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Has Anyone at The New York Times Met a Working Mother?

Amy Curtis
Amy Curtis  |  July 20, 2026 8:00 PM

One of the things I love about the Left is how they live in such a cozy, ignorant little bubble. During the BLM/antifa riots of 2020, for example, leftists would look out the window if their cozy, safe, upscale neighborhoods and not see the local grocery store being looted or the corner gas station burning to the ground.

That, they said, was proof enough that things weren't scary and violent out there. They cannot fathom a world where people don't live in big urban areas, order $22 avocado toast from Uber Eats, and use public transportation. Flyover country doesn't exist and people don't actually live lives differently than they do.

It's the height of self-centered privilege.

And no one, not a single person or institution, is more guilty of this than The New York Times. That's why one of their public health reporters, Anemona Hartocollis, can't seem to understand the concept of a working mother.

Here's what Hartocollis wrote:

When I called Emma Waters for fact-checking, she always seemed to be on the go: driving to Virginia, about to board a plane. She had two children and was pregnant with a third. She was the main support of her young family. How did she do it? For a young conservative policy analyst who espouses putting marriage and children before career, she seemed awfully busy with ... work!

Mrs. Waters (yes, she asked to be called Mrs.) told me she was "neither trad wife nor girlboss." She seems fluent in both. I'm not sure a term for what she is has even been invented—yet.

There is a term. It's called a mother. I guess that's foreign to workers at The New York Times, who probably return home to their cat and vast collection of succulents every night after work.

"It's amazing how much leftist discourse is just them pretending not to understand things, thus making discourse impossible," the screenshot reads. And that may be the most accurate thing ever posted on X.

Thanks to feminists and Democrats, it's almost impossible for most women to stay home and raise their children full-time without having some source of income. And when you have children and a job, you're busy. 

I used to work multiple jobs while in nursing school, going through a divorce, and raising three young children. If I wasn't in class or clinicals, I was working. Driving for Uber, doing home aide visits, working on campus in the science lab. When I worked as a nurse, I was driving all over southeastern Wisconsin to visit patients. Now, I work from home, but I still have a busy schedule: homeschooling my youngest, grocery shopping, trips down South.

This is called life, and there isn't a doubt in my mind Mrs. Waters has found a work-life balance that works for her and her children. And yeah, if I were married, I would go by 'Mrs.' too. Most of us love our husbands and are proud to share a surname and that title.

I thought women could choose how to be addressed, or is that a privilege only reserved for leftist women who do things the way Hartocollis approves of?

Hartocollis seems to think that Mrs. Waters has to fit into some box—tradwife or girlboss—and that there are no shades of gray, no spectrum between those two extremes. No one fits neatly into one category. Humans are complex, life is busy and messy, and trying to shoehorn people into fixed little pigeonholes is how we ended up with the twisted 'transgender' ideology that mutilates children so they fit these strict gender roles the Left has imposed on them.

The funniest thing about this, in a bitterly ironic sort of way, is that people like Hartocollis think they are the champions of women, that they know what's best for us and have our best interests at heart. They will tell us, with a straight face, that we have to vote for Democrats to protect our rights, etc. etc. They think all women only care about what they care about: abortion, mostly.

But they know nothing about us. Perhaps The New York Times should leave Manhattan and talk to women like me, or countless others, who could teach them a thing or two.