If women could go back in time

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Would they still fight for workforce accessibility/equality or accept that stay at home mom is better than working a full time job and not seeing their kids grow up? Did it provide the happiness it promised?

Saw this question being asked and I know what I would choose

Clueless premise. One-income families (e.g., father works, mother stays home) started disappearing in the late 70s, were in free-fall in the 80s, and gone by the 90s. The another 30 years went by. The corporations won.

https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/

Hate to break it to you but SAHMs are alive and well in higher education, higher income areas. My neighborhood and my sister's neighborhood are full of them, and we live several states apart.

SAHM w 2-4 kids is common in the south where you sorority sister marry a frat guy who will work for his dad.

Not common on the east or west coast.

Hahahaha. Says the poor. It's 100% alive and real among very well educated women who marry well.

I didn’t see this as a majority nor large minority when we lived and worked in Boston, NYC nor Wash DC.

Only in Dallas.

And I work in tech so never see this in The Bay Area either.

Maybe we’re defining well educated differently or running in different u grad and grad circles, as well as different DC area neighborhoods, schools and kid ECs entirely.

Agree. SAHM w/multiple degrees from elite schools. We are out there but not common.

I don’t know how this turned into an “elite degree” contest. I am one of the early posters and college-educated SAHM’s in the $250k+ household income level are still very very common. Definitely until the youngest starts kindergarten and then some do go back, but usually part-time or flexible. Maybe this is less common among rocket scientists, I don’t know. I live in the suburbs, so maybe it’s a function of that too, but many many families who have the means to make this choice, are.

It's not a contest. We are just sharing our various experiences within our own peer groups.

It's not that common in my circles. <10%

No one at NIH or Leidos or other scientific research team places with PhDs or masters tapped out when they had kids.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I know I would not do well as a SAHM and that life is not for me.

When I was younger I thought that if I ever did want to stay home, it would be fine.

As I have gotten older I see it as such a huge risk that I would never take. It surprises me that I feel this way, but I have seen so many marriages go to hell seemingly out of nowhere, so you CANNOT lose your ability to support yourself. As other posters have noted, it fundamentally changes the power dynamic of the marriage to have only one breadwinner.

I was doing fine working and doing kid stuff so never considered it, even when laid off once.
The closer I got to SAHM was during Covid when I ran Mom School from 8am-noon. And we lived out at the lake both summers, worked remotely.
I have to say, my nanny, spouse, kids and husband got VERY spoiled being told when to get ready and what to do.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The question is inherently stupid, given that the majority of women have always had to work to help their families survive.

This conversation is for a few privileged women to kvetch over. The rest of us know that this world will never be good for women and girls until we crush the patriarchy and stand on truly equal footing with men in all areas of life.

This is often repeated on here. That only white women in the 1950s stayed home.

But I find it hard to believe that all of these women were working full time out of the house jobs. Why? Daycare wasn’t a thing. Didn’t exist. Who was watching the kids of all these moms who were working?

Yes, grandma. She worked all her life as a maid, then took care of the kids while my mother worked a job with a salary.

So grandma didn’t need to be employed or retired early to watch the kids?

I’m still suspicious about all these working women without any form of childcare. Doesn’t really make any sense. My guess is most of these working women were working part time or shift work. But certainly not out of the house from 8-6 PM every day five days a week. These women would need to be home to prepare dinner, clean the house etc.

I’m with you. I’ve read a lot of Jane Austen, Little House on the Prairie, Little Women, etc. None of these depict married women with children working outside the home and living in extended family homes.

Little House on the Prairie has plenty of married women working outside the home. The various dressmakers Laura works for, as well as women at the hotels. In real life, Laura’s family owned and kept a hotel in one of the gaps the books don’t cover.

And the entire series shows how agricultural families were constantly working: Almanzo in farmer boy is “doing a man’s work on the farm since age 10” after all. As many people have pointed out, married women with babies might keep the babies with them while they worked (as farm hands, laundresses, etc) but from toddlerhood on up, kids were expected to be working too not in childcare. The necessity of childcare follows on from the advent of child labor laws which I for one consider an excellent thing.

