Sorry mom, what you do is meaningless

Yikes, I ran into an ugly morass of a feminist rant against women who let down the team by actually staying home and, the horror!, being a mother. Get a barf bag and click if you dare Elizabeth Wurtzel's screed in the Atlantic 1% Wives Are Helping Kill Feminism and Make the War on Women Possible. Under the headline we read Being a mother isn't a real job -- and the men who run the world know it. You pretty much know what you are going to get after that....

What follows is a litany of ugly and often crude self-loathing silliness from a woman who apparently thinks that all stay at home moms are the bimbo trophy wives of domineering rich guys who spend their days shopping and going to yoga while hubby is at work. Here is a sampling...

I am going to smack the next idiot who tells me that raising her children full time -- by which she really means going to Jivamukti classes and pedicure appointments while the nanny babysits -- is her feminist choice. Who can possibly take feminism seriously when it allows everything, as long as women choose it? The whole point to begin with was that women were losing their minds pushing mops and strollers all day without a room or a salary of their own. 

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 And there really is only one kind of equality -- it precedes all the emotional hullabaloo -- and it's economic. If you can't pay your own rent, you are not an adult. You are a dependent.

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I have to admit that when I meet a woman who I know is a graduate of, say, Princeton -- one who has read The Second Sex and therefore ought to know better -- but is still a full-time wife, I feel betrayed. I'm not much of a moralist -- I have absolutely no right to be -- but in the interest of doing what's right both for me personally and for women generally, I have been strict with myself about earning my keep.  

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Because here's what happens when women go shopping at Chanel and get facials at Tracy Martyn when they should be wage-earning mensches: the war on women happens. 

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Most mothers have jobs because they need or want the money and fulfillment; only in rare cases are they driven by glory. To be a stay-at-home mom is a privilege, and most of the housewives I have ever met -- none of whom do anything around the house -- live in New York City and Los Angeles, far from Peoria. Only in these major metropolises are there the kinds of jobs in finance and entertainment that allow for a family to live luxe on a single income. In any case, having forgotten everything but the lotus position, these women are the reason their husbands think all women are dumb, and I don't blame them.

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Hilary Rosen would not have been so quick to be so super sorry for saying that Ann Romney has never worked a day in her life if we weren't all made more than a wee bit nervous by our own biases, which is that being a mother isn't really work. Yes, of course, it's something -- actually, it's something almost every woman at some time does, some brilliantly and some brutishly and most in the boring middle of making okay meals and decent kid conversation. But let's face it: It is not a selective position. A job that anyone can have is not a job, it's a part of life, no matter how important people insist it is (all the insisting is itself overcompensation). Even moms with full-time jobs spend 86 percent as much time with their kids as unemployed mothers, so it is apparently taking up the time of about 14 percent of a paid position. And all the cultish glorification of home and hearth still leaves us in a world where most of the people paid to chef and chauffeur in the commercial world are men. Which is to say, something becomes a job when you are paid for it -- and until then, it's just a part of life. 

Yikes. Shockingly a woman who is a lawyer in New York City doesn't seem to get what life is like in the rest of the country where being a mother rather than an employee is hardly a glamorous life of pedicures and Chanel. Wouldn't have expected that. I found it especially odd that she seems to think that a leaving home mom somehow spends almost as much time with their kids as an "unemployed mother" (and the notion of that phrase being used to describe women who raise children is worth an entire post of it's own). Maybe if you count the time sleeping as "spending time" with your kids that makes some sense. Since kids leave for school and return from school at generally different times than mom, many children are not in school yet because they are under 5 and adding in the 1/4 of the year or more that kids are not in school, that idea is ridiculous on its face. Thus we have a reminder of the old saying that statistics never lie but liars use statistics.

As Robert VerBruggen writes in his rebuttal, Elizabeth Wurtzel Should Get Out More, even a half-hearted attempt to gather some facts rather than relying on anecdotal evidence gathered in an atypical city like New York would reveal stats like...

65 percent of married women who stay home with children under 18 years old live in households that earn less than $75,000 a year, according to the most recent data from the United States Census Bureau.

