More on a recurrent theme
Was thinking further about that domesticity vs work thing that so annoyingly keeps cropping up. And in particular, the way in which work tends to get dismissed as some frivolous selfish indulgence that women are pursuing for reasons which cannot hold a moral candle to being a domestic goddess and supermum.
It seems to me that between 'needs the money' (which is usually considered an adequate excuse even for mothers, though people can get picky over 'needs') and 'doing it for egotistical self-gratification', there is actually a rather wide area known as 'doing something useful/a good job'. And okay, the money is important, and so is the element of personal gratification, but doesn't some of this latter actually come from doing something which one perceives to be of value to a wider world?
I have finally managed to track down an extended passage by Winifred Holtby (it's in Women and a Changing Civilisation, 1934, pp 146-9) in which she manages not to use the word 'smug', but does passionately invert the discourse, even more prevalent in her day than this, that mothers who stay at home are wonderful unselfish beings doing the right thing, while women who battle in the public sphere are selfish bitches (or disappointed harridans unable to catch a man).
She doesn't deny that
[T]here is value in the domestic arts. Food should be well-prepared, rooms should be clean and charming, clothes decently repaired, a civilised standards of comfort and of order preserved in every dwelling place.
However:
[W]omen who are naturally inclined to enjoy domestic work, use it as an excuse to do nothing and know nothing else. The consciousness of virtue derived from well-polished furniture or rows of preserved-fruit bottles is too lightly acquired.... It is agreeable to distemper ones's own nursery, bake crusts, squeeze oranges and mix nourishing salads; it is not agreeable to sit on quarrelling committees, listen to tedious speeches, organise demonstrations and alter systems, in order that others -- for whom such wholesome pleasures are at present impossible -- may enjoy them. Yet women are praised for the maternal instinct which makes the care expended on their own children natural and pleasant; they are criticised for the political activities which result in the safeguarding of other people's children as well as their own.
I invoke (among others) the spirit of Alice Stewart, a married woman with children who worked as an epidemiologist (and subjected to a number of professional constraints in doing so, given that it was the 1950s), whose work demonstrated 'an association between malignant disease in children and reported foetal exposure to diagnostic x-rays', something that took a long time to be accepted.