What doesn’t sit well is defining material success and a paid career as “male” or childrearing (which goes well beyond breastfeeding) as “female”.

This, I think, is critical. You knew what you were doing and were willing to take the risk. A 22 year old just out of college or an 18 year old just out of high school and feeling all romantic about taking care of her husband and babies may not have considered the issue as thoroughly. I continue to assert that any man or woman who wants to spend his or her time as an unpaid caretaker, whether for partner, children, parents, or any combination of the above, should know the risks before making any committments and that society has a responsibility to minimize those risks as far as is possible. Nor should we as a a society be encouraging people to take excessive risks, i.e. by glorifying SAHM. Beyond that, well, what business is it of mine or anyone else’s what you want to do with your life? I’m glad things worked out for you.

Incidently, I breast fed my child exclusively for about 8 months and altogether for 3 years, although I started going back to work within 6 weeks of her birth. I’m not sure if I’m unusual that way or not, but anecdotally, returning to work doesn’t mean ending breast feeding. At least not if you have a good breast pump and a mother in law who is willing to bring the baby to you at work periodically.

I never thought about it that way.

Well, that is really the point–not that it’s wrong or foolish for you to be SAHM, but if you’ve never thought about other choices, or how you have to make choices that men aren’t expected to, then “it’s my own free choice” is not the whole story.

Will you visit my blog and give me feedback?

Thanks,

Dan

Sure. That’s because childrearing is, y’know, Women’s Work and good enough for the ladies, but if a man does it, he’s lazy, unmanly or both. Conservative who claim to respect SAHM are, essentially, doing the same thing you or I would do in praising a five-year-old for doing an especially colorful fingerpainting: it’s wonderful for their level of ability and maturity, but we sure wouldn’t be lavishly praising a fifteen-year-old for doing it.

As for feminists insisting women not stay home, I was pretty sure it was all those crazy crypto-Marxist feminazi types who were agitating for flextime, shared jobs, childcare at work, etc.

Well, vulnerable and degrading. Any woman with a trust fund who wants to be a SAHM can knock herself out. Why not? She’s choosing to work for herself — to run her own small business, if you will. Those of us who aren’t so lucky have to consider whether SAHM-hood is really worth having our paychecks signed by our husbands. Most men have the tact not to refer to their wives’ money as their “allowance” anymore, but more genteel language only does so much to mask the reality. There’s a reason people are discouraged from dating their bosses, and even when they are both feminist, the financial relationship of working husband to SAH-wife is that of employer to employee. No amount of sincerity about “our money” and equal partnerships can erase the fact that the money flows from the husband’s employer, to the husband, and from there to the wife. In exactly the proportions he chooses. If he is kind, or fair, or feminist, he may choose to put his money into a shared account she has full power to draw from. And she has that power, if she has it, because he gave it to her.

And all this ugliness has nothing to do with how reliable or trustworthy a man is as an individual. It has nothing to do with how well-prepared a woman should be for divorce or abandonment. It doesn’t even have anything to do with whether a woman has any desire for participation in public life or ambition for a career. You could have no such ambitions, you could know with absolute certainty that your husband was a feminist prince who would never leave you, and the fact would still remain that except for whatever assets you brought into the marriage, all the money you have came from him. People talk about being a SAHM as a job, and a job it certainly is. It’s a job whose salary has nothing at all to do with how hard you work or how much, or how well, but purely on how much money your husband has.

So, until SAHMs start drawing a salary from some source other than the men they’re married to, which is not likely to happen soon, if at all, it is going to be a big huge ugly mess for feminist women.

I never thought about it that way. I think that, ideally, someone should be home with the kids, at least when they’re small. I realize that’s not always possible when money is tight. And for me, it looks like money will always be tight.

Still, it seems like whoever stays home will get flack regardless of their gender. Men who stay home are burdened with a stigma: according to most people, stay-at-home-dads are lazy sissies and should be “bringing home the bacon.” If a woman stays home, the feminist movement wonders if her choice was made in a vacuum. That is a good and accurate critique, of course, but saying you are a SAHM either comes with a bit of suspicion, or is glorified as a almost every woman’s “God-given role” at places like Biblical Womanhood. It’s hard, as a Christian feminist, to make a choice like this: is this what God wants me to do with my life, or am I doing it because that’s what women “should do” according to society when they have kids?