Working mothers
A friend of mine is a professor at a community college. Yesterday she told me that she intentionally posts controversial subjects to the discussion board of her online classes in order to get her students to think, reason and write. One such subject is whether parents should work outside the home or stay home and care for their kids.
I've heard a lot of people talk about this over the years and there are a few things I think often get overlooked in this discussion, namely sexism, racism and classism.
Sexism: I want to start out saying, for the record, that almost all mothers work. The only ones I can think of who do not are the really wealthy women who neither have paid jobs nor raise their own children, but as they are very rare, I'm going to exclude them from my discussion for now (even more rare are fathers who fit this category). I recognize that raising children and running a home (including cooking, cleaning, etc) is a lot of work and, unless one is rarely paid work unless one is paid to raise someone else's children and clean their home and cook their meals. Yet when social conservatives say that a woman should stay home with their children rather than have a paid job, they mean just that: WOMEN should stay home. They do not make this demand of men. I even once heard a woman who does career counseling say that she regretted having a paid job rather than staying home with her children (and I was quite surprised to hear her say this, although, in hindsight, she is actually a very conservative person). Yet, she never said that perhaps her husband should have given up his career to raise the children while she earned money. Conservatives put this as an either-or: love your children so much you stay home with them or selfishly choose a career. Men, however, can have both No one says they are giving their children less than 100% even if the father is at work eight hours a day. Furthermore, as half of heterosexual marriages in the US end in divorce, a woman who chooses to stay home is taking a financial gamble. If she drops out of the job market she will have a hole in her resume, less money in her bank account/savings and pay less into Social Security (which will mean she'll get less per month when she retires). If she never divorces or becomes widowed young, her gamble pays off, but there's a one in two chance that she will lose this gamble.
Classism: Many women--single, married, divorced or widowed--simply cannot afford NOT to earn money. Food, housing and health care are expensive, especially if one MUST work full time in order to get health care for one's self and one's family. Conservatives trash so-called "welfare" mothers who stay home to raise their children rather than "earning" a living, yet also trash middle class women who earn a wage working outside the home rather than staying home to raise their children. Indeed, many women who used to receive public assistance have literally been forced by the government to take (usually low-paying) jobs, even if that means leaving their children home unsupervised because they cannot afford childcare because the US provides little to no financial support for childcare for parents who earn wages outside the home, nor does the US have a real public childcare system. In France, for example, any parent can enroll their child in pre-school just as they would in a public school. The pre-school is free, open to all children and open during the hours when almost all parents need to be at their paid job. This is not only a way of supporting working families and making it easier for employers to depend on parents as employees but creates jobs in the form of pre-school teachers. Remember several years ago when a six-year-old shot a girl in his class? He got the gun from his uncle's house where he was staying (unsupervised) during the day because his uncle had to work and his mother--who had been receiving welfare--was forced by the government to take a paying job. As previously mentioned, there is no public childcare, so she had no choice but to leave her six-year-old home alone. When word of the girl's shooting death hit the news media many people called for the mother to be arrested because she did not sufficiently supervise her child, but how could she have? Michael Moore in "Bowling for Columbine" followed the mother's work schedule. She had to get up before dawn to ride a bus to the job the government had assigned her--waiting tables at Dick Clarke's "American Bandstand" restaurant--work all day then ride the bus home as she could not afford a car to take her home. All her money went to pay for food and rent, so the only childcare available to her was the public school during school hours. She literally could not make sure her child had the care he needed the rest of the hours she way away. Oh, by the way, the woman is African American, which brings us to the next point...
Racism: The government forced an African American woman to leave her child home unattended so that she could work serving food to European Americans. Does this sound familiar? When slavery was legal, most plantation owners had a system by which one older slave woman would care for all the plantation's young slave children (until they were old enough to work) so that the children's slave parents* could work the fields or the house rather than spend time raising their own children. In his autobiography, Frederick Douglas said that he knew who his birth mother was, but had no relationship with her as he was raised on the plantation by the designated slave childcare provider. When his birth mother died, he therefore did not grieve. He said he did not know who his birth father was, but he may well have been the plantation owner. When applying for a job with an organization that specifically helps working women, the woman interviewing me mentioned that for African American women, there had never been a choice between earning a living or staying home to care for one's children. African American woman had always had to earn (or, as slaves, work for someone else's economic benefit). In an article I once read about women who did choose to stay home with their children, the one African American woman interviewed said that whenever she took her children somewhere on a weekday, everyone assumed she was a "welfare mom" even though her husband actually earned a LOT of money and that family could afford to have one parent not working.
