More Women Staying Home With The Kids
By Margaret Snyder (10/23/03)
According to recent reports more women are staying home with the kids than a few years ago. Let’s hope this is a trend toward sanity. Not that I don’t think women should have a choice. It’s just that I believe that, given the choice, most of us would stay home and take care of the kids.
Two of my college friends were members of Phi Beta Kappa. After we graduated, in 1969, one went to nursing school and one went to secretarial school. We were on the eve of expanded opportunities for women, but back then almost all bright women went into one of those two fields or teaching.
We simply didn’t think of doing anything else. Now women are free to use their talents in every professional field and in business. And to quote one of them, it’s a good thing.
But somewhere along the way, we became less free to choose NOT to work outside the home. Every time we turned around, there was another feature story in a magazine or in the paper about how Susie Career Mom does it all: she makes casseroles on Sunday afternoon for the whole week, puts dust cloths under her shoes to mop the floors, takes the kids to the library once a week, is unfailingly civil to her husband and a super-achiever in her rewarding career.
For three decades this was the ideal held up to women and millions took the bait. If they had qualms about leaving the kids in daycare, there were always other feature stories about how day care was good for the children’s socialization and developing “independence”. Worried mothers writing to clueless advice columnists about their toddlers crying when they left them at day care were told not to worry, it was quite normal and natural.
Nobody told them it was normal and natural for a mother to stay home and take care of her children. Women were supposed to go out and have careers just like men and raising children was better done in a collective setting. If you didn’t go out and have a career like a man, you were letting down your “sisters” by providing ammunition for all those male chauvinist pigs out there.
Certainly if we look at the percentage of women temperamentally suited to raising children and compare it to the percentage of men similarly suited, we would find that many more women than men fit that mold. Now, when you talk statistics, you have to remember that almost no one is “average” and plenty of people don’t fit the mold. It is good for society and for individuals that people be able to do what they do best. But the fact is that it is normal and natural for most women to want to take care of the home and raise the children and most of them are better at it than most men.
So how did it come to be that the most normal and natural thing became socially unacceptable? I think it happened because feminists were pursuing their own particular vision, which included the idea that raising the children was kind of like taking out the garbage: no particular skill involved, kind of demeaning, but someone has to do it, preferably someone else.
In more recent years, the feminist movement came to be dominated by lesbians, who certainly cannot claim to speak for most women. Most women are concerned with the problems of living with someone of an entirely different sex, and bearing and raising children. Women who care about these things are not represented by women who don’t.
And yet someone let radical feminists set the agenda.
It comes from the same mindset that brought us communism: an elitist “the poor oppressed don’t know what is good for them so we will have to force it on them” attitude. I believe it was French Marxist/feminist Simone de Beauvoir who said that it was dangerous to give women a choice between working outside the home and staying home because most of them would choose to stay home. Women staying home did not fit the new world socialists were (are) trying to make. Circumstances would have to be altered to suit their vision.
In a free nation people have choices. We have been losing ours. Let’s hope this welcome news is not a statistical fluke.
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