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:

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

Do you think parents should start training their children to do without them as infants? It appears many people do. Baffles me.

[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.

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.

I have.
My point wasn’t that their life was idyllic, just that the women were all SAHMs and that we didn’t all just invent gender roles in the 1950’s.

Also, do you really think that there aren’t any SAHMs today who work really really hard and do a ton of work at home? Are all of your homeschooling friends married to wealthy men? I have several friends who take care of little children, grow and can lot of their own food, sew a lot of their own clothes, keep animals, take care of elderly relatives, etc. Women who don’t earn an income are considered SAHMs no matter how hard they work.

[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

You realize that when a woman stays home her partner has to work longer hours to support her lifestyle, right? By your own logic, partners to a SAHM don't see their children grow up either and yet I never see anyone asking similar questions to men as if their time with children doesn't seem to be equally important.

I also think you've got a rosy view of the past. Even though most women stayed home they didn't live like wealthy housewives do today because most of them were married or average earning men who had to work very long hours while the wife did manual unpaid labor at home and did not have much quality time for her children. I'd be a working woman today a d share childcare with my husband.

[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

You realize that when a woman stays home her partner has to work longer hours to support her lifestyle, right? By your own logic, partners to a SAHM don't see their children grow up either and yet I never see anyone asking similar questions to men as if their time with children doesn't seem to be equally important.

I also think you've got a rosy view of the past. Even though most women stayed home they didn't live like wealthy housewives do today because most of them were married or average earning men who had to work very long hours while the wife did manual unpaid labor at home and did not have much quality time for her children. I'd be a working woman today a d share childcare with my husband.

I think you misunderstand. My husband would have the demanding job/long hours either way. He wouldn’t become a GS15 if I was working. So given those facts, it makes sense for one of us not to work.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

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.’

I would love to buy this Pioneer Girl book, bit there are numerous books with this title (about same topic) on Amazon, which one are you referring to?

[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

You realize that when a woman stays home her partner has to work longer hours to support her lifestyle, right? By your own logic, partners to a SAHM don't see their children grow up either and yet I never see anyone asking similar questions to men as if their time with children doesn't seem to be equally important.

I also think you've got a rosy view of the past. Even though most women stayed home they didn't live like wealthy housewives do today because most of them were married or average earning men who had to work very long hours while the wife did manual unpaid labor at home and did not have much quality time for her children. I'd be a working woman today a d share childcare with my husband.

DP but the bolded is not a factual statement.

[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

God this thread is vile.

[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:

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

God this thread is vile.

It's the truth. Children grow up. They are not your besties.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

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.

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.

I have.
My point wasn’t that their life was idyllic, just that the women were all SAHMs and that we didn’t all just invent gender roles in the 1950’s.

Also, do you really think that there aren’t any SAHMs today who work really really hard and do a ton of work at home? Are all of your homeschooling friends married to wealthy men? I have several friends who take care of little children, grow and can lot of their own food, sew a lot of their own clothes, keep animals, take care of elderly relatives, etc. Women who don’t earn an income are considered SAHMs no matter how hard they work.

Not how this works

[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:

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

Do you think parents should start training their children to do without them as infants? It appears many people do. Baffles me.

I bet s lot of things baffle you.

[Anonymous]

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

You realize that when a woman stays home her partner has to work longer hours to support her lifestyle, right? By your own logic, partners to a SAHM don't see their children grow up either and yet I never see anyone asking similar questions to men as if their time with children doesn't seem to be equally important.

I also think you've got a rosy view of the past. Even though most women stayed home they didn't live like wealthy housewives do today because most of them were married or average earning men who had to work very long hours while the wife did manual unpaid labor at home and did not have much quality time for her children. I'd be a working woman today a d share childcare with my husband.

I think you misunderstand. My husband would have the demanding job/long hours either way. He wouldn’t become a GS15 if I was working. So given those facts, it makes sense for one of us not to work.

So why is his career advancement more important than yours?

[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:

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

God this thread is vile.

It's the truth. Children grow up. They are not your besties.

You have a serious problem repeatedly using this line of reasoning to rationalize away your belief that your children don't really need you or want you around and that's why you aren't there for them.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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.

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.

I have.
My point wasn’t that their life was idyllic, just that the women were all SAHMs and that we didn’t all just invent gender roles in the 1950’s.

Also, do you really think that there aren’t any SAHMs today who work really really hard and do a ton of work at home? Are all of your homeschooling friends married to wealthy men? I have several friends who take care of little children, grow and can lot of their own food, sew a lot of their own clothes, keep animals, take care of elderly relatives, etc. Women who don’t earn an income are considered SAHMs no matter how hard they work.

Not how this works

It is how this works.
Women who stay at home with their children and do not earn an income are SAHMs. Being a working mom refers to earning an income through outside employment. It doesn’t refer to how hard you work.

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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

God this thread is vile.

It's the truth. Children grow up. They are not your besties.

You have a serious problem repeatedly using this line of reasoning to rationalize away your belief that your children don't really need you or want you around and that's why you aren't there for them.

And you use your children as your emotional crutch. Get a therapist so you don't mess your kids up and they don't want to be around you at all.

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Anonymous wrote:As a SAHM, I would love it if most women were still SAHMs. There would be more people around and we could do more things during the day like PTO, book clubs, lunches, etc. Also there wouldn't be this pressure to "go back to work" when the kids are older the way there is now. I've managed to work just very part time at a school, but I feel like there is this expectation that because my kids are older I should be back at work. Also, if most families only had one income, there would be less of a competitive "arms race" so to speak on buying kids stuff and experiences. Housing and other prices wouldn't have been driven so high either.

But mostly I would just love it if I were EXPECTED to stay at home, rather than bucking some trend.

Honestly, yes. I sometimes think I'm career-driven because that's what is expected of women of my socioeconomic class, but it sure would be great if being SAHM was the default.

I wish the default was each choice being respected and supported.