Turns out that being a stay at home mom is not the sole privilege of the wealthy but is actually a conscious choice made by many middle-class families that make up 2/3 of the stay at home mom population. Kind of deflates the whole premise of her article but hey that is OK because most of the people reading her article have the same myopic vision of American family life. Anything that affirms their worldview is fine and dandy.

While Ms. Wurtzel gets essentially nothing right in her entire essay, an impressive feat, there is one truth that is inadvertently written.  Being a mother isn't a job. It is a calling and a far more important one than being a lawyer, one that doesn't come with a pension or vacation time or a time clock. There is indeed a war on women and it has been going on for decades, a war against mothers that has led to generations of single mothers, millions of aborted children and an entire population of children who have raised themselves. Instead of berating women who choose to raise their children in a vain attempt to validate her own life, perhaps Ms. Wurtzel could try to encourage those who are striving to raise children in a culture that demeans and diminishes the value of home and family.

A War On Women? No. A War On Mothers? Oh Yes.

The news media is beating the America public over the head with their invented notion of a "War on Women", a war of course perpetrated by evil conservatives as opposed to the war on unborn women waged by liberals. I digress. What the past 24 hours or so has shown us is that there is indeed a war going on in the culture but the target is not women in general but mothers. The internet is all a twitter (pun intended) over the intemperate and ugly remarks made by one Hilary Rosen at CNN.

“Guess what, (Romney’s) wife has actually never worked a day in her life,” Hilary Rosen said Wednesday evening on CNN.

These foolish comments, made by a lesbian and homosexual advocate who adopted two children with her now ex-girlfriend, making her an expert on motherhood, suggest that Ann Romney, a stay at home mother of five children, doesn't know the first thing about working. Since Ms. Rosen has had an illustrious and prestigious career, it can be assumed that her children have spent much of their life in the care of professional care-givers while she went to work to do Super Important Stuff like defending huge music corporations from illlegal file sharing. What is raising kids compared to that? Given that reality I can step in and assure her that stay-at-home moms work far harder with fewer breaks than any high powered executive or lawyer or whatever else. As Mrs. Romney has also battled multiple sclerosis and breast cancer, she should be commended for her diligence as a mother, not chastised by someone like Ms. Rosen. Ms. Rosen has finally come out and apologized for her foolish comments but not before she penned an angry screed for CNN.

Spare me the faux anger from the right who view the issue of women's rights and advancement as a way to score political points. When it comes to supporting policies that would actually help women, their silence has been deafening. I don't need lectures from the Republican National Committee on supporting women and fighting to increase opportunities for women; I've been doing it my whole career.

The irnoy of those comments is obvious to anyone. Who made things like government mandated birth control and funding for abortion providers part of the political battlefield? Here is a hint, it was not "the right". For a woman who can with a straight face call abortions on demand and subsidized by tax payers a "women's health issue", reality is not really relevant. I am not sure how aborting tens of millions of tiny women is "increasing opportunities". I guess those women who have their lives snuffed out in the womb won't compete for jobs with other women.

These comments are ignorant but they expose an important worldview. While liberals across the board have been tripping over themselves to repudiate what she said, the underlying view of motherhood and women was exposed for all the world to see. Certainly Mrs. Romney, the wife of a very wealthy and influential man, did not have some of the same concerns that the wife of a bus driver would have but all of the money in the world cannot change the very difficult and often thankless job of being a mother. There is an ugly, unstated but assumed view that women who "just stay home" are somehow "letting down the team" and settling for being "just a mom". Even the cultural assumptions are biased against mothers. We call women who stay home and raise their kids "stay at home moms" but we don't refer to mothers who leave their kids in the care of someone when they go to work as "leave home moms". To stay home and raise your children rather than subcontracting that task out to someone else requires a woman who has the strength, humility and conviction to do something sneered at by a small minority of vocal and influential women, standing against the overwhelming weight of our culture to do what women for thousands of years have done without complaint, namely being the primary caregiver and molder of the next generation.