*Of course, some of these kids were the unacknowledged children of Euro-American members of the plantation-owning family or their employees, but those Euro-Americans were hardly going to care for these children. Obviously, this was immoral, but it just further supports my argument about racism being a factor in this entire discussion.
I've heard a lot of people talk about this over the years and there are a few things I think often get overlooked in this discussion, namely sexism, racism and classism.
Sexism: I want to start out saying, for the record, that almost all mothers work. The only ones I can think of who do not are the really wealthy women who neither have paid jobs nor raise their own children, but as they are very rare, I'm going to exclude them from my discussion for now (even more rare are fathers who fit this category). I recognize that raising children and running a home (including cooking, cleaning, etc) is a lot of work and, unless one is rarely paid work unless one is paid to raise someone else's children and clean their home and cook their meals. Yet when social conservatives say that a woman should stay home with their children rather than have a paid job, they mean just that: WOMEN should stay home. They do not make this demand of men. I even once heard a woman who does career counseling say that she regretted having a paid job rather than staying home with her children (and I was quite surprised to hear her say this, although, in hindsight, she is actually a very conservative person). Yet, she never said that perhaps her husband should have given up his career to raise the children while she earned money. Conservatives put this as an either-or: love your children so much you stay home with them or selfishly choose a career. Men, however, can have both No one says they are giving their children less than 100% even if the father is at work eight hours a day. Furthermore, as half of heterosexual marriages in the US end in divorce, a woman who chooses to stay home is taking a financial gamble. If she drops out of the job market she will have a hole in her resume, less money in her bank account/savings and pay less into Social Security (which will mean she'll get less per month when she retires). If she never divorces or becomes widowed young, her gamble pays off, but there's a one in two chance that she will lose this gamble.
Classism: Many women--single, married, divorced or widowed--simply cannot afford NOT to earn money. Food, housing and health care are expensive, especially if one MUST work full time in order to get health care for one's self and one's family. Conservatives trash so-called "welfare" mothers who stay home to raise their children rather than "earning" a living, yet also trash middle class women who earn a wage working outside the home rather than staying home to raise their children. Indeed, many women who used to receive public assistance have literally been forced by the government to take (usually low-paying) jobs, even if that means leaving their children home unsupervised because they cannot afford childcare because the US provides little to no financial support for childcare for parents who earn wages outside the home, nor does the US have a real public childcare system. In France, for example, any parent can enroll their child in pre-school just as they would in a public school. The pre-school is free, open to all children and open during the hours when almost all parents need to be at their paid job. This is not only a way of supporting working families and making it easier for employers to depend on parents as employees but creates jobs in the form of pre-school teachers. Remember several years ago when a six-year-old shot a girl in his class? He got the gun from his uncle's house where he was staying (unsupervised) during the day because his uncle had to work and his mother--who had been receiving welfare--was forced by the government to take a paying job. As previously mentioned, there is no public childcare, so she had no choice but to leave her six-year-old home alone. When word of the girl's shooting death hit the news media many people called for the mother to be arrested because she did not sufficiently supervise her child, but how could she have? Michael Moore in "Bowling for Columbine" followed the mother's work schedule. She had to get up before dawn to ride a bus to the job the government had assigned her--waiting tables at Dick Clarke's "American Bandstand" restaurant--work all day then ride the bus home as she could not afford a car to take her home. All her money went to pay for food and rent, so the only childcare available to her was the public school during school hours. She literally could not make sure her child had the care he needed the rest of the hours she way away. Oh, by the way, the woman is African American, which brings us to the next point...
Racism: The government forced an African American woman to leave her child home unattended so that she could work serving food to European Americans. Does this sound familiar? When slavery was legal, most plantation owners had a system by which one older slave woman would care for all the plantation's young slave children (until they were old enough to work) so that the children's slave parents* could work the fields or the house rather than spend time raising their own children. In his autobiography, Frederick Douglas said that he knew who his birth mother was, but had no relationship with her as he was raised on the plantation by the designated slave childcare provider. When his birth mother died, he therefore did not grieve. He said he did not know who his birth father was, but he may well have been the plantation owner. When applying for a job with an organization that specifically helps working women, the woman interviewing me mentioned that for African American women, there had never been a choice between earning a living or staying home to care for one's children. African American woman had always had to earn (or, as slaves, work for someone else's economic benefit). In an article I once read about women who did choose to stay home with their children, the one African American woman interviewed said that whenever she took her children somewhere on a weekday, everyone assumed she was a "welfare mom" even though her husband actually earned a LOT of money and that family could afford to have one parent not working.
*Of course, some of these kids were the unacknowledged children of Euro-American members of the plantation-owning family or their employees, but those Euro-Americans were hardly going to care for these children. Obviously, this was immoral, but it just further supports my argument about racism being a factor in this entire discussion.