and a mother, I have realized that Mrs. Banks is a more nuanced character than she first appears. She is clearly pained by the discord in her home and her husband’s harshness to their children. She knows something is amiss but can’t understand what it is or how to fix it; instead, she turns her gaze to the outside world, compensating for her feeling of helplessness by prioritizing her political involvement. She loves her children and is at times willing to stand up to her husband when their interests are at stake, but she can’t make time for them. She would rather leave them with a stranger, Burt, than be late for a rally. While she does not have a “career” in the narrow, modern sense, she believes that her contribution to the public sphere—what we now call “work” or “career”—is more valuable than the work of the home.
Winifred’s husband, George Banks, is even less involved in the daily tasks of child-rearing. At the beginning of the film, he comes across as self-important, domineering, and inattentive to his wife and children. He views himself as “lord of [his] . . . castle” and his wife, children, and servants as his “subjects,” to be treated with a sense of “noblesse oblige.” He is too preoccupied with his own concerns to notice that the nanny has quit her job or to hear his wife’s anxious interjection that the children are missing.
Mr. Banks does acknowledge the importance of home and family, albeit imperfectly. He recognizes that the good of society depends on raising competent, educated children:
A British nanny must be a general. The future Empire lies within her hands. Tradition, discipline, and rules must be the tools. Without them, disorder, catastrophe, anarchy!
He takes pride in his home and family, feeling a “surge of deep satisfaction” when he “return[s] from daily strife to hearth and wife.” Nonetheless, he is missing the key insight that mothers and fathers, not the British nanny, are the most important formators of their children, and that his presence, attention, and love are the greatest contribution he can make to his family—and, by extension, to his country. Throughout most of the film, he places his personal value in his career, and he aims to instill an appreciation for the values of the public sphere—productivity, order, and profit—in the members of his household.
While Mr. Banks is right to see the work of raising children as essential for the nation, he mistakenly places more value on their future contributions to society than their well-being as his children. Nor is he wrong to think that he needs to prepare his children for the “real world”; however, as he learns when bringing his children to work one day ends in pandemonium and a run on the bank, when you try to launch young people into the world without the firm foundation provided by healthy family life, the results can be chaotic and disastrous, for both the family and the world.
The Wind Changes
In their own ways, both Mr. and Mrs. Banks prioritize their public work to the detriment of their home and children. Ironically, it takes Mary Poppins and her friend Burt—neither of whom has children—to “change the wind.”
Even by mainstream feminist standards, Mary Poppins is the most “empowered” woman in the movie. She is devoted to her profession, unencumbered by the responsibilities of a wife and mother, and free to come and go as she pleases, floating through the air with her umbrella and bottomless carpetbag. Not only can she hold her ground with Mr. Banks, but she can bend him to her will with a few choice words.
Mary Poppins’s Edwardian girlboss credentials end there, though. Her work is devoted to helping families prioritize their children. She isn’t a biological mother, but she is a fairy godmother figure—a spiritual mother, if you will. In their “wanted” advertisement for a new nanny, Jane and Michael, the children, share a litany of desired attributes. Slipped among requirements both fanciful and funny is the one that betrays their deepest longing: “Love us as a son and daughter.” Although she refuses to admit it, Mary Poppins does just that; in fact, her decision to disregard her own feelings and step aside in favor of their parents is itself a sign of maternal, self-sacrificial love. Her playful sayings, such as “a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down” and “feed the birds for tuppence a bag” are in fact calls to the Banks parents (and parents everywhere) to give their children the attentive care they need to thrive.
While Mary Poppins is the catalyst for change, Burt plays a key role, as well. Mary Poppins can wither Mr. Banks with a glance, but ultimately it is Burt who cracks his tough exterior, gently pointing out his error in prioritizing work over his children with the lyrics:
You’re a man of high position, esteemed by your peers, and when your little tykes are crying, you haven’t time to dry their tears. . . . You must grind, grind, grind at the grindstone, though childhood slips like sand through a sieve, and all too soon they’ve up and grown, and then they’ve flown, and it’s too late for you to give . . . just that spoonful of sugar[.]
Burt acts as a father figure, counterbalancing Mary Poppins’s maternal role and revealing that biological fatherhood is not the only way to be a father.
