This is a wonderful thread - thank you to the posters who wrote such beautiful messages.
I can't write anything as eloquent. I also felt incredibly powerful after the birth of both my children. I remember holding my first, my son, close to my face and he breathed on me. It was a totally surreal moment - it hit me that this was a real life person, that his life on earth had just begun, that he was breathing and that he had just come out of my body - it was so odd and amazing I couldn't really compute it. I felt exactly the same way when my DD was born - amazed all over again at this new person that had grown in me and that I had endured hours of agony to bring into the world.
Related to that feeling is another aspect of femaleness that others have mentioned - the mindblowing resilience that women have, the ability to just get on with things, to keep stepping forward, often with a smile and a kind word, even in incredibly difficult circumstances.
What has struck me since becoming a mother is the way in which men view so many aspects of life as optional - if they are tired, not interested, don't particularly value it, they just won't do it. That includes things like keeping a home habitable, taking good care of children, maintaining strong family relationships - things that make life comfortable, enjoyable and meaningful. They will just opt out of them and expect other people to do them on their behalf or just let their lives/social relationships fall apart. Women, in the meantime, juggle three million things and make sure everything is done no matter what. They'll be there washing uniform at 11pm having not sat down for 12 hours because they will not under any circumstances see their children go to school in dirty clothes, no matter how tired they are, no matter how much they'd like a rest. They'll then do a meal plan because they want to stick to the budget so they can all have a holiday and they want the children to eat well. Then they'll make the packed lunches so the morning will go more smoothly. Then they'll write a note to respond to that party invitation. All while a man has just checked out and is ignoring all those details.
Exhausting as all that is, and difficult as it is for women at the time I genuinely think, as another poster has mentioned, women reap the rewards of their hard work later in life. While men get more isolated, more disgruntled and purposeless as they get older, women benefit from the years and years of groundwork they've put in to building strong relationships with their children, friends and family, years of being able to cope and organise and get on with things. Some men get to 50 not being able to run a house at all while women have not only run a house for the last 20 years but also worked and raised children. In many of the older couples that I know the woman is a truly impressive person who has achieved a monumental amount (very little of it valued monetarily or otherwise by soceity) while the man has earned a lot of money but is essentially a burden to everyone around him. Men lose out in the end. Big time.
Equally, professionally, I think a lot of women end up dropping out of careers not just because of the double load of childcare/housework and paid work, but because they can't see the value in continuing to play the game that many men play in business, which is to try to big yourself up while doing the minimum amount of actual valuable work. Many women in banking, for example, get to a certain point and think 'what the fuck am I wasting my life on this shit for'? because being top dog and stomping on competitors holds no intrinsic value for them - they just don't see the point in spend 12 hours a day doing such meaningless 'work.' I think men often don't like having women in the workplace because women come along and say 'what the fuck are you actually achieving. Women get things done, real things, things that matter, like tending to that screaming baby 10 times in a night. In comparison, polluting oceans and getting people in debt seems a pretty poor offer in terms of legacy.