Scorned For Being "Stay-At-Home"?
Posted by Rebecca Teti in Family on Thursday, March 17, 2011 10:17 AM
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My book club discussed Alice von Hildebrand’s The Privilege of Being A Woman last night.
A number of interesting questions came up, with decidedly different approaches, in spite of everyone in the room being a practicing Catholic striving to be faithful to the Magisterium, and all but one of us a stay-at-home mom at least until our kids were school-aged.
Von Hildebrand’s known for a highly polemical style (“von Firebrand” I’ve heard her called), so while no one in the room disputed her fundamental thesis on the dignity of women and the beauty of the call to motherhood (whether physical or spiritual), we had differing views on how effective her approach is for anyone not already in “the choir.” Some found her comforting, a champion of all they’re trying to embody: others, off-putting.
Fascinating to me was how keenly the youngest moms among us seem to feel their choice to be at home with their kids is denigrated, and how deeply they consider themselves to have been indoctrinated by ideological feminism at university.
My own experience is different; I think the pendulum has swung back in favor of stay-at-home-motherhood from a peak of genuine hostility to the concept twenty years ago.
I’m not denying that the academy is afflicted with ideologues, nor that you can still find people, even many people, who look down their noses at stay-at-home moms, imagining they are wasting themselves in self-imposed dungeons of dishes and diapers or sitting around without a thought in their heads watching the View all day long.
I only say that there are a lot more stay-at-home-moms today than there were twenty years ago, and there’s a certain safety in numbers. Social science affirms the goodness of this choice for kids; crusaders like Dr. Laura popularized some of that social science and defended women who put their kids before their careers; and workplace phenomena such as job-sharing, flex-time and telework are the results of women “voting” with their real lives to be at home with their kids as much as possible, even when they need or want to earn a salary.
It is far more common today than it was in the 1980s, for example, to hear a working woman apologize for working, or to confess openly that she’d love to be able to stay at home if she could.
We can leave debate about whether or not she actually could for another time. I’m simply noting that the pressures on women now seem to me to run in both directions. If SAHMS, as we style ourselves, sometimes feel we have to justify our existence before a skeptical world, our salaried sisters with children just as often feel the same, and can feel judged for decisions they haven’t come to lightly.
(I’m not sure that’s progress—everyone feels bad!—but it at least indicates a pendulum swing from one extreme to the other and now perhaps we’re beginning to find equilibrium.)
What’s your perception?
If you are under 35, how much pressure do you feel to be doing something besides child-rearing, as if that were not fulfilling in itself? Are most people in your social set supportive or critical of your choice to be at home? How greatly do you think you were influenced by so-called “radical feminism” at school or at home?
If you’re over 35, do you think society at large is more or less accepting and encouraging of stay-at-home motherhood than when you were in high school and college?
Tomorrow, or perhaps next week, I have a follow-up question about what we mean by “work.”
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