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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Neither nature nor society is favorable to women, at least we should stick together and lift each other up even if we are making different choices. [/quote]

This^.[/quote]

As long as women are the ones actually having the babies, and we also live in a world structured by men, this is going to be a challenge for women.

I've recently spent time researching the paid leave/subsidized childcare/subsidized parenting policies in many European countries. What is interesting is that none of these policies eliminate the underlying issues around how individual women will choose to handle work and family. European culture has plenty of built in misogyny (some countries are much worse than the US in certain ways), so it's not some utopia for women. There is still this catch-22 where certain forces think women should be at home with their children, and other forces think a woman who does that is automatically "lazy" because she doesn't have a "real job". It's a lot of the same arguments you seen in this thread.

The main difference is that whatever a woman chooses, there actual is some social support for it. Most European countries offer significantly more parental leave than in the US, and in some countries (mostly Scandinavia but not exclusively) men are given and expected to take leave as well. Subsidized childcare of some kind is pretty much universal. So if a woman wants to return to work, she gets a long leave, her right to return is protected, AND the cost of childcare is reasonable regardless of her income level or how it measures against her husbands.

But likewise, these countries also tend to have policies that make being a SAHM easier to. The biggest ones being the pro-birthrate policies that give money to families for kids. So a family that wants a SAHP will have some guaranteed income that will help compensate for the loss of one income. Some countries also offer other benefits for families, in an effort to encourage people to have kids and have more kids. I'd be curious to know if this has led to more SAHDs in these countries but haven't found data on it yet. It's a big benefit for families of all kinds (dual-income families generally get these payments too).

Being a mother isn't really "easy" anywhere in the world, and mothers come in for criticism and misogyny pretty much everywhere. But if women here were a bit more united in arguing for better conditions for mothers, full stop, maybe we'd have policies like those in Europe that make life better for women regardless of their career and family choices. [/quote]

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