I was such a huge fan of the Laura Ingalls Wilder books as a child, they were among my most favorite and as an adult I bought a lovely collectors set with color illustrations that still sits on my bookshelf.

Next to those sweet little books sits the much more recently published Pioneer Girl, an annotated history of the true story of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s life, published by the South Dakota Historical Society. I highly recommend it to any fans of the children’s books. Suffice to say that Pa Ingalls was a dreamer and a wastrel and life was very hard and very ugly in many respects. Almanzo did not provide well for Laura owing to bad luck and bad health and they never had a comfortable life until Laura began publishing her children’s books in her middle 60s, Almanzo’s middle 70s. Women worked very, very hard to help their families survive - far beyond keeping house and playing with their children, ‘watching them grow.’

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I sometimes think I would have liked to see women getting into the workforce without “The Pill” and reproductive control and this assumption that having children is some kind of recreational activity that you chose to engage in.

Like what would it look like to have married men and women in the workforce with the assumption that they would have children?

Men would have to do much more at home to make it work. Otherwise the women would drop dead from exhaustion.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Would they still fight for workforce accessibility/equality or accept that stay at home mom is better than working a full time job and not seeing their kids grow up? Did it provide the happiness it promised?

Saw this question being asked and I know what I would choose

I have not read the thread. This is based on OP.

Women should have thought more on working. Now most costs are based on two family income. Women are expected as housewives and WOH incomes. Thumbs up to Phyllis Schafly.

It’s a bit more complex than that. In the late 19th- early 20th, few jobs paid enough to let married mothers stay home. Women were among those leading unionization and calls for greater workplace safely. Men were offered a wage that allegedly could support a family as a trap. It got those pesky women out of the work place entirely and made it harder for men to strike.

[Anonymous]

I guess my absentee spouse kind of watches them grow. If he can see them over his iPhone at the dinner table.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Would they still fight for workforce accessibility/equality or accept that stay at home mom is better than working a full time job and not seeing their kids grow up? Did it provide the happiness it promised?

Saw this question being asked and I know what I would choose

Clueless premise. One-income families (e.g., father works, mother stays home) started disappearing in the late 70s, were in free-fall in the 80s, and gone by the 90s. The another 30 years went by. The corporations won.

https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/

Hate to break it to you but SAHMs are alive and well in higher education, higher income areas. My neighborhood and my sister's neighborhood are full of them, and we live several states apart.

SAHM w 2-4 kids is common in the south where you sorority sister marry a frat guy who will work for his dad.

Not common on the east or west coast.

Hahahaha. Says the poor. It's 100% alive and real among very well educated women who marry well.

I didn’t see this as a majority nor large minority when we lived and worked in Boston, NYC nor Wash DC.

Only in Dallas.

And I work in tech so never see this in The Bay Area either.

Maybe we’re defining well educated differently or running in different u grad and grad circles, as well as different DC area neighborhoods, schools and kid ECs entirely.

Agree. SAHM w/multiple degrees from elite schools. We are out there but not common.

I don’t know how this turned into an “elite degree” contest. I am one of the early posters and college-educated SAHM’s in the $250k+ household income level are still very very common. Definitely until the youngest starts kindergarten and then some do go back, but usually part-time or flexible. Maybe this is less common among rocket scientists, I don’t know. I live in the suburbs, so maybe it’s a function of that too, but many many families who have the means to make this choice, are.

It's not a contest. We are just sharing our various experiences within our own peer groups.

It's not that common in my circles. <10%

No one at NIH or Leidos or other scientific research team places with PhDs or masters tapped out when they had kids.

This has also been my experience

JD/MBA/Masters in the liberal arts - they drop out of the work force to be SAHM and constantly bring up their elite educations.

PhDs (any subject) and Masters in hard sciences/econ/engineering - not as much.

I know a lot of SAHMs who had careers before having babies who haven’t gone back once all the kids are in elementary school- I get it - I’ve got an elementary school aged kid, and it was easier working an insane job when she was little.

If I can swing it financially, I’d like to retire by the time my kid hits high school and consult on the side. But I sure as hell would
have been miserable being a SAHM to my kid when he was a baby.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Would they still fight for workforce accessibility/equality or accept that stay at home mom is better than working a full time job and not seeing their kids grow up? Did it provide the happiness it promised?