Millions of women stay home with their children but it has become harder and less common over the last few decades. Many social observers have noted that being a stay at home mom is rapidly becoming a status symbol reserved for precisely the sort of women, like Ann Romney, that Ms. Rosen takes shots at. We cannot have a society where choosing to be a mom rather than an employee is a luxury reserved only for the wealthiest families. If feminists and their allies on the left truly cared about women in general and working mothers in particular they would work to enact policies that make it easier for women to choose to stay home. After all, isn't "choice" the demigod of the left?

The vocation of motherhood

Doug Wilson has a series of videos on the theology of work that I just stumbled across and they are pretty interesting, coming as they do from a particular worldview and doctrinal position. The most recent one is fascinating, an interview between Doug and his daughter Rachel Jankovic on Motherhood and Work: The Vocation of Motherhood. There is a lot that I disagree with Doug Wilson on, from the role of elders to infant baptism, but I loved this interview...


1--The Vocation of Motherhood from Canon Wired on Vimeo.

I found one line she said to be very interesting. She suggested that the work of staying at home is what drives women to the workplace (at around 1:17). That may not be true in every case but I can't tell you how many times women I work with have made remarks about there being no way they could deal with staying at home and caring for their kids "full-time". When I tell co-workers that my wife stays at home with our eight kids and also homeschools them, they get a look of horror on their face, as if somehow there is something intellectually stimulating and satisfying about working in a cubicle festooned with pictures of your children. 

As a culture we have so stigmatized motherhood as a vocation and calling and created such a horrifying picture of stay at home motherhood of the constantly weary, covered in drool and wearing frumpy clothes mom that we have made mothers afraid of motherhood. Rather than women seeing motherhood and child-rearing as the preferred state to be abandoned only as a last resort, women seem to default to working outside of the home and only reluctantly coming back home when they simply can't afford the child care any longer.

The devaluation of motherhood and marriage is all around us. It was reported yesterday that the percentage of married people in America has hit an all-time low and is heading for minority status. I am hardly surprised that is the case, in fact I am a little surprised that it is not even worse. Why would we expect unregenerate people to embrace an institution created by God for His people and as a picture of His Son and the church indefinitely? What troubles me is that the church, rather than standing in opposition to this trend and seeing family, marriage, motherhood and fatherhood as opportunities to witness to the world instead seems more interested in embracing and outdoing the world at its own game. Some of the most popular women writers in Christian circles seem to take delight in denigrating and mocking the Scriptures because they find that Biblical teaching on motherhood interferes with their own "gifts" and ambitions.

We should recognize and honor motherhood as the high calling that it is, in a realistic fashion recognizing how very difficult it often can be, but supporting and equipping women in this great service to God and the church. We hardly need yet another writer telling women that they need to be more than "just a mother" or "just a wife", as if those are degrading and unimportant things. Of course we should also realize that in this world merely telling young women to stay home and let us know how that works out for them is not proper either. The church exists in large part to equip every member for maturity and ministry and few ministries require more equipping, encouraging and maturity than the raising of children. The church should be pulling out all of the stops to encourage young women to embrace being a wife and mother but also making sure that we are supporting them in that vocation with love and wisdom, especially from older women (Titus 2:3-5). Unfortunately fewer and fewer older women have much experience in this area as more and more of the older generation of women have spent their mothering years working outside of the home.

Being a mother is every bit as important as being a missionary to far away lands even though few churches will put your picture up on their missions board. I wish they would! I would love to see a bulletin board in the foyer of churches with pictures of moms and their kids at home. We should love them and support them. I think it is a far better use of our offerings to financially help out a family in need so mom can stay home than it is to pay for another professional minister or supporting some denominational bureaucracy.

Honor moms. Support them. Love and encourage them. Nothing will have a greater impact on the future witness and mission of the church in America than strong families.

Sarah Palin on Neanderthals who dare question feminist dogma

This seems to be an odd position for someone who touts herself as a social conservative and defender of traditional values. From WorldNetDaily comes this telling snippet from an interview with Sarah Palin on Fox news….

"It kind of seems, Geraldine, that some things haven't changed," Palin said. "There are still the Neanderthals out there who pick on the petty, little, superficial, meaningless things – like looks, like whether you can or can't work outside of the home if you have small children – all those type of things where I would so hope that at some point those Neanderthals will evolve into something a bit more with it, a bit more modern, and a bit more understanding that, yeah, women can accomplish much."

