I felt a post coming on today when I caught myself sounding just like my mother. The subject was women who choose to rely on their male partner’s earnings instead of going out to work themselves.
Although my mother did work periodically – on a part time basis, usually to “help” when money was tight, as long as it didn’t interfere with looking after the children – her main role was always to keep house and to be our mother.
Once or twice, she tried to kid me that it wasn’t so bad, being a mother and housewife. I didn’t believe her. It wasn’t the life I wanted and (apart from a brief wobble when as the mother of a young baby I suddenly wanted to be exactly that and never have to go back to work again) I’ve felt the same way my entire adult life. Maternity leave is the only time I have ever been out of work or off work, and it drove me crazy. It would be disingenuous to suggest that being off work was the only thing that made me crazy. But it didn’t help, and I am certain that it was getting back to work that saved me. Work isn’t a bowl of cherries but it is independence – and, of course, a break from domestic drudgery. In my case, Arbeit really does macht frei.
My mother, despite having been to work only now and again and only on a part time basis, is very quick to criticise women who do not work. She recounts, for example, the stories of her various friends’ offspring who have marriages that break up and is scandalised that ex-wives seek maintenance payments from their ex-husbands instead of going out to earn their own crust. I argue sometimes, and suggest that there might be lots of good reasons why a wife, especially a mother, could reasonably expect her ex-husband to help support her – not least because so many women give up their own careers and torpedo their own earning potential in order to look after their husband and children, to be that mother and housewife, to further the husband’s career and enhance his earning power at the expense of their own. As it happens, my mother is one of those women – she could have had a great career herself if things had turned out differently. She says that if she had been left to cope alone, she would have done, and would have gone out to work and done it all, and claimed not a penny from anyone. I believe her. But wouldn’t it have been unfair?
And yet…
There is something in me that reacts quite violently, reflexive and unthinking, on this subject. So often it is hinted or implied or outright said that a working mother is an aberration: the suggestion that my own “choice” to work (as if I even had one) is not valid. So often I am told, directly or indirectly, that a woman’s place – and especially a mother’s place – is in the home looking after her family. Which is a lie. And when a woman reinforces that lie by actively choosing to take up that place, it pisses me off.
I am quite defensive on this, and not always wholly rational. If I manage to switch on my brain for long enough, I am not likely to hold it against the woman personally, because she is not the patriarchy. In particular, older women who married in the 1970s or 1980s or so – the generation of our mothers – get a pass on this. Serious job or career opportunities for women were so thin on the ground, and the training for motherhood and house-wifery was so intensive, that for most there was no realistic choice anyway.
But on the other hand, for my own generation, surely things are different? There is a glass ceiling, of course, and three-year-old girls still get Barbies from old men pretending to be Father Christmas – but we are a world away from the world in which our mothers grew up. These days, a woman who is perfectly capable of working but who chooses to rely on a man instead is (on the whole) making a genuine choice. Why? If there are no realistic job opportunities, I can understand it. If you have children and have made a pragmatic decision to take the risk of dependence on someone else in order to have the opportunity to be a full-time parent, fair enough. But there are women who just feel like it is the man’s role to provide, and it is her role to care for a man (and his children). It isn’t necessarily laziness, but it is the voluntary and unnecessary assumption of the passive role of female dependence. And that pisses me off.
It’s like not voting.
It’s like one in the eye for all the women who fought to free their sisters from household drudgery and servitude.
And – the longer we collectively assume responsibility for housework and childcare, the longer it will be before we kick away the idea that this is Woman’s natural place – and that men who “help” are somehow special. And that will keep the glass ceiling firmly in place, because practical equality in public life can never happen while there is practical inequality in private.
And that – as I think I may have mentioned – pisses me off.
Touchingly Naive 
16 March 2009 at 12:02 am
I’m still, as of yet, unable to fathom why you have this prejudice towards women who assume the “traditional” role.
