question for stay at home moms

iVillage Member
Registered: 08-22-2004
question for stay at home moms
6
Sun, 08-22-2004 - 12:57am
Hi. I am a college student and currently conducting research on stay at home moms for a paper. If any of you wouldn’t mind sharing, I would love to know how you react, or would react to people demeaning your position in life: raising the next generation. Have you ever experienced people thinking less of you for choosing to stay at home rather that go out into the work force? How would you feel if someone told you that you were, personally, creating a negative impact on the feminist movement? If anyone would like to react to those questions, I would love to correspond with you. Thanks!
iVillage Member
Registered: 08-20-2004
Sun, 08-22-2004 - 1:32am
How can someone having the freedom to choose their own children as their focus have a negative impact? The feminist movement is about having the freedom to choose, not to choose a career necessarily. Staying at home with our children does not mean we are not contributing members of society. We still vote, we still make economical decisions, we still prepare our children for a world where they will choose their own path, whether that path is straight through the glass ceiling or not is immaterial.

Just because I stay at home doesn't mean I have given up being an equal force and partner in my marriage. It's not fifty years ago when women faded into a background and always had dinner on the table and got him another beer. If I have dinner on the table at the end of my husband's day at work, he is thankful and he is just as likely to get me another drink and talk to me and ask my opinion on pretty much everything.

So, no, I do not believe we are moving backwards by staying at home. If anything, it says to our children, 'I have a choice, and I am fortunate to be able to choose to be with you.' If people choose to have a career because it makes them feel more fulfilled when they come home to their children, then they are better parents because they are choosing what works for them. Having the freedom to choose does not mean the need to criticize others for their choices.

iVillage Member
Registered: 07-07-2004
Sun, 08-22-2004 - 2:44am
<>

My opinion is that <> has less to do with what other people think about me than what *I* think about myself. In choosing to stay home (in this culture), one of the great challenges/opportunities is to learn that you have to approve of your own choices and depend less on external sources for approval and recognition.


<>

My choice to withdraw (temporarily) from a career track has less to do with exalted notions about <> (that kind of perfume language is typical of the patronizing lip-service paid to motherhood) and more to do with the impracticalities of combining career and family in a culture that is unsupportive of/hotile to parenting. The fact that a certain, significant degree of incompatibilty exists in this country between advancing a career and parenting well ... and that women in particular are expected to take full advantage of their 'right' to choose fulfilling careers outside of the home and then pay the ugly personal price for trying to 'do it all/have it all at once' is indicative of the *very unfinished* business of the 'feminist movement.'

I don't accept the notion that *I* am creating a negative impact on the women's movement. The feminist movement was/is intended to elevate women to a position of equality and to create opportunities for women. If that effort was entirely successful and complete, then my partner and I would not have to *choose* between A: trying to pretend that maintaining a satisfying career in a demanding field *and* raising children -- with little visible, offical concession or support in corporate America (or anywhere else) to the double(!)-duty -- is no bigger of a deal than walking and chewing gum or B: taking some time off to raise a family with my partner's support while I try not to go insane with the loss of respect, income and sometimes it seems, myself. In letting such rediculous notions against stay-at-home parents stand, the women's movement fails *ME*, not the other way around.

The fact that there is such charged debate and hot feeling between working mothers and mothers who stay at home reveals that each side envies the other's 'advantage', is ambivalent about their so-called 'choice' and that ultimately NEITHER path is without sacrifice. Women need to stop spitting tacks at eachother, accept one anothers' (often)uneasy working-solutions and work to refocus the efforts of the women's movement into something that produces social and political changes that benefit *all of us,*

especially those on the lower end of the economic scale for whom any notion of *choice* is utter pie-in-the-sky and for whose unsupported parenting efforts we all pay dearly

instead of perpetuating hollow, unexamined stereotypes that damage everyone. When you read these boards ... listen to the challenges that parents face... and witness the intelligence, strength and expertise that these women bring to their families and share with eachother ... you understand that ain't nobody *here* settin' nothin' BACK.


Edited 8/22/2004 3:41 am ET ET by donachiara


Edited 8/22/2004 3:55 am ET ET by donachiara

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iVillage Member
Registered: 10-12-2003
Mon, 08-23-2004 - 11:28am
OMG, you freaking GO GIRL!! nothing to add, just the worlds BIGGEST thumbs up to your post.

iVillage Member
Registered: 10-12-2003
Mon, 08-23-2004 - 11:31am
actually, i DID have something to add. post this on the sahm/wohm debate board, not the sahm SUPPORT board. i do not come to this board to defend my parenting choices, my CHILDREN are defense enough. was your post in any way, shape or form supportive of sahm moms? NO. so take it somewhere it belongs.


Edited 8/23/2004 11:37 am ET ET by claritysblue

iVillage Member
Registered: 10-27-1998
Tue, 08-24-2004 - 2:10pm
I really don't think the original poster was saying that she thinks these things. She wanted to know what SAHMs think about people who think these things, and specifically, bring them up to us.

I know there are plenty of people who think those things about at home moms and you'd be foolish and naive to think otherwise. She just wanted to know what our reaction to it is.

I will never forget a discussion I had with my MIL. My two sils were pg with their first children and one had the opportunity to quit her job and stay home, but it would end her career. I was saying how I thought I would want to go back to work after my first was born, but I was very happy staying home with him that first year and really did not feel comfortable at all with the thought of working when he was so young. Her reply (even though she was trying to convince sil to stay at home) was "but you didn't have a career". Umm..I graduated from college and followed my dh to a rinkydink town where he was starting his career but I couldn't get a career started and then I ended up pregnant, working as a secretary and not using my degree at all. The words still sting, like there is nothing else I can do but stay at home with my kids, so why would I understand the issues a successful career woman would face?

Off on a tangent, but anyway....

What really irritates me is the patronizing "you are doing the most important job staying home with your kids - it is the hardest job in the world" BS. I really don't believe most people mean that.

baby growth



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iVillage Member
Registered: 10-16-2003
Tue, 08-24-2004 - 6:00pm

All I can say is "Well said!!"