Saw this question being asked and I know what I would choose

I think about this all the time. I think if you have a good marriage and husband, assuming that one job is enough to live a nice life, the 50s way seems easier. But that's a lot of ifs.

Considering the explosion in the divorce rate with the advent of no fault divorce and that women initiate 70% of divorces I'd say the evidence on the "ifs" is in, and it's not in favor of a 50's style marriage.

I'm always a little suspect of these posts. They never discuss the fact that until the '70's women couldn't get credit cards or mortgages in their own names. Marital rape was still legal in some states into the '90's. If you did need a job because you were a widow, your husband was disabled, your husband was a drunk and couldn't hold a job, you could be fired for being a woman up until the 60's and for being pregnant up until the '70s.

So yeah, I sure as hEL! hope we'd fight for our right to workforce accessibility and equality.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I know I would not do well as a SAHM and that life is not for me.

When I was younger I thought that if I ever did want to stay home, it would be fine.

As I have gotten older I see it as such a huge risk that I would never take. It surprises me that I feel this way, but I have seen so many marriages go to hell seemingly out of nowhere, so you CANNOT lose your ability to support yourself. As other posters have noted, it fundamentally changes the power dynamic of the marriage to have only one breadwinner.

I was doing fine working and doing kid stuff so never considered it, even when laid off once.
The closer I got to SAHM was during Covid when I ran Mom School from 8am-noon. And we lived out at the lake both summers, worked remotely.
I have to say, my nanny, spouse, kids and husband got VERY spoiled being told when to get ready and what to do.

I don’t even understand this. You told them what to do? Why? And why would that ‘spoil’ them. They surely hated it

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I know I would not do well as a SAHM and that life is not for me.

When I was younger I thought that if I ever did want to stay home, it would be fine.

As I have gotten older I see it as such a huge risk that I would never take. It surprises me that I feel this way, but I have seen so many marriages go to hell seemingly out of nowhere, so you CANNOT lose your ability to support yourself. As other posters have noted, it fundamentally changes the power dynamic of the marriage to have only one breadwinner.

I was doing fine working and doing kid stuff so never considered it, even when laid off once.
The closer I got to SAHM was during Covid when I ran Mom School from 8am-noon. And we lived out at the lake both summers, worked remotely.
I have to say, my nanny, spouse, kids and husband got VERY spoiled being told when to get ready and what to do.

I don’t even understand this. You told them what to do? Why? And why would that ‘spoil’ them. They surely hated it

Ie 4pm get ready for soccer and leave at 4:10.

Alexa can say it
I can say it
Nanny can say it
Dad can say it but doesn’t care
Kid can say it

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Would they still fight for workforce accessibility/equality or accept that stay at home mom is better than working a full time job and not seeing their kids grow up? Did it provide the happiness it promised?

Saw this question being asked and I know what I would choose

Clueless premise. One-income families (e.g., father works, mother stays home) started disappearing in the late 70s, were in free-fall in the 80s, and gone by the 90s. The another 30 years went by. The corporations won.

https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/

Hate to break it to you but SAHMs are alive and well in higher education, higher income areas. My neighborhood and my sister's neighborhood are full of them, and we live several states apart.

SAHM w 2-4 kids is common in the south where you sorority sister marry a frat guy who will work for his dad.

Not common on the east or west coast.

Hahahaha. Says the poor. It's 100% alive and real among very well educated women who marry well.

I didn’t see this as a majority nor large minority when we lived and worked in Boston, NYC nor Wash DC.

Only in Dallas.

And I work in tech so never see this in The Bay Area either.

Maybe we’re defining well educated differently or running in different u grad and grad circles, as well as different DC area neighborhoods, schools and kid ECs entirely.

Agree. SAHM w/multiple degrees from elite schools. We are out there but not common.

I don’t know how this turned into an “elite degree” contest. I am one of the early posters and college-educated SAHM’s in the $250k+ household income level are still very very common. Definitely until the youngest starts kindergarten and then some do go back, but usually part-time or flexible. Maybe this is less common among rocket scientists, I don’t know. I live in the suburbs, so maybe it’s a function of that too, but many many families who have the means to make this choice, are.

