I am amused by the “controversy” over the writings of Rick Santorum and his wife that feminism has hijacked the definition of acceptable roles for women and places little value on those women who do not work outside the home. Amused of course, because what they wrote is absolutely true.
It of course started innocently enough, with the notion that women should have the right to pursue any career they choose and be treated respectfully should they decide to enter the workforce. Although I am not sure the portrayals of some great wall of sexism preventing women from entering the workforce prior to the feminist movement are exactly accurate.
One grandmother of mine was widowed in 1954 at the age of 36. She managed to work after having not planned on it, earning enough to supplement social security and provide for her two children. My other grandmother was an army nurse in Britain during WWII and returned home after the war to practice here. I never heard any great tales of sexist treatment or closed off career paths from either of them.
Feminists would tell you of course my grandmother was a nurse, only those stereotypically female career paths were available to women. I disagree, I think women gravitated towards fields like teaching and nursing because they fit their natural gifts. I watch my 4.5 year-old daughter interact with our 2.5 year-old son and she instinctively wants to be teaching him things. She enjoys pretending to read to him and giving him “instruction”. She has done this naturally.
So feminists threw open the doors to working women in the 1970s. The problem is, most women initially did not walk through it. The Department of Labor did not keep track before 1970, but in 1970 40% of women over the age of 16 were working. By 1980 that number had grown to only 48%. So feminists adopted a more radical stance. They drove a culture that seemingly began to only value women’s contributions outside of the home. They got the percentage of women working as high as 57%, and as high as 75% for women in the 25-54 year-old age group where it has peaked and is now slightly receding.
The question is, why did they have to adopt such an aggressive approach and what were they fighting? The answer is not just biology, but I believe the design of our God and inherent gifts bestowed upon women that go beyond biology. No, this does not mean I think women should be banned from the workforce and chained to a stove. They ought to be given a true choice and that choice should be respected whatever it is.
But the reality is and I say this as someone who has spent a decade working alongside women in large corporations, in a field where they make up close to half of the department in many major corporations, most women, once they have children, would prefer to stay home and raise their children. This is not about what they will answer on a survey when society has made them feel as though the entire future of their gender rests on them charging into the workforce and breaking through a “glass ceiling”, but this is about what is in their heart of hearts and what they will tell friends in private moments.
There is also another way to look at this as well, that is from the perspective of (gasp!) the child. Kids want to be at home with their mothers. The fact that this is no longer an obvious statement to most people speaks volumes about where we are as a society. Most parents put their offspring in day care from about week 13 of this planet on and never get to see the other side. We were more fortunate.
My wife worked part-time after the birth of our daughter for 20 months until the birth of our son. Our daughter went to daycare three days a week. She knew the routine. One of the last weeks my wife was working, she needed to be in the office the entire week, all five days. So on Tuesday, not a normal daycare day, she dropped our daughter off. Our daughter revolted. This was not the deal, she knew it, and she wanted to be home with mama. She attempted to lead a jailbreak of the entire daycare center. On Thursday, another day she was supposed to be home with mama, she went even further.
This was not about deviating from “a routine”. She did not protest on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays when she began to stay home with mom. No, this is a child who wanted to be at home with mom.
I will give you one more perspective, from that of the economy. For working women, who are good mothers, work is never their top priority, even when they are there. They are, almost constantly, thinking about their kids, what is going on at home, what they are making for dinner that night (as studies have shown, even when both spouses are working a majority of the homemaking tasks fall to women), etc. For an employer to expect any different would be insanity.
Additionally, because work is not their #1 priority, they tend to be much quicker to acquiesce or accommodate other points of view, regardless of how legitimate their argument may be. To working mothers, it is not always about what is best for an organization, but about getting through the day to get home and take care of the family (to feminists this will sound like an insult, but really, do we want mothers wired any differently)?
Contrast this with heterosexual, married men. Family men, the kind that used to fill the ranks of the Fortune 500 back in the “Mad Men” era. These men are trying to provide financial stability for their families. They are invested in their work to a greater degree because the better they and their company perform, the more they can earn. Men are also wired to seek glory outside the home, not exclusively, but their self-worth is not as exclusive to family life as it is for women. Men also, by their nature, tend to be less accommodating if they believe they are right. They will push an organization harder if they see it going in the wrong direction, because they have something (be it ego or financial) to gain or lose based on how the company performs.
Leadership and the ability to change an organization, despite what we are sometimes told, also depends on the ability to judge someone as a person, make a call on their ability or willingness to do a job, and act accordingly. It also involves chewing people out, sometimes publically to make an example out of them, who are not exhibiting the behaviors you wish to see. There are many men in today’s corporate world who lack the ability to lead this way, but it certainly must be even more difficult for women.
This is not to say that because of this fact, women cannot be outstanding employees or make great contributions in the workforce, they absolutely can. What it speaks to is that they are best suited for certain kinds of roles and the impact they can have on a company’s culture. There are women who are suited to be CEO of a company, who can be every bit the hard-charging change agent a male can, let’s talk about them for a minute.
I have encountered these women. They, to put it bluntly, behave like men. Studies have found them to be much less conflicted about their family-career balance and I have found them to have no issues being assertive. These are choices that are open to women, but bringing us back around to Senator Santorum’s point, is this a choice to be praised above and beyond that of a stay at home mother? As a society, do we want a high percentage of women behaving this way versus embracing their role in bringing up the future generation (if you want to work on a critical, high-profile new product launch, what better project than your children)?
This is where the feminism push to make work outside of the home the ideal for women falls apart. How do young girls learn to be wives and mothers? By watching their mothers. Our 4.5 year-old daughter walks around all of the time talking about, “when I am a mommy”. When my wife goes to make dinner, she instinctively pushes a chair over to the counter, climbs up, and watches her. She has talked about wanting to, “work as a teacher until she is a mommy”. Without any prompting, pressure, or instruction from us, she has voiced thoughts as to what her calling is. There is something inherent in little girls that steers them in this direction and it is beautiful. It is not something to be squashed or dismissed or devalued, it is beautiful and we should hold women up to the world as beautiful for what they are called to do.
Let us look at the alternative, which we are seeing. Children reared, from week 13, in a daycare center, by strangers. Children then shipped off to government schools by day, returning home to an empty house. Food, cooking, dinner, are no longer the center of the family. These young girls will grow up not knowing how to pull those great meals together like grandma. Does that sound trivial, really?
In a time when we are less connected than ever, think back to how a great meal could bring the family together. Food was the center of immigrant life as this country was being built. It was hardly a bad thing.
Here is maybe a better point, because I have seen this in my peers. Think about girls who grow up and now are afraid to stay home with their children because they have no idea how to do it. They have not seen this behavior modeled and they have not been told they have the instincts. From even a parenting standpoint, what they have seen is based on watching the young women at their daycare.
The future of our free society depends on the next generation. While there are many “choices” or arrangements available for how to do this, they are not all equal. Just as the choice between attending the community college down the street or Harvard will not provide equal educational results, neither will the choices here. What we have to learn in this society is the difference between tolerance and endorsement. While Senator Santorum has rightly suggested that we can accept the choice that women may make to work outside of the home, we should not lose sight of that other choice that needs to constantly be affirmed.
May we all pray for the day when our society realizes that there may be very little room for choice here after all, that women’s most vital role is at the heart of the family we so desperately need to build our society upon. That raising the next generation is the most important task you could ever undertake. The renewal of America depends upon the renewal of the family.
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