A Word for the Homemakers

I’ve really enjoyed these “home-living” posts by Libby. Sometimes it seems like the Religious right has the corner market on home-living. They applaud women like me for being sweet, shy housewives with children. They approve of my desire to homeschool and to try to make my marriage work out even in hard times. Meanwhile in the secular world, I feel that I’m considered to lack career ambition, be overly attached to my kids, and probably co-dependent with my husband. I am imagining this dichotomy, or is it real?

By some odd twist, at the very same time reader Aloha left the above comment, reader trinity91 found herself on another thread defending her choice to stay at home with her child. To the best that I can see, it started when another reader divulged the high price she pays for childcare and trinity91 responded with “and then people are flabbergasted as to why I stay home.”

Reader Annie Mouse responded with this:

Sure, because your breadwinner will never, ever have a heart attack, get in a car accident, or slip and fall and be unable to support you. Likewise, he will never, ever run off with his secretary or just get tired of supporting you and leave.

trinity91 explained that she and her spouse had thought through all of these things and had taken various preparations. She explained, again, that her staying at home worked better for her and for her family in their particular situation.

In another section of the same thread, trinity91 put it like this:

it’s absolute bullshit. You can’t win if you work then you’re being a bad mom by putting them in daycare. If you stay home you’re being a bad mom by not showing your kids that they can “have it all”.

Reader Varid then offered this response:

The term “have it all” is so cliche of right-wing putdowns. More like, showing the kids that girls don’t actually have to get an education thinking is just so haaaaard and heck, you can just stay home and make the beds.

It went round and round in that thread, and it was mean.

trinity91 was not arguing that all women should stay home with her children, or that staying home with children is preferable to working. In fact, she’d said nothing at all to criticize working mothers. She simply and patiently explained that, in her situation, staying at home with her child made sense. She explained that her occupation pays so poorly that her income would not cover the full cost of childcare. She explained that having up-to-date training, not recent job experience, was what mattered in her occupation. She explained that she and her husband had made plans for things like retirement savings, health problems, or a potential split.

Since when is feminism about making other women’s choices for them rather than about letting other women make the choices that are best for them and their families?

When I was fairly new to feminism, I remember talking to a feminist coworker about stay at home mothers. My coworker told me that she felt it was a betrayal of all women for any woman to stay home, and that in her ideal world every woman would be required to work outside of the home. I disagreed, but I can understand where she’s coming from. When employers look at hiring a woman in her 20s or 30s, they bear in mind the possibility that she may have children and quit her job to stay at home with them, thus depriving them of a trained employee. A man in his 20s or 30s won’t do this. If all women worked, employers wouldn’t make calculations like this.

But even if we assume that a world in which all women worked would become equal faster than our world of today (something I don’t think is a given), demanding such a world would mean asking women like trinity91 to make a choice that is less good for them and their families for the good of women as a whole. Is this what feminism is about? Maybe I’m too third wave—choice feminism and all that—but I can’t do that.

This entire discussion is also predicated on an assumption that working is better than not working, but our lives are about more than just work, or they should be. Why should we conclude that working is better than not working before even having the conversation? And besides, this discussion itself is also predicated on seeing paid work as work and unpaid work as not work. I don’t think we should let these assumptions sit there unchallenged, and yet too frequently we do.

Let’s not forget that feminists once demanded wages for housework.

As one commenter pointed out to trinity91, even when women work the housework has to get done somehow. Well, yes. In my case, Sean and I split these responsibilities, and sometimes—when we are both just too busy—they fall by the wayside. I’ve sometimes found myself wishing I were a stay at home mom because then I could actually do those dishes I see sitting in the sink when I’m on my way out the door for work. I could keep the house spotless. I could reorganize the closets, which need it badly. There is so much more I would do if I had the time. So yes, working couples have to find a way to get the housework done in their spare time, but stay-at-home mothers can devote their entire time to housework and childcare, meaning both that things will be less likely to fall by the wayside and that the working spouse can devote more time and attention to work.

Of course, there are class issues at play here. A poor single working mother must balance both work outside of the home and housework in extremely trying circumstances. Next to women in situations like these, middle class homemakers who talk about just how much housework they do all day and how they really are working can come across as a bit classist. But successful working women who de facto question the decisions of other women to stay at home can also come across as classist. After all, not every woman has a promising, fulfilling career in front of her. Women who stay at home aren’t usually giving up careers as lawyers, doctors, or accountants. More often they are giving up jobs as bank tellers, orderlies, or food service employees, or, well, had no job to begin with.

This from Time magazine:

The phrase Stay At Home Mother generally conjures up two images: the nice Midwestern mom with a car pool and a husband with a nine-to-five, or the highly educated former career woman now channeling all her hard-won achievement and scholarship into finding the exact right kind of juice box and organic cheese stick. But the data keeps suggesting that both these images are off the mark. Increasingly, the stay at home mother is beginning to look like a woman who doesn’t have too many other choices.

This is not to say that most stay at home moms are only staying home because they’re no good at anything else. Rather, it’s that an increasing proportion of the women looking after their kids full time are having a tough time of it. They can’t find well-paid work and they can’t find childcare that would make less than well-paid work worthwhile. Average weekly child care expenses rose more than 70% from 1985 to 2011, according to the Census Bureau. Wages, especially for women with only a high school education, did not rise at nearly that rate.

. . .

So what are most stay-at-home mothers like? . . . A third of them were not born in the U.S. Half of them are not white. Almost half of them have a high school diploma or less, 20% are single mothers and 7% have husbands who were unemployed in the 12 months prior to 2012. More than a third of them live in poverty. Stay-at-home mothers’ education levels have risen across the board in the last 40 years, but the share of them living in poverty has more than doubled.

Most women who stay at home do so because they have to. Rather than stigmatizing them or acting like they’re somehow at fault here, those worried about the effect of stay at home mothers on future inequality should focus on things like better childcare options and job training for women. Rather than cutting off the only viable option, they should create new options for women. And seriously? Given the actual makeup of stay at home mothers, acting as though stay at home mothers are a problem (rather than a symptom of a deeper problem) is incredibly shortsighted and not at all helpful.

But what about women who stay at home because they want to? My response? So what. Yes, I’m serious. If you have the resources to stay at home (and that’s generally what we’re talking about with women at home by desire rather than circumstance) and that’s what you want to do, enjoy! Take precautions (i.e. be aware of the potential consequences of your choice should your spouse die, or leave, or should you want to rejoin the labor force later), but if you’re informed and prepared you’re fine in my book. I’m not going to go around telling women what choices they’re allowed to make. I would like to imagine that we can equip women with the tools they need to make informed decisions, and then trust them to make the best choices for them and their family.

My feminism isn’t about limiting others’ choices. It’s about offering as many choices as possible and then letting women choose the choice best for them, whether as dictated by their circumstances or as guided by their desires. I’d like to thank trinity91 for handling the discussions on that recent comment thread so well, and I’d like to thank the commenters who came to her rescue. In the future, there will be no stay at home mom bashing in my blog’s comment sections. Discussion, by all means. But meanness? No.