It's not a contest. We are just sharing our various experiences within our own peer groups.

It's not that common in my circles. <10%

No one at NIH or Leidos or other scientific research team places with PhDs or masters tapped out when they had kids.

This has also been my experience

JD/MBA/Masters in the liberal arts - they drop out of the work force to be SAHM and constantly bring up their elite educations.

PhDs (any subject) and Masters in hard sciences/econ/engineering - not as much.

I know a lot of SAHMs who had careers before having babies who haven’t gone back once all the kids are in elementary school- I get it - I’ve got an elementary school aged kid, and it was easier working an insane job when she was little.

If I can swing it financially, I’d like to retire by the time my kid hits high school and consult on the side. But I sure as hell would
have been miserable being a SAHM to my kid when he was a baby.

Its interesting how different people are. SAH at home with my babies/toddlers was literally the pleasure of my life. It meant everything to me and I think I might have been suicidal if I had been forced to leave them.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Would they still fight for workforce accessibility/equality or accept that stay at home mom is better than working a full time job and not seeing their kids grow up? Did it provide the happiness it promised?

Saw this question being asked and I know what I would choose

Clueless premise. One-income families (e.g., father works, mother stays home) started disappearing in the late 70s, were in free-fall in the 80s, and gone by the 90s. The another 30 years went by. The corporations won.

https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/

Hate to break it to you but SAHMs are alive and well in higher education, higher income areas. My neighborhood and my sister's neighborhood are full of them, and we live several states apart.

SAHM w 2-4 kids is common in the south where you sorority sister marry a frat guy who will work for his dad.

Not common on the east or west coast.

Hahahaha. Says the poor. It's 100% alive and real among very well educated women who marry well.

I didn’t see this as a majority nor large minority when we lived and worked in Boston, NYC nor Wash DC.

Only in Dallas.

And I work in tech so never see this in The Bay Area either.

Maybe we’re defining well educated differently or running in different u grad and grad circles, as well as different DC area neighborhoods, schools and kid ECs entirely.

Agree. SAHM w/multiple degrees from elite schools. We are out there but not common.

I don’t know how this turned into an “elite degree” contest. I am one of the early posters and college-educated SAHM’s in the $250k+ household income level are still very very common. Definitely until the youngest starts kindergarten and then some do go back, but usually part-time or flexible. Maybe this is less common among rocket scientists, I don’t know. I live in the suburbs, so maybe it’s a function of that too, but many many families who have the means to make this choice, are.

It's not a contest. We are just sharing our various experiences within our own peer groups.

It's not that common in my circles. <10%

No one at NIH or Leidos or other scientific research team places with PhDs or masters tapped out when they had kids.

This has also been my experience

JD/MBA/Masters in the liberal arts - they drop out of the work force to be SAHM and constantly bring up their elite educations.

PhDs (any subject) and Masters in hard sciences/econ/engineering - not as much.

I know a lot of SAHMs who had careers before having babies who haven’t gone back once all the kids are in elementary school- I get it - I’ve got an elementary school aged kid, and it was easier working an insane job when she was little.

If I can swing it financially, I’d like to retire by the time my kid hits high school and consult on the side. But I sure as hell would
have been miserable being a SAHM to my kid when he was a baby.

Its interesting how different people are. SAH at home with my babies/toddlers was literally the pleasure of my life. It meant everything to me and I think I might have been suicidal if I had been forced to leave them.

Well it's good thing you have a choice right?. I also hope you have developed an identity outside of #mom.because babies and toddlers grow up and don't always want you around

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Would they still fight for workforce accessibility/equality or accept that stay at home mom is better than working a full time job and not seeing their kids grow up? Did it provide the happiness it promised?

Saw this question being asked and I know what I would choose

This isn't a good faith question. It's literally someone's assumption/ opinion with a question mark slapped on the end.

The assumption that being a SAHM mom is easier or what all women would find satisfaction in is false.

The idea that women never worked outside the home before workforce equality is false.

It's also false that women fought to not be sahm mothers

They fought to be actual human beings allowed to make their own decisions own their own property, bank accounts etc. without a husband's permission or father's permission. They fought to be fairly compensated for the work they were doing.
Please read a damn book

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The question is inherently stupid, given that the majority of women have always had to work to help their families survive.

