On Feminism and Embracing the Homemaker

I was fascinated by a recent comment by a reader named Alberta Rose:

In the last seven years my son has seen me drift from the women who say “Why aren’t you?” and towards women who say “This is how I live life”. He’s seen me leave behind bitterness, pettiness and jealousy. I’ve become at peace with saying “God blessed us with one child”. I’ve gone from feeling like I let down the Women’s Liberation by placing a higher value on marriage and motherhood to feeling like I’m living life as God would have me live it. My husband has gone from feeling like he let me down to feeling like he’s worthy of respect and admiration. 

Let me explain what I find so important here.

My mother was raised in an evangelical home, but she felt attracted to women’s rights while in college and beginning her career. Then I was born and she decided to stay home with me. She began homeschooling me five years later because she couldn’t bear to send me off to kindergarten and wanted to keep me home with her. She drifted toward conservative evangelical and fundamentalist ideas about male headship and female submission because it was in that world that she found her way of life as a stay-at-home mom and then a homeschooling mother validated and honored.

Mothers who stay at home with children, or other women who find themselves homemakers for other reasons, can sometimes feel alienated by feminism. As Alberta Rose explained, she felt she had “let down the Women’s Liberation” by choosing to be a homemaker and put motherhood before her career. And I’ve known some feminists who absolutely would say she was letting down feminism. It’s not surprising that Alberta Rose would turn away from a movement where she felt alienated to a belief system that felt more in line with her life choices.

I recently wrote a post in defense of women who set aside their jobs or careers to be homemakers. I said many things in that post—that not all women had fulfilling jobs or careers, that many women stay home out of necessity, that most women who stay home do so only for a time, and that we need to avoid valuing paid work above all other parts of life. In that post I quoted a comment by reader Aloha:

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.

Do you see what I’m saying? If we feminists make women who stay at home to care for children or elderly relatives feel less valued, or like they are letting feminism down, we risk driving them away—and conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists, with their strict gender roles and emphasis on honoring women who choose to give up all to serve their families and raise their children, are more than willing to welcome those women with open arms. Everyone wants to feel valued. If women who choose homemaking don’t feel valued by the women’s movement, we shouldn’t be surprised if some of them look elsewhere.

I’m making a pragmatic argument here, yes, but my argument is more than just pragmatic. We advocate for equality, yes, but what does that mean exactly? It would be easy to say that equality means that men and women should be equally represented in each career, be just as likely to be employed, and have equal earning power. But we don’t live in that world, and women have to make decisions in this world.

Does it help anything to tell women who stay home rather than engaging in the paid workforce their decision is sub-optimal? And what does that mean, anyway? Mothers who choose to stay at home with their children commonly do so because it’s what best for them and their families. How can a decision that is best for a woman and her family be sub-optimal? Who decides what is optimal for an individual woman—some sort of imagined feminist counsel, or the individual woman herself?

I recently wrote a related post in which I argued that all girls should have their interests encouraged and work toward developing career skills. My argument was not that all women, including mothers, should work rather than staying at home but rather that women who find themselves staying at home still need outlets, and also need the ability to find gainful employment should disaster strike or their relationship sour.

I don’t want a world where women are told what choices to make or what life trajectory they must follow. I want a world where women have choices, are equipped to freely make those choices, and are protected by a social safety net. And yes, I want that for men, too. I want a world that is flexible, a world that is interesting, a world where each can find fulfillment in their own way. I want a world where paid employment is not held up as more important than happiness or satisfaction. I believe in working toward a world with fewer bounded choices, but not a world with fewer choices.

I believe in working toward flexible work policies for mothers and legal policies that protect the financial rights of stay-at-home mothers. I support my friends who work and those who stay home with their children. It doesn’t have to be either/or. It can be both/and.