Petty? You can make arguments on either end of the political spectrum or even try to use some Biblical support for it but the topic of whether or not women should work outside of the home when they have small children is anything but “petty”. I would go so far as to make the link between absentee parenting and much of the social ills we experience in America. I think having a parent at home is far more important than whether we allow/mandate prayer in schools or have textbooks that talk about the religious beliefs of the Founders or whether we allow Ten Commandments monuments on public ground.

I think women or at least one parent should stay home with their children. I don't apologize for that view and neither should anyone else. I believe it is unhealthy for kids to be raised by strangers or even worse to be hanging around at home alone. It may be unkind to bring this up but I wonder if Ms. Palin would be a grandmother already if she were at home instead of chasing fame and personal glory?

Furthermore, the prevalence of two-income families where the second income is superfluous has been, in my humble opinion, disastrous for our economic well-being and our families. In the not too distant past, most families survived quite nicely on a single income where the father worked and the mother stayed home to care for the home and the children. As we have increased the number of women working outside of the home in an misguided attempt to ”empower” women, we have seen a change in our economy. Today many, if not most, families are two wager-earner families. More people are putting off marriage and consequently putting off children while men and women alike establish their careers. By the time they get married and eventually start having kids, they are used to the things in life that two people working full-time can afford to buy. It is perceived to be much harder to make ends meet on one salary today but we used to do so quite commonly. What happened?

If you needed further proof that Sarah Palin is more useful as a spokesperson and someone to rally the troops than as a serious leader, this is it. There are a lot of people who think that women ought to have home and children as their first priority. Many of them are exactly the kind of people who Palin would depend on to win the GOP nomination. Referring to us as “Neanderthals” is probably not going to win her many votes. There is a new strain of “conservative” women who seem to think that “traditional” values boil down to opposing gay marriage and abortion while embracing a neo-feminist view of the family.

Ms. Palin, I am not really interested in “evolving” into something “more modern” if that means that we consign an ever larger number of our children to the tender mercies of day care workers and public school officials or worse yet left to fend for themselves day after day after school. I am quite convinced that “women can accomplish much” but I also think that they can do so with the children God has placed under their care instead of seeking personal glory in the workplace. What is the greater testimony of a strong woman, children who are raised well by their mother or a list of accolades from work and a high balance in your 401(k)? If a woman chooses to work outside of the home, that is between her and her husband but please let’s not resort to petty and ignorant name-calling of those who think that decision is not in the best interest of children. That is the sort of behavior I expect from political liberals who can’t argue their positions on merit, not from someone who many people think is a champion of conservative values.

Can women work outside of the home? Sure. Are there circumstances where this is actually necessary as opposed to a matter of preference? Absolutely. Is it generally better wherever possible for women to stay at home and care for their children? You betcha!

Career paths for our daughters

My buddy James sent me this YouTube video from a homeschool convention in Illinois...



I loved near the end when one of the young women was asked what she wants to be. She said "I want to be a mom and homeschool my kids". Praise God for this young woman and her parents! That is a far nobler aspiration than being a business executive or a lawyer or even a doctor.

What is our desire for our children, particularly our daughters? To conform to the world’s view of success or to conform to the quiet, humble life of those called to follow Christ? I don’t think that there is anything wrong with them being a doctor or a teacher or a business leader. I also think we do them a disservice if we don’t raise our daughters to view being a mom as being at the very least as important as having a “career” and in fact we should be raising our daughters to view motherhood as the preferred “career”! It is hard in our parental pride to look at our daughters and not see them as special, as different from other kids. Our two older girls are 16 and 12 and are incredibly bright. Blessed with being natural and voracious readers, with creative minds and appetites to learn it is easy to dream of them being doctors or vets or any number of professions. Sure being a mere “stay at home mom” is fine for the daughters of other parents but my girls are special. They certainly are, as are yours. All them more reason to encourage them to make their own choices but to view being a wife and mother (and educator!) as being a wonderful, God honoring choice and one that is even more valuable to society and the church than being a lawyer or an engineer. We have let the world’s idea of success and prestige infect our thinking and in doing so have neglected to place the proper importance on parenting in general and motherhood in particular. Few Christians would deny the beauty and value of motherhood. Let’s make sure our daughters hear that message from us, loud and clear.