So as a stay at home mother, you would consider my life to be one of “drudgery and servitude”. Charming… Like thousands of other women, I “chose” to stay at home and in doing so personally raise and care for my children. I fully appreciate how fortunate I am to be in this position. I wouldn’t dream of condemning another women for her choices, so why must you condemn me? Wasn’t feminism initiated with the intention of allowing women to “choose” their own path in life?
I should also add that I love my life as a stay at home mother and frankly, I wouldn’t change it for the world.
18 March 2009 at 8:30 pm
Oh, dear. I suspect you may be reacting with anger, and perhaps not thinking very carefully about what I have actually written or what I might actually have meant.
I did not say that your life is one of drudgery and servitude or that I consider it so. I said that women who fought for our right to work freed many women from lives which they did in fact experience as drudgery and/or servitude. And if I had been obliged to be a stay at home mother then I would in fact have experienced that as a life of drudgery and servitude.
Nor did I say that I particularly condemned you or anyone else who makes the choice to be a stay at home mother. In fact, I specifically said: “If you have children and have made a pragmatic decision to take the risk of dependence on someone else in order to have the opportunity to be a full-time parent, fair enough.” Does that sound like condemnation to you? It doesn’t to me.
Whether feminism was initiated with the intention of allowing women to choose their own path in life is also debatable. Some feminists think so. I think it is more complicated than that.
For one thing, feminism isn’t a monolith and the women who made up and make up the feminist movement had a lot of different ideas about what they wanted to achieve.
Personally, I think that what feminism is about is the liberation of women, about freedom for women. Liberation and freedom entail responsibility, and this is not the same as choice. In that context, I would view a “choice” to reject freedom, or a “choice” to accept or embrace dependency, as somewhat problematic. I don’t necessarily condemn these choices, but I don’t call them feminist.
15 April 2009 at 3:23 am
How is it liberating to be a mother with children to get up at the crack of dawn and drag them to day care. Work all day. Then come home exhausted having to cook, clean and take care of children do homework bathe them and ready for bed. Not mentioning the activities that they get involved in when they’re older.
Then having to deal with your husband. You have no time for yourself you look a mess all the time. For what, to answer to a boss at work when you can be home doing what you want. This is coming from a woman who has done both, I’ve worked my ass off and i hated it now I’m a house wife and I couldn’t be happier.
So i don’t know where your coming from attacking all these house wives and calling them lazy. House wives work just as hard as a working mother. If motherhood and keeping up a house is hard enough why add to it?
This is why the children today are out of control and not taken care of because there is no order in the household because the woman went back to work.
15 April 2009 at 7:40 pm
Clearly one cannot work full time and be a parent and be a housekeeper and “deal with” a husband and also be happy. And if husbands pulled their weight one wouldn’t have to. Why not insist on that and kick out the ones who refuse?
And, for the record, I don’t think I did particularly attack housewives or call them lazy. In fact I said:
“If you have children and have made a pragmatic decision to take the risk of dependence on someone else in order to have the opportunity to be a full-time parent, fair enough. But there are women who just feel like it is the man’s role to provide, and it is her role to care for a man (and his children). It isn’t necessarily laziness, but it is the voluntary and unnecessary assumption of the passive role of female dependence…. the longer we collectively assume responsibility for housework and childcare, the longer it will be before we kick away the idea that this is Woman’s natural place.”
I too have done both, albeit that my full time mothering was mercifully brief – I prefer paid employment to unpaid labour. “Work isn’t a bowl of cherries but it is independence.” While I don’t question that you have found a lifestyle which suits you, I would not call it liberation. It is dependence, and dependence is the antithesis of freedom.
I would also challenge your comment that working women are the cause of children being “out of control” and children not receiving adequate care.
Clearly there are families where the children are “out of control” and not receiving adequate care, and where this happens it is because social and family structures are failing those children.
It is perhaps easy to say that women breaking away from their conventional family roles are the cause of this, but this ignores the rights of the women involved. Even if children are not being given adequate care, women giving up their hard-won freedom is not the solution. The solution must be to build new familial and social institutions which care for children without requiring anyone to give up their liberty and become dependent on a person who ought to be their equal.