This conversation is for a few privileged women to kvetch over. The rest of us know that this world will never be good for women and girls until we crush the patriarchy and stand on truly equal footing with men in all areas of life.

This is often repeated on here. That only white women in the 1950s stayed home.

But I find it hard to believe that all of these women were working full time out of the house jobs. Why? Daycare wasn’t a thing. Didn’t exist. Who was watching the kids of all these moms who were working?

Yes, grandma. She worked all her life as a maid, then took care of the kids while my mother worked a job with a salary.

So grandma didn’t need to be employed or retired early to watch the kids?

I’m still suspicious about all these working women without any form of childcare. Doesn’t really make any sense. My guess is most of these working women were working part time or shift work. But certainly not out of the house from 8-6 PM every day five days a week. These women would need to be home to prepare dinner, clean the house etc.

I’m with you. I’ve read a lot of Jane Austen, Little House on the Prairie, Little Women, etc. None of these depict married women with children working outside the home and living in extended family homes.

have you read prairie fires, Laura’s biography? Highly highly recommend. The ingalls women’s lives border on hellish in reality — the worst of both worlds. Ma is a homemaker subject to pa’s terrible planning and manic whims. Laura does work outside the home as soon as she possibly can, until she is married, to another hapless man. The mothers themselves have too much work to do to leave the house. It’s so far from the idyll presented in the children’s books, which is why I roll my eyes when homeschooling friends I know use the little house series as history books.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Would they still fight for workforce accessibility/equality or accept that stay at home mom is better than working a full time job and not seeing their kids grow up? Did it provide the happiness it promised?

Saw this question being asked and I know what I would choose

Clueless premise. One-income families (e.g., father works, mother stays home) started disappearing in the late 70s, were in free-fall in the 80s, and gone by the 90s. The another 30 years went by. The corporations won.

https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/

Hate to break it to you but SAHMs are alive and well in higher education, higher income areas. My neighborhood and my sister's neighborhood are full of them, and we live several states apart.

SAHM w 2-4 kids is common in the south where you sorority sister marry a frat guy who will work for his dad.

Not common on the east or west coast.

Hahahaha. Says the poor. It's 100% alive and real among very well educated women who marry well.

I didn’t see this as a majority nor large minority when we lived and worked in Boston, NYC nor Wash DC.

Only in Dallas.

And I work in tech so never see this in The Bay Area either.

Maybe we’re defining well educated differently or running in different u grad and grad circles, as well as different DC area neighborhoods, schools and kid ECs entirely.

Agree. SAHM w/multiple degrees from elite schools. We are out there but not common.

I don’t know how this turned into an “elite degree” contest. I am one of the early posters and college-educated SAHM’s in the $250k+ household income level are still very very common. Definitely until the youngest starts kindergarten and then some do go back, but usually part-time or flexible. Maybe this is less common among rocket scientists, I don’t know. I live in the suburbs, so maybe it’s a function of that too, but many many families who have the means to make this choice, are.

It's not a contest. We are just sharing our various experiences within our own peer groups.

It's not that common in my circles. <10%

No one at NIH or Leidos or other scientific research team places with PhDs or masters tapped out when they had kids.

This has also been my experience

JD/MBA/Masters in the liberal arts - they drop out of the work force to be SAHM and constantly bring up their elite educations.

PhDs (any subject) and Masters in hard sciences/econ/engineering - not as much.

I know a lot of SAHMs who had careers before having babies who haven’t gone back once all the kids are in elementary school- I get it - I’ve got an elementary school aged kid, and it was easier working an insane job when she was little.

If I can swing it financially, I’d like to retire by the time my kid hits high school and consult on the side. But I sure as hell would
have been miserable being a SAHM to my kid when he was a baby.

Its interesting how different people are. SAH at home with my babies/toddlers was literally the pleasure of my life. It meant everything to me and I think I might have been suicidal if I had been forced to leave them.

Well it's good thing you have a choice right?. I also hope you have developed an identity outside of #mom.because babies and toddlers grow up and don't always want you around