Moms Told: Get To Work!

From an interview with Linda Hirschmann, author of Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World:

I started researching ... how families were making egalitarian marriages a generation after feminism. And I learned in fact that they weren't. I stumbled across the information that educated women who are in a position to have a whole range of choices about their lives were choosing to marry and stay home with their children instead of remaining in the world of work.

What they actually had done was recreate the 1950s life. Then I asked the question, “Is this good?” according to the standards of secular Western goodness.

I applied those standards to the decision to stay home and tend children and the household, and I found that they were, in fact, lacking. These women are not using their full human capacity. They are not independent, and they are not doing more social good than harm.

Can't you just feel the contempt for people who think raising their own children is the most important thing they can do? No?

The most frustrating thing about the whole business is the nonsensical stories that they tell themselves and me about what they think they're doing. The delusional quality of it is a little weird.

Do we feel despised yet? There's more, much more:

If they, in fact, believe the things that they tell me, then they are incredibly stupid and foolish. I'm hoping that they're reciting it like a mantra: "choice, choice, choice, choice," or "I never met a man who wished on his deathbed he spent more time at work." These are mantras that these women recite; they send them to me in e-mails.

So, "choice" is only for those who choose work. It's only for those who make the approved choice. Got that ladies? Excuse me, got that, wommons? Next, she answers the question of how it can be true that women harm society by staying home with their children:

Because it is: She's helping to make a zeitgeist in which women are seen as undesirable employees.

Got that? The zeitgeist. I guess stay-at-home moms are even more powerful than they thought. You're not only raising the next generation, but you're making a "zeitgeist".

... just because you choose to stay at home doesn't make it right, and that you have to examine the decision for its worthiness up against some kind of standard other than what St. Paul told the Ephesians. And if you're going to put it up against the standards that don't involve talking to God, if you're going to evaluate it according the standards for human behavior, that it's going to be found lacking.

All of these women who are making a career—they call themselves Chief Household Officers, of all things—out of running a 3,000-square-foot house with two small children in it, were extremely agitated when I did not treat it as the same as inventing a cure for cancer. [Emphasis added throughout.]

So, first, you must not, not ever, conform your life to what you think God wants of you. And second, you should be out curing cancer. Or working as a file clerk, or something.

That's the bait-and-switch going on. One may make a case (a dubious one, I think, but others might like it) that it's more worthwhile to cure cancer for everyone than to raise your own two children. And therefore you should go out and get a job.

But will your job be as a cancer researcher? Mine isn't. Will your job be secretarial? Data entry? Cashier? But why think small? Maybe you'll be a CEO of a mutli-million dollar company. How many big-company CEOs are really producing something more important than the raising of their children? Another convenience store chain? A chain of movie theatres? A chain of shopping malls? A tobacco company? There are people out there making some pretty big money supervising the production of some pretty useless stuff. Can I interest you in being a corporate lawyer?

I'm not a mom, I'm a dad, and I work outside the home. I'm a computer consultant, I help people make their businesses more efficient. I do not imagine for a minute that my work is more important -- or even as important -- than the Extraordinary Wife's job, which is taking care of our three children full-time. I work outside the home so as to finance the rest of the lifestyle, which is, at present, centered very much around our children.

But according to this self-styled "philosopher", mothers would be more nobly employed doing anything else for money; even, presumably, working as a paid nanny taking care of other people's children rather than their own.

Stay-at-home moms of the world, continue to unite! You do the most important work there is, and in you are vested all the hopes of a future that has more sanity than the present crazy times we live in.

So don't let liberals who aren't raising (and often not even having) their own children tell you that you must raise your children to agree with liberal views. You stand as a rebuke to the notion that a woman has no value except what she can earn in the marketplace.

Stand fast.