Thanks to Mary Poppins’s and Burt’s efforts, the wind at last changes. Mr. Banks loses his job and has a “conversion,” symbolized by fixing the children’s kite and taking his family out to fly it. At the beginning of the film, he scoffed at his children’s request for help patching their kite, but he now embraces the task. He has found that his life’s primary purpose is not at the bank, but at home, and he laughs in the face of failure. The lesson here is not that work and career are unimportant, but that the pieces only fall into place when we prioritize home and family over those public activities. Mr. Banks shares his newfound appreciation of Mary Poppins’s lessons with his superiors at the bank, and this unexpectedly leads not only to his reinstatement, but his promotion.
Mrs. Banks quickly embraces her husband’s about-face. She sacrifices one of her beloved “votes for women” sashes to make a tail for the kite, and one of the last images we see is the patched-up kite dancing in the wind, the suffragette sash trailing behind. The symbolism here is profound. Admittedly, one might reasonably conclude that it symbolizes Winifred Banks’s rejection of the women’s rights movement (or at least her role in it) in favor of domesticity. I make no claims about the creators’ intent; however, I think it makes more sense, both in light of the film as a whole and as a reflection of reality, to see it as a reordering rather than a rejection.
As I quickly discovered when my daughter wanted to make a kite the day after watching Mary Poppins, the tail is not just decorative; rather, it balances the kite and allows it to soar. Similarly, the most important work in society occurs in the home, but this emphasis is properly balanced and enhanced when women exercise and advocate their right to participate in public life. Family life is enhanced by a sex-realist, maternal feminist movement and by women’s participation in every area of society. As Wollstonecraft and Bachiochi emphasize, such a feminism is incomplete without recognizing that men must also prioritize home and fatherhood. When these priorities are reversed, both the family and the public sphere lose the valuable, distinctive contributions of mothers and fathers; the kite cannot fly if it follows the tail. I like to imagine that Mrs. Banks learns to place her children first, but still attends the occasional rally and teaches her children (and her husband) the importance of women’s legal and political rights.
Some may still fear that acknowledging the priority of home and motherhood is tantamount to barring women from outside pursuits; however, I agree with Mary Wollstonecraft that “no employment of the mind is sufficient excuse for neglecting domestic duties, and I cannot conceive that they are incompatible.” (emphasis mine) The fact that I managed to find intellectual stimulation and inspiration for this essay in my daughter’s incessant requests for “Mary Poppins music” is a case in point. I still have career aspirations and want to change the world, but, like Winifred Banks, I have discovered that to my children I am the world. If I neglect their needs while trying to make a difference in the public sphere, I will fail both them and the rest of society.
I am not saying that Walt Disney or any of the movie’s creators (let alone P. L. Travers, the author of the Mary Poppins books who notoriously disliked the film adaptation) intended the story as a commentary on feminism. I do find it striking that the film was released in 1964, just four years after the birth control pill ushered in the sexual revolution, and one year after Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, igniting the second wave of feminism. In hindsight, the message of Mary Poppins was directly contradicting the cultural trends that were just gaining momentum. Whether the film’s creators realized this significance, I do think that many of the lessons I have laid out were intentional, and the best stories, intentionally or not, impart important truths.
This vision of prioritizing home and family is not what most people think of as feminism today—but that’s the point. Rewriting the cultural narrative is the reason we need profound yet relatable stories like Mary Poppins. Yes, we need to study great thinkers like Wollstonecraft and Stein, but we also need to shift our cultural imagination, and stories and art are an essential part of that. While lengthy philosophical treatises may be the best way to reach certain people (I admit I’m one of them), stories and other forms of art are more accessible and, I suspect, more effective at changing hearts and minds. In particular, we need stories that remind men and women with no children of their own that, like Mary Poppins and Burt, they have an important role to play in reorienting society toward home and family.
Authors and artists must rise to the challenge of creating new works that contribute to this effort, but it is also worthwhile to return to the stories we have long known and loved with an eye to what they can teach us about women, work, and feminism. Granted, watching Mary Poppins is unlikely to persuade a hardcore liberal feminist that domesticity and women’s empowerment are compatible. Nonetheless, our own ideas are reflected in the way we interpret a story, and the story can, in turn, reflect those ideas back to us, clarifying them and revealing new truths. In this sense, works like Mary Poppins can play a powerful role in shaping culture. These classic stories also act as touchstones that enable and enrich conversations about difficult topics. Public discussions of women, work, and the home quickly descend into ideological diatribes. In our culture, stories can act as mediators, removing us from reality just far enough to avoid knee-jerk reactions and foster productive exchanges across political and cultural divides.
If you still don’t buy into my feminist interpretation of Mary Poppins, revisit the film and decide for yourself. Put aside your work for a few hours and spend some time with your family watching Mary Poppins. After all, family comes first.