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"Why feminists and conservatives just don't get
modern motherhood. So, in the July, 2000 issue of
Reason, the magazine for "Free Minds and
Free Markets", Cathy Young gives us the word...Many
conservatives hesitate to declare categorically
that mothers should not work. But the right's
defense of the choice to stay home often morphs
into an indictment of mothers who don't make that
choice. Assistant Attorney General of Arizona in
the Wall Street Journal, Peter Thomas,
castigated career-minded parents who put their
children in daycare. Thomas called them "more
respectable, less violent versions of Susan Smith,"
the North Carolina woman who drowned her two sons
in a lake because they were interfering with her
post-divorce love life...Consevative pundit
Danielle Crittenden, winces at the unmanliness of
fathers she watches at a playground fussing over
young children and cooing at them in "unnaturally
high" voices; she laments that she cannot imagine
these New Dads in the role of warrior and suggests
that their wives must be secretly yearning for real
men. (She does not, however, go as far as Norman
Podhoretz, who once opined that "Mr Moms" were no
better than men who deserted their children.)...The
idea that mothers today have been deprived of the
choice to stay home is ridiculous: Slightly
more than a third of women with preschool children
are not employed and fewer than half work
full-time...Men's lives are changing too. Both
feminists and conservatives are included to dismiss
the New Dad as a creature of wishful thinking, but
father care is hardly fictional or marginal.
According to the Census Bureau, nearly one in four
fathers in two-earner families provide childcare
while the mother is at work, and nearly one in five
are the primary caregivers. With nearly one in
three working wives not out-earning their husbands,
more couples who believe that one parent should
remain at home may decide that it should be the
father. True "full-time dads" are still rare, and
they still labor under a cloud of suspicion that
they are slackers; but quite a few fathers avail
themselves of broader opportunities to work from
home...No one trust mother and father to know best.
Liberals think parents don't understand what's good
for their kids. Conservatives think working parents
are deluding themselves to alleviate guilt...The
conclusion: Any policy changes that would let
families keep more of their earnings would help
parents. So would policies promoting real
flexibility in the workplace."
Source: July, 2000 issue of
Reason by Cathy Young, author of
Ceasefire: Why
Women and Men Must Join Forces to Achieve True
Equality
* * *
I'm not against mothers. I am against the ideology
which expects every woman to have children, and I'm
against the circumstances under which mothers have
to have their children. - Simone de Beauvoir
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