The feminist betrayal of women

The ugly secret of feminism is that it has not made women better off or happier. In fact just the opposite is true.

The Wall Street Journal asks: Why aren't women happier? and it is a fascinating question. It comes in response to a new report on the general happiness of women in America that just came out and shockingly it turns out that women are less happy now than they were 35 years ago. What?! How can that be? Allow me to express some thoughts….

(In the spirit of full disclosure, I am not a woman)

Some of the theories behind this from the secular media have to do with women not acclimating to their new opportunities quickly enough, that these great opportunities make women feel depressed because they haven’t gained the whole world all at once. In other words, expectations rose faster than social change and women felt left behind. So the problem is not the enormous shift in women’s roles and expectations, but rather because things haven’t changed in reality fast enough.

May I pose a different theory? Women are not as happy because feminism has sold them a mess of pottage. A small handful of women convinced vast swaths of the rest of the women in this country that what they thought they really wanted was not only not what they wanted but that in fact desiring to be a wife and a mom was something to be ashamed of. Even now women who choose to stay at home with their children are accused of “letting down the team”, which assume that the “cause” of feminism takes priority over the raising of children.

Thirty five years ago, in 1974, the percentage of women in the work force was much lower than it is today. With the advent of mass contraception, it was far easier for women to control, delay or even prevent having children. This helped drive women into the workforce in greater and greater numbers. According to the Department of Labor, in 2008 59.5% of women were in the workforce (defined as working or actively looking for work). In 2002, 55% of women with infant children were in the workforce versus 31% in 1976. This has led to the creation of more than 687,000 daycare centers.Women are already 46.5% of the workforce and with layoffs hitting male dominated professions, it is quite possible that we will see even this year women becoming the majority of the workforce. That is a big deal culturally to have our workforce become majority female. Women are working more and in a wider variety of industries and professions than ever before. Yet they are less happy.

Meanwhile, as women enter the workforce a couple of things happen simultaneously. The number of workers goes up and that supply has a negative impact on labor demand and wages. As society shifts to a two income family labor and wage norm, it becomes progressively harder to make it on one income. The cause and effect are the inverse of what we are told; it is harder to survive on one income precisely because so many families have elected the two income model. Take away the accessibility of revolving credit, leading to enormous amounts of unsecured debt driven consumption, and I think you would find that the buying power of a single income family 35 years ago is pretty similar to the buying power of a two income family today.

While mothers and fathers are working, houses sit empty during the day and children are warehoused somewhere else. Generation after generation of kids are abandoned into the system of daycare, preschool and public school by their parents. As I cited above, according to the U.S. Census Bureau there are more than 687,000 daycare centers in America. 69,000 of the largest centers employ three quarters of a million employees (primarily women I assume) to watch kids so that other women can go to work. Ultimately this leads to two million preschoolers in day care out of around 10 million preschool children. One out of five preschoolers is being raised by someone other than their parents for the majority of their waking hours. We are reaping the harvest of generations of latchkey kids who got nice vacations and a TV in their room but essentially raised themselves under the influence of their peers, the television and the internet and under the supervision of disinterested strangers instead of by their mothers. Little wonder we find nation in the state it is in today.

Maybe what a lot of women want is to be a mom and what a lot of moms want is to be...a mom? Not a super mom who juggles a career and a couple of kids, but just a mom. Can a few extra bucks make up for dropping off your eight week old infant at daycare where they will spend 45 hours a week being watched by someone else until they are old enough for school? Is that really making women feel fulfilled? Maybe a group of angry, bitter women in the media and academia don’t really understand what drives the majority of women. Is it that hard to believe that women and men have different goals and motivations?

The truth is that the feminist movement has not "liberated" women or made their lives better, but has instead made their lives worse. Women are more stressed and less happy now in spite of the utopian promises that women's liberation promised. Women were sold a bill of goods by feminism and now society